Fermentation Time

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.

 

http://www.kaibosh.org.nz/ 

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.

 http://simplemom.net/how-to-make-a-compost-bin/

http://www.farminmypocket.co.uk/healthy-soil/compost/tyre-stack-composter 

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

Mushing elderberries

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.

Recipe decision made

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 also attempted to listen to this interview but I was too sick to concentrate, it does sound very interesting though. Discussing the true value/monetary value of food. I'm going to try and listen to it again tomorrow.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2547288/frederick-kaufman-financialised-food.asx

Now for the best medicine against colds, off to bed.

I've just been looking at a bunch of different recipes and feel a bit overwhelmed. I'm not sure whether to be scientific or to be cottage garden about it.
This recipe seems really good but a bit more involved than I'd hoped. http://honest-food.net/2012/08/19/elderberry-wine-recipe/
I'd more imagined that I'd just bung it together like a recipe like this http://www.wine-making-guides.com/elderberry_wine.html

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.

First day- elderberry collecting.

My first day of wine adventures has been balancing on the shed roof at my mother's place picking elderberries. It is elderberry season and while I haven't decided on a recipe or gathered all the necessary equipment to make wine, I thought it would be a fun weekend activity to gather my first wild material.

This relates to the 'when' aspect of my occupation, I've been constrained by the season that I must collect elderberries now however due to modern technology I can freeze my berries until I've got everything else sorted. I also had to make the time during daylight hours to collect them and was glad it wasn't raining as I precariously balanced on the ladder and shed roof.
My mother has an elder tree which had a lot of fruit on it and I know it hasn't been sprayed and isn't close to the road so not covered in fumes. It took me about half an hour to collect a shopping bag full of heads of berries and then I sat down at the kitchen table to strip them off their stems.

This took all afternoon but luckily I had a friend help me for the first hour and then my son took an interest too. This made me think of the chapter I'd been reading in our perscribed text book ("Introduction to occupation; the art and science of living" by Christiansen and Townsend) which talked about concurrent activities. Yes, I was preparing elderberries for a project for school but I also socialising with a friend and caring for my child. Once Taman (my son) and I were the ones stripping the elderberries it was a great platform for me to teach him about elderberries and we ended up watching a lot of different youtube clips about elderberries and elder trees. He enjoyed the added responsibility of helping me and eating sneaky berries when I wasn't looking. Then once we were bored of that we watched a movie together while we continued stripping the heads.
There is a quicker method where you freeze the berries before stripping them, it's a bit tidier and the berries come off easier however I didn't have space in the freezer for the elderberries in bulk and I was impatient to get into it.

I watched a couple of different clips on youtube about how to make elderberry wine so I have a better idea of the practicality of it which I haven't really been able to grasp just from the recipes I've read. I also listened to a few different clips about elderberry wine and elder trees. I wasn't so taken by Elton John's Elderberry Wine song but I really enjoyed this song.

and so by taking up this new occupation, I've unexpectedly learnt about a new band adding to my learning experience. Tarantella also has a song called Mexican Wine so I'm sure that can join the playlist.


The berries are cleaned and in the freezer for the time being. I think I will need more elderberries plus one youtube clip recommended adding a few blackberries, which are also wild and in season so I will be out collecting again tomorrow afternoon.

This week I start to research and collect what equipment and other ingredients I need plus make a time timetable to make sure I'll be in Dunedin when bottling is due etc. The 'how' of the my new occupation.

I will also research the history and folklore around the elder tree.

Introduction

For my Occupational Science paper which is part of my Occupational Therapy training we have been given the task of learning an all new occupation and this blog to record how I go.
The paper outcome is:

"At the successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

1. Understand and articulate the language of occupation

2. Recognise concepts of occupational engagement, transition and deprivation in a variety of contexts

3. Critique occupational taxonomies with a view to developing an understanding of occupational categorisation and frameworks for occupation focused practice"

So through the process of learning a new occupation I am expected "to come to an understanding of the practices, requirements, roles, routines, and purpose and meaning attributed to ongoing active involvement" or in other words the who, what, how, when, where and why involved in an occupation.

I am to spend an average of 15 hours learning an occupation which I am unfamiliar and inexperienced with but interested in. I am to organise this occupation and keep a record as I go.

My occupation that I'm going to learn is making wine with wild harvest materials for the main ingredient. I intend to make elderberry wine and dandelion wine.

I imagine that as I blog I'll explain all the who, what, how, when, where and whys about this occupation. But I can tell you that at this point I'm very excited. I've done a lot of preserving before but brewing is new. I'm also hoping that by making this public to my friends and family I can better explain my aims and experiences as a student of occupational therapy. Also without wanting to count my chickens before they hatch, I'm looking forward to some delicious wine as an end product.