Taman brought these dandelion heads inside the other day, he wanted to put them in a vase and he wants to grow them too. Interestingly one of his friends has also planted dandelion seeds but I don't think Taman knows that. He's growing an interest in the natural world and the natural processes. Come spring, dandelions will be a very welcome weed in my garden as I plan to make dandelion wine.
Here is my yarrow mead in the fermenting jar. I strained it on Saturday and put it in the bottle only to discover that the bung (this pink, rubber cork which holds the airlock) was missing from Taman's pocket. My fault for leaving it in his pocket, he was just so keen to be part of the bung buying process, he's fascinated by wine making. Either that or he's trying to sabotage it, he did snap my hydrometer in half and then hide it under a couch cushion. He hasn't come to understand that when you're dishonest you need to be consistent. So while he hid the evidence, as soon as I asked where my hydrometer was he lead me to it and told me he broke it and then hid it. How can you be annoyed by that kind of innocence?
Anyway, I covered the top of the fermenting bottle with a couple of layers of gladwrap and put the airlock into that. My friend who works at the brew shop advised me to do that. The gladwrap didn't give a tight seal but the first few days of fermentation are so fast that there's usually a constant layer of carbon dioxide keeping oxygen and potential contaminants such as wild yeasts away from the brew. On Monday I swiftly went down to the brew shop and got a new bung and now it's bubbling away quite happily and the washhouse smells of fermentation again.
There was actually just enough juice once I'd strained it. When I had added the water originally I was worried that I had put far too much in but once I taken a sample for my hydrometer reading it was perfect. My hydrometer read that it has the alcohol level of a table wine. I'm not really sure what that means or the purpose of the activity but I'm sure with time and expertise it'll become apparent.
So now to leave the brew for another 2-3 weeks until after the holidays and then rack it off into another demijohn to avoid the sediment tainting the flavour. I'll need to buy another demijohn but this means I should be able to get into a good swing of having 3 brews on the go. I can make the 3rd brew a few weeks before the 1st brew is ready to be bottled and then I'll have the 1st demijohn to rack the 3rd brew into when it's time. If that makes sense. And I do think I will need to have 15 litres of wine on the go at a time, there are so many people interested in my wine it's going to disappear quickly and there are so many different recipes I want to try and it's such a long process of at least six months. Do I need to justify this more?
I wonder when I'll get the guts and the materials together to make a 20L wine... Maybe a dumpster brew.
So that's my learnt occupation put to rest for another few weeks... time to work on my bloody occupational science assessments.
I have put down my next brew of yarrow mead. Mead is a wine made with honey, it has a very strong flavour and is drunk like a dessert wine.
I haven't documented this very well nor taken photos of the process as I'm not nearly as nervous as last time. In fact, my confidence may be my demise with this brew as I realised that I hadn't sterilised a couple of pieces of equipment. Ah well, too late now.
This is the recipe I used: http://www.celtnet.org.uk/recipes/brewing/fetch-recipe.php?rid=yarrow-flower-wine
I made a couple of adjustments which I hope won't be too detrimental. Instead of oranges and lemons I used citric acid (maybe I should have used tartaric). And I added a campden tablet to the brew so that it was sterile. Unfortunately I didn't listen to my instincts that there was too much water in the recipe and sure enough, upon reading the root recipe (basic mead recipe) I realised that instead of 5L of water I should have used only enough water to make the whole brew 5L. You live and learn.
It will be a shame if the brew doesn't work as I used 1.5 kgs of organic raw honey which isn't cheap. It comes from the farm where I buy my raw, fresh milk and they have since sold out. Most of the honey is clover but also 500 grams of manuka, I didn't want to use full manuka as it has a very strong flavour and is expensive.
The main ingredient of course is yarrow.
Yarrow is a "weed" that grows all over Dunedin. I collected my flowers from the Leith River banks as there I knew it hadn't been sprayed and was not near a road so not covered with exhaust. (and further upstream from scarfieland and all the rubbish which is thrown in). The area was also covered with hemlock which is very poisonous so I had to be careful with Taman but it only took one explanation before he was telling me to be careful and correctly identifying the hemlock and the yarrow. We collected a bag full and Taman sang a yarrow song which he'd made up. He promised to record it when we got home but has since refused. The morning felt like a very wholesome gathering activity as did the elderberry collection.
The whole shopping bag was only just enough for the two litres we needed. I had thought I'd have some left over to dry for yarrow tea, a useful herb for colds, congestion and fevers. It's the end of the season too so a lot of the flowers were getting a bit passed ideal. It's not really an ideal time for me to be putting on this brew as I'll be away in a couple of weeks but I wanted to get it going before the yarrow season finished.
This clip has taught me a lot about yarrow.
Yarrow is almost globally spread and has a long history of use. Yarrow can be used for many things, it has antibiotic properties so is good for cuts, burns, bladder infection, kidney infections. It can be used to stop nose bleeds. It can lower blood pressure. Yarrow is also one of the best fever reducers, along with peppermint and elderflowers. So yarrow tea is amazing for a cold with both antibiotic and fever reduction. Yarrow has been used with hops, mugmort, wormwood and other herbs to brew beer which preserves the beer and adds the bitter flavour. (There's an interesting history of why beer is most usually made of hops).
Todays research stint had me watching this clip which I enjoyed, the singer is Bethany Yarrow, daughter of Peter Yarrow from Peter, Paul and Mary. I have a feeling that as I research different weeds which often have rich folklore histories and medicinial uses, I will be listening to a lot of folk music.
I watched a few clips for "Yarrow", a traditional Scottish ballad. Yarrow refers to a place not the plant.
Then while reading about the song on wikipedia I saw that a band called Scatter had released their version of Yarrow and I tried to track that down as it sounded like a band I'd like. I couldn't find their version of yarrow but I found a couple of different tracks by them. I really like free noise, improv music.
It's amazing how far my distractions will go when I should be writing an assignment for occupational science on occupational identity and occupational satisfaction.
Today I racked off my wine. This is to remove too much sediment which can taint the taste of the wine. Simply I just used gravity to transfer the wine from it's demijohn to a new one and then topped it up with water. I still don't know how to use my hydrometer but I'll try and work it out and then I can work out if I need to put more sugar in or not.
I was a bit nervous with this process as I don't like touching the wine. I'm not very confident that the wine will work. However when I was sucking wine up the tube to rack it off I got a little taste and it's actually delicious already.
I got another demijohn from my other grandma (not the one who gave me the recipe book). This bottle is from my great-granddad's wine making efforts. I thought about collecting grapes from his vines too but it doesn't fit with my wild wine focus. I'll leave that project for the future.
This afternoon I'm going to collect yarrow heads and get started on my next brew, yarrow mead.
The wine is in the demijohn and it's bubbling away beautifully! My washhouse has slight pleasant smell of fermenting sugar and fruit and it looks rather beautiful I think. It's also exciting to watch the bubbles bubbling everytime I walk past. I was a bit concerned that wine had gotten into the airlock but apparently that's not really an issue.
Yesterday I strained it which I thought would be a quick enough job but to really squeeze out all of the juices it took me over an hour. I need a bigger funnel too. So now to sit and wait until it stops fermenting then bottle it and wait and wait and wait several impatient months until it's done. I sure hope it's good.
I've started thinking about what other wines I will make. Elderflower, gorse flower and dandelions won't be ready until Spring and I want to get an least one other brew going before then. I'm going to keep researching other 'weeds' that I can use but so far I haven't found much. Perhaps parsley at a stretch because there's a lot on campus and I know fields of wild parsley in Wellington.
I'm also considering going down another tangent and focusing on using materials that would normally not be utilised which encompasses the 'weeds' but could also include dumpster food.
Dumpster diving is collection of food which supermarkets have thrown out due to being past the best before date, superficial damage to packaging and sometimes it's just the end of the line (I found five heaters and two soda streams once as the shop changed seasons or models or something, there certainly wasn't anything wrong with any of the products). The food is usually still in delicious condition but due to bureaucracy and capitalist drive for consumption it's thrown into the dumpsters and goes to waste. Food in landfills is not a useful or healthy ingredient, the decomposition of food is faster and therefore interferes with the decomposition of other materials. 23% of methane emission in the USA are from food in landfills. Food wastage is massive problem all over the world, in the USA 40% of all food goes uneaten (NRDC, 2013). This is appalling given widespread poverty and hunger.
So without wanting to get into too much of a rant, I think it would be appropriate for me to make wine out of dumpstered ingredients over the winter when there's no weeds to make wine from. Luckily I don't need to be too picky either as I've got recipes for all sorts; apples, beetroot, bananas, carrot, celery, kiwifruit, lemon, parsnip, rose petal, tomato and many, many more. Just fermenting stuff and sugar makes wine, kind of, the question is if it actually tastes good. As dumpster diving is slightly illegal, I may just say that the food has been unknowningly upcycled to keep it a bit more politically correct for school.
Here's a really cheesy short clip about dumpster diving but it portrays it quite well.
Here's a link to Wellington initiative which collects food after the vegie markets and gives it back to the community through several food banks and charities.
And just while I'm on a roll here's a couple of links to easy ways to make a compost bin for your flat so that you can let your food wastage decompose where it should do.
If only saving the world was really as easy making wine, dumpstering and composting. But at least they're interesting and rewarding activities.
References Reducing Food Waste and Losses in the U.S. Food Supply | NRDC. (n.d.). Natural Resources Defense Council – The Earth’s Best Defense | NRDC. Retrieved March 22, 2013, from http://www.nrdc.org/food/wasted-food.asp
Today I finally began the actual wine making. This was just crushing elderberries in a sterilised bucket with a sterilised spoon then adding boiling spring water, and a campden tablet and 1tsp pectinase when the mixture had cooled down. Then covering it with a lid. Tomorrow around about 5pm I'll add the yeast, nutrient, citric acid and vitamin B1. Then I'll leave it for a couple more days before straining, adding sugar and putting into demijohn.
I had left over elderberries so I made some elderberry cough syrup with raw manuka honey and spices. It smells delicious and should be useful over winter.
Yesterday I had collected most of the bits of pieces but I was still feeling a bit absent due to lingering cold so I didn't click that the beautiful glass demijohns my brother had lent me are for 20Ls. If I wanted to make 20L of elberberry wine I'd need almost 8kgs of fruit, I'd also need a whole week at my current rate of collection and preparation. It's not going to happen so I'll head back to the brew shop to get a modest 5L jar.
The large jars did get me thinking about potato wine. I have potatoes that grow wild in my garden, so they almost count as a wild harvested material. I'd certainly have enough to make a 20L brew. Question is, if there's anyone who wants to drink 20 litres of potato wine. At this point potato wine is the in the 'very experimental, I'm not convinced' category. Parsley wine is looking intriguing and it grows all over campus.
No playlist for today. I was kind of listening to national radio, mostly listening to the most welcoming sound of rain outside.
I'm sipping on a delicious whiskey mac (I'm sick, my Grandma swears by it!) and am making the last few decisions before I launch into my first brew. Tonight's soundtrack is good old Janis. I figure she would have drunk a lot of elderberry wine in her time.
I've decided on my recipe. I had spent an hour yesterday painstakingly piecing together a recipe from a book on my kindle where the recipe was kind of like those pick-a-path books. To make Elderberry wine use this recipe but replace this with that then follow the method over there and in that method over there you have to find the explanation on how to do this thing with that, unless of course you're doing this with that, then you must start again. You get the idea and it's made even more difficult on a kindle. Then I hadn't even got around to converting imperial to metric before I realised I was way too sick to be at school and made my way home to bed. Anyway, then this morning, when I came home from my presentation to my class about my project, I came home to the glorious site of a parcel in my letterbox. My grandma has sent me her two recipe books for home brew and wine making and in "Home Brewing and Wine-making for New Zealanders" by Chris Reading is the perfect recipe for me, and it's even in metric measurements.
This is my recipe,
1.8kg elderberries (strip from stalks)
1.3kg sugar
1/2 tsp citiric acid
yeast, nutrient, pectin enzyme, vitamin B1
water to 4.5 litres
-Crush elderberries and add boiling water. Cool.
-Add 5ml SMS [one Campden tablet], plus pectin enzyme.
-Leave for 24 hours. Take specific gravity reading with hydrometer.
-Add yeast and other ingredients (except sugar).
-Leave two or three days, or longer if you wish to use as blending wine for port style (high tannin).
-Strain, add sugar and ferment.
There are a few more tricks to that but I'll explain them as I do them.
My mission for tomorrow is hunting and gathering. I need:
- A large plastic bucket
- Glass fermenting vessels/ carboys/ demi-johns
- Corks and bungs
- Fermentation lock
- Hydrometer
- Syphon tubing
- Corking machine (possibly, I'm actually going to worry about bottles later)
- Bottle brushes
- Muslin
- Campden tablets
- Yeast
- Nutrient
- Citric Acid
- Pectin enzyme
- Vitamin B1
- Bottle sterialising stuff (this is a technical term)
- Spring water
- 200 grams more elderberries (though I might collect more to make a cough syrup for winter coming up).
For a lot of the equipment, I'm hoping to borrow off my Mum or eldest brother. I'll then make my way to a brew shop to get the last of the things I need. Then I should be able to get stuck into it tomorrow or Sunday.
The presentation went well for considering how unprepared and sick I felt.
I read through the assessment to come at the end of the year and I did wonder how I will make an appraisal of the potential value of my learnt occupation within a service that focus on on-going participation in occupation. Somehow, I don't imagine that making homemade wine would be seen as a valued occupation in most community services. However the wine isn't really the focus of my interest, it's more about using the resources available to me in my environment. As far as I'm aware, a huge component of occupational therapy is about using the resources available to the service-user in their environment (social, physical, economic, institutional) to the full potential to provide well-being for the service-user and community. So there's one correlation and I'm sure I'll find more as I go and learn more about occupational science.
Already this small topic has had me interested in other topics somewhat related.
Yesterday as I tried to piece together my recipe I listened to a couple of different interviews with Kim Hill
(oh wow, I just about flipped out as I accidently closed the window to this as I was writing it. I only swore a couple of times for trusting technology for my record keeping. However, technology is more clever than I am and it autosaves! I'll carry on now )
So as I was saying, I was listening to Kim Hill interviews. The first one was about a guy, Michael Reynolds who makes Earth Ships, self-sufficient houses made of largely recycled materials (bottles, tyres) with incredible heating systems (as in none by the sun and good design) and recycling of water systems. He's made a doco which I've seen so I was only half listening but is certainly worth sharing. And it's all about using the resources available to their best potential. http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2547960/michael-reynolds-earthships.asx
I'll talk to a friend who works at the home brew shop and has his own microbrewery (beer) about his opinion and my grandma is going to send me her wine recipe book too.
Even though my learning will be mainly self-directed I plan on involving as many people as possible, especially for advice as I don't really know what I'm up to.
