I am happy to report that the plum wine has been coming along very well. This is my first foray into wine-making and it is thus far proving to be pretty straight-forward. The plum wine fermented for a week in a primary container and was recently racked into the secondary. The primary container was a sterilized plastic bucket with a tight-fitting lid. I needed to
Making Plum Wine
Plum season is finally upon us! I found a wild plum tree around the corner on an abandoned lot. Turns out the university owns it and one of their maintenance guys told me to help myself. Awesome! I began plotting what I would make them into as I plucked them from the tree. I have dabbled in brewing hard cider and thought plum wine sounded
Finished Hard Pear Cider
And I thought I dragged my feet last year brewing hard cider! This year we should practically call it an “aged” Asian pear cider. We started the process in early September, let it ferment the first round for a month, then had it do a secondary fermentation for another month. Probably the each round could have been shortened to a couple weeks at a time,
Asian Pear Cider: Redo
We harvested a few buckets of asian pears from my mom’s house right after we moved into our new place in Oregon. There more things still in moving boxes than there were out of boxes, but the harvest waits for no one! If you don’t drop what you are doing to preserve now, you’ll miss your window for the season. I decided to try another
Road Trip Recap II
We continued our road trip west from New York to Oregon after a long break in Oklahoma. Kansas was an easy day, with flat freeway and a horizon line that seemed to go on forever. When we did briefly stop, we were greeted by some of the nicest people I’ve ever run into on the road. Most people noticed the license plate from Oregon and
Home Sweet Home
We made it back safe and sound to Oregon! Look for a couple more posts in the next week or two about the fun road trip we had heading back West. We are renting a 1930’s bungalow just a few blocks from campus this year and I am excited to get settled. It has been over a year since we have seen some of our
Winter Provisions
Food preservation is a lot of work at the time – you won’t find much disagreement with that statement. There are a few things you can do to lighten the mood, like canning with friends or enjoying a beer while you make your own homebrew. Due to my hard work this fall, my winter cupboards are still stocked with the delicious flavors of summer. The
Pear Cider Success
The pear cider we started brewing in late September has been finished! We took our time throughout the brewing process. The initial fermentation was planned to be only two weeks, but ended up being more like a month due to vacation schedules. We racked the cider and let it ferment a second time, which also ended up being about a month instead of just a
Pear Cider Progress
The pear cider has been quietly fermenting under my kitchen table for about four weeks now. Typically cider would undergo that first round of fermentation for about two weeks, but because of travel plans we decided to let it sit longer. It was time to rack the cider into new carboys. Racking means you siphon out the good liquid into a new container, leaving the