Jews and Berries

The price of blackberries dipped significantly enough that Paddy and I decided it was time to make some blackberry wine last weekend. So, we hopped in his truck and headed to our best source of quality brewing and wine-making ingredients: Sam's Club.

Seriously, though, we get funny looks buying 25 lbs of fruit and 12 lbs of sugar anywhere else. The stock boys look at you funny when you ask if they have any more flats of blueberries in the back, and the best guess most people have as to what the hell you're doing with a shopping cart full of strawberries is making 80 pies.


Now, in light of our Ginger Sockpiss and Blueberry Fail, we decided to really try to be sanitary about this whole thing. We were careful to sort out any blackberries that looked the least bit moldy, and then soaked them all in a no-rinse solution. Is it safe to do that? We have no idea. I guess we'll find out in a year or so when we drink it. Paddy plans to gift a bottle to someone we don't really like before trying it ourselves. But no-rinse is supposed to lose its potency after about 15 minutes, and we also rinsed the berries with clean water afterward.

Then came the boil - or lack thereof. Maybe it was all the sugar raising the boiling point, or maybe the burner just wouldn't get hot enough. Either way, it just kind of simmered for 90 minutes or so. We added sugar, and it was hot enough to dissolve that right away with no problem. It was quite thick and syrupy at this point, and the specific gravity looked dead on, though we suspected the high temperature may have skewed the reading. But it was still only simmering, I think we should have used the turkey fryer (as discussed here and here .)

But the length of time wasn't a concearn, because Paddy had something to keep us occupied: professionally made blackberry wine! I've never had blackberry wine, so I thought it would be interesting to see what it was supposed to taste like while we were making our batch. Paddy got out a couple glasses, then reached into his fridge and pulled out the wine.

Some of your aren't sure where I'm going with this. Others just threw up a little in the back of their mouths.

You see... I always thought Manischewitz was kosher wine. I was wrong. So, so wrong. It's not kosher wine, it's kosher Mad Dog.



The stuff tasted like a grape popsicle! I had trouble downing the very first glass Paddy poured for me. I ended up just gulping most of it down at once. And it's not like Manischewitz is a terrible company, their matza balls rock! So... what the fuck is wrong? Well, it seems there might be a reason beyond bad wine making. Check it out - from the sole repository of our species' culture and knowledge (Wikipedia):

The sweetness of Manischewitz wine and other kosher wines is often the fodder of jokes. However, Kosher wine does not have to be sweet. One of the reasons for the prevalence of sweet kosher wine in the U.S., and in the Americas generally, dates back to the early days of Jews in America, when there was the need to locally produce kosher wine for the Kiddush ritual on the Shabbat and holidays. The combination of a limited choice of grape varieties that could grow in the areas where Jews had settled, along with limited time available to produce the wine and a market dominated by hard cider, yielded a bitter wine that had to be sweetened to make it palatable.[citation needed]

Indeed, so well-known is the sweet Manischewitz variety in the U.S. that the existence of a thriving kosher wine industry anchored by vineyards in France and Israel, along with a growing U.S. industry, is often a surprise to Americans unaccustomed to taking kosher wine seriously.

Joke fodder? Well, I have to say the first thing that came into my mind when I tasted it was "I have to make fun of this in a blog post!" But I somehow feel bad. I mean... if that's how it's supposed to taste... and obviously people buy it.... but do the people buying it just not know of any other kosher wines? I sure as shit didn't. But then, it's not a subject I've really ever looked into, with my whole not being Jewish thing I have going on.

It's easy to see why most people only know of Manischewitz; it took me all of 5 seconds to find www.kosherwine.com. They have 4 wines on the first page alone, quintupling the number of kosher wines I knew about. And they run the full gambit from $4.99 to way the fuck more than I can afford to spend on a bottle of wine. And they have names like Tierra Salvaje, Bartenura Moscato, and Chateau Labegorce. Wow! And that "wow" wasn't sarcastic, I'm genuinely wowed by such things. The wines I drink never have names that fancy!



Not enough? Try Online Kosher Wines or Kosher - Wines.

But this raises the question of what the hell makes a wine kosher? Paddy's guess was no bacon (our wine making process is complex). Here is an explaination (it's not the bacon thing) by Yael Zisling; and with a name like that, I'm inclined to trust him on this matter.

If you're too lazy to click on the link, it mainly has to do with when the grapes are harvested and who is allowed to touch them (not me). But in reading his description, I saw absolutely nothing requiring kosher wine to taste like a fucking grape popsicle. I guess, in the end, it's just another instance of a large company making low-quality product. Manischewitz is so big compared to Sol de Chile or Galil Mountain, that they're all you really know about unless you look into it. I'm kind of curious to try some of those, though most places won't mail order to my state, as it is illegal. But if I get the chance, and it's not one of the $90 bottles, I'll have to try some.

Now, I figure Jewish readers (assuming we have Jewish readers, assuming we have readers at all) are bitching at their computer screens; saying that most Jews know of these (probably) much more delicious kosher wines, and the only reason I've only heard of Manischewitz is that I'm not Jewish. That's quite possible, but what can I say?



So anyway, we kind of simmered the must for maybe 90 minutes, then just gave up. It was late. I know the right thing to do would have been to get out the turkey fryer and boil the hell out of it, but I wanted to go home and go to sleep. We may pay for this in the end, the Blueberry Fail is still sitting outside somewhere at Paddy's place, probably just a bucket of fuzz by this point. Is the blackberry wine doomed to the same fate? Quite possibly, only time will tell.

We then cooled it with our cooling coil, mentioned here, and pitched the yeast. Only then did we remember that we didn't take the starting specific gravity. So even though you're supposed to do that before adding yeast, we pulled some out and got a disappointingly low reading. Too little sugar. The temperature had indeed influenced the earlier specific gravity reading. So even if the no-rinse didn't render the berries poisionous, even if it doesn't mold over... it will still be pretty weak wine. Paddy suggested slowly adding more sugar over the course of fermentation, so as to not kill the yeast by giving it too much sugar at once, but my trusty Alaskan Bootlegger's Bible says that's how you make a wine very sweet. The sweet Manischewitz blackberry wine was bad enough; I don't need 3 gallons of moldy, poisonous, weak, sweet, not kosher, home-made Manischewitz.







(Oh, and "House Wine" might have a cheap sounding name and cheap looking label, and it may not be kosher, but it is inexpensive and fucking awesome. Bold yet velvety smooth with very little acidity while not losing the full flavor you want in a red wine. I highly recommend you pick some up!

And if you got the "Jews and Berries" joke without Googling it, it's quite possible you haven't set foot outside since 1985. Go fishing, or something.)

Fermentation Friday - Cheese it! It's the fuzz!

Cleanliness is next to godliness. Old phrase. It has its origins in ancient Hebrew, someone who may or may not be full of shit once claimed. But the expression has more than age to lend it credibility. Science, practical experience, and riding the bus all bear this out. Letting sanitation slip is something you'll pay for in the end. Let your car stay dirty, it'll be more prone to rusting. Let your body get dirty, and you get hit on by Brad Pitt. Let food you're cooking get dirty, and some guy with mutton chops projectile vomits chicken fried steak into a stranger's yard as his car sits with blinkers on in the middle of the road. But in the home brewing world, being dirty can lead to even more horrific results.

Now, Paddy and I are pretty careful when it comes to cleaning our brewing equipment. We dish out the no-rinse pretty generously, and even give it a rinse with hot water after that, in spite of the product's name. It's served us well, other than the fact that it will most certainly kill both of us in some rare or possibly even as-yet-undiscovered way. Every time we open the container, the powder becomes airborn, and we invariably inhale some of it. It can't be good for us.

But even with being so cautious and clean, there have still been some failures related to sanitation. Three stick out in my mind.

Ginger beer. Beer with ginger. Simple idea, right? It was an interesting experiment we'd hoped would lead to epic drunkenness. We essentially brewed up a really light beer with a shitload of ginger in it. 2 weeks later, we had something surprisingly interesting, but it lacked the sweetness we had hoped for. So we decided to blend in some sugars and let it sit for awhile. A quick sample spiked with sugar seemed to confirm this was the way to go. So we heated up a small amount of water on the stove, and began stirring in various sugars. The water was at a simmer. I asked if we should boil it, and Paddy said "Nah, it'll dissolve just fine this way." (If you're keeping score, this was the mistake.) We cooled it, poured it in, racked it into a carboy for good measure, and let it sit with a fermentation lock on it. Two weeks later, we anxiously opened up the carboy and took a big whiff. It smelled like someone had pissed in a sweaty gym sock.




If we had sterilized the sugar water we added, we might have had a couple cases of a wonderful sweet, bitter, alcoholic concoction. But instead, we dumped the awful swill down the drain and chased it with Clorox. Fail.

Wine has had the similar problems twice for Paddy and me. Once was a strawberry wine that ended up moldy. Brown fuzz climbing up the sides of the bucket. Yeah... that shit got Cloroxed before dumping it. I commented that it made the whole room smell like a pool, not bleach. Paddy would later open his pool for the first time, and learn in his research that was the smell of death. Then, most recently, we brewed up a bucket full of blueberry fail. Or rather... didn't brew it. Which was the problem again. Paddy tells me the bucket is currently filled with green fuzz, so at least we're achieving some variety in our mold cultures.

So to close it all up here, I'm going to boil the ingredients for all my beers and wines from now on. I mean, just boil the shit out of it. Literally. Kill anything that's in there. That, and hold my breath when scooping out the no-rinse.

Fermentation Friday-- Sanitation

All of my friends have some sort of phobia in brewing. One is terrified of yeast, another is afraid of all-grain. I am afraid of bacteria. I can't get through the idea that I sanitize things, then expose them to air before putting them back in my beers. So... I sanitize everything, below is the rough process.

First, I oxyclean everything. I use the stuff from Costco- blue specks and all. It is cheap, easy and cuts through any mess. I then make up 2 gallons or so of Star-San. I love the foam. Really. I try to keep a bucket of star-san ready the whole day. I clean and then star-san the boil pot, ditto the mash tun and hot liquor tank (another 5-gallon tun). I also clean and sanitize all the hoses. At this point, I'm not worried about the beer going bad, but I gather all bacteria tastes bad, whether or not it ruins the beer. When I add in the Irish Moss (15 min left) I make sure to clean the immersion chiller with vinnegar, rinse and hit it with the sanitizer (which at this point holds all of the spoons and other equipment to touch the wort after it is cooled). I then let the coil sit for the last five minutes of the boil, put the lid (re-sanitized) back on the pot for the last two minutes of the boil and then put the flame out. I then start the chilling and put a gallon of star san into the carboy and shake for a minute. It is then put upside down in a bucket so it can drain out the foam (as much as possible). Eventually, I'll put a sanitized zip-loc over the neck and let it set out. The beer goes in and a blow-off is put into a gallon jug full of sanitizer that had been used to clean things previously. In secondary, I sanitize the airlocks with whiskey, drinking when we fill them for good luck. Tedious, boring but effective so far. If only I was so careful with my yeast.