3 Cats Fine Wines

3 Cats Fine Wines Beet Wine

• 15 lbs. beets, cleaned and thinly sliced. No need to peel.
• 10 lbs. sugar
• Zest and juice of 3 lemons and 2 oranges
• 20-25 whole cloves
• 2” of ginger root, grated
• 5 Campden tablets, crushed
• 6 gallons of tap water
• 1 package wine yeast
• 1 5-gallon food grade bucket (bigger if you’ve got it, I don’t)
• 1 5 gallon carboy with bung and airlock (bigger if you’ve got it, I don’t)

Zest the oranges and lemons, and juice them through a strainer. No pulp, no seeds. Into the primary fermentation bucket, place the sugar, the orange and lemon juice and the Campden tablet powder. Boil the beets, the orange and lemon zest, the cloves and the ginger root, roughly divided between however many cooking vessels you need to use to achieve about 6 gallons of liquid.

When beets are tender but not mushy, line a colander with a flour sack dishtowel and place it on top of the primary bucket. Pour the beets and liquid into the colander.

Stir the sugar mixture and juice once you’ve got a couple gallons of liquid, so it’s easier to dissolve. Once the bucket is full nearly to the brim with liquid, stir carefully then siphon off 2 gallons into a second container. This is so the full bucket doesn’t overflow during the primary fermentation process, and a 5 gallon bucket will potentially overflow if it contains 5 gallons of fermenting liquid. You’ll lose some wine later when you siphon it into secondary, so this extra will help replace the loss enough to fill the carboy properly.

Take a hydrometer reading, after noting the temperature of the liquid. This calculator http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/recipator/hydrometer.html?16280467 will correct your hydrometer reading since your liquid probably isn’t at the standard 60 degrees. You should be starting out at about 1.091. If it’s lower, add sugar to each container until you reach that mark on both. Cover loosely and let stand. The Campden powder needs 24 hours to kill any stray bacteria that might harm the wine. Start timing when everything is in the bucket and stirred up, you don’t have to wait until it’s cooled to start the clock. After 24 hours have passed, activate the yeast, and divide it proportionally into the two containers. Stir. Cover the containers with a cloth tied down, or rubber-banded, and set aside for 5 days, stirring twice a day.  Don’t cover tightly, it needs to breathe.

Stirring First Day Ferment in Kettle

First Day Ferment after Stirring, Bucket

After 5 days have passed, take another hydrometer reading and compare it with the first. Write it down. Siphon the wine from the primary buckets into the carboy, affix an airlock, and set aside. When the airlock stops bubbling, and there are no more bubbles on top of the wine, take another hydrometer reading. Subtracting this reading from the first reading should give you the wine’s alcohol content.

* 7/28/13 – 4 gallons in bucket, added 2 cups sugar; 2 gallons in kettle, added 1 cup sugar, to reach 1.090 SG in each.

* 7/29/13 – Divided and added 1 packet Lalvin Bourgovin RC 212 yeast to both containers. Temp 83 degrees in the house.

* 7/30/13 - Fermenting very nicely as you can see above! After the Primary Fermentation is complete, I'll post up more photos and discussion of the process. Meantime, it's just wait and stir, stir and wait. I can say that the taste I had after mixing all the basic ingredients together was simply divine... hoping that is a good omen for the finished product!

Here are pics of the two other wines currently in bulk aging, in back is a Rhubarb and in front is a basic Beet without spices that I started last month.