Greenstorm's Journal

I bottled a couple of boozes this weekend: I fortified the dry seville orange mead with vanilla-orange instead of carbonating it, and bottled it like that. It added a lively fresh layer, I think it turned out ok. I also bottled the redcurrant wine, which is basically delicious juice-tasting.

I have an unknown port and a plum dessert wine upstairs to bottle still, plus assorted others that have been bulk aging forever: my perennial favorite, a cherry flanders-red style roselare sour; a sour crabapple cyser; an apple-quince cider; a strawberry-apple sour; and a lacto-sour berlinerweisse-style mead (when I did a cyser in this style it tasted like lemonade I swear).

The alchemy involved in brewing and aging is just... fun. You can aim for something and sometimes arrive exactly on-target or sometimes arrive somewhere unexpected. If you don't like it you wait and it will usually eventually be good. The flavours are recogniseable but more interesting and complex than the starting ingredients. And it's a hobby that benefits from waiting, from starting and stopping, from patience.

If I get two more things bottled then I'm making two rhubarb wines or meads this spring: a rose-rhubarb and a plain rhubarb or rhubarb mead.

I wonder if rhubarb is enough of a fruit to call that a melomel?

Running today. Sunny out. Lots of homework but feeling above water; really I end up feeling above water whenever I do things un-school-related and manage to hit school goals at the same time. Today's un-school-related? I went grocery shopping. There will be ribs for dinner tonight (I'm enjoying my instant pot very much, thank you) and I'm contemplating going back to buy seville oranges for mead. The urge to brew, well, it's good to feel it again. It means hope for the future.

Yesterday I made soap. Actually, I taught a mini-soap workshop. I have some friends who have scent sensitivities, which I'm getting very sympathetic to as my own scent sensitivities get worse. We got together in a space that was safe for all of us to breathe (!!) and played with fat and lye. One of us was allergic to coconut, so my normal recipe (tallow, olive oil, coconut oil) was out of the running, and I don't like palm oil (which normally replaces coconut oil to make soap bubbly and extra-cleaning) so we all brought the oils we had and played around with an online soap calculator for awhile. We ended up making one soap with butter, which was fun and experimental, and one with just tallow and olive oil. It was so nice to bring a framework of knowledge and then just play with that knowledge for awhile, basically like getting instant colleagues or co-hobbyists or whatever, rather than doing a hierarchical knowledge transfer. It was, however, exhausting.

Day before that was some play that ended in a reminder that, as a top, I definitely need aftercare and reassurance. Fun though.

That said, it was a rough-feeling weekend; my reserves are depleted and so everything threatened to feel really awful when it didn't go just right.

I have some time to myself this weekend and I'm thinking of filtering and bottling some of my two-year-old apple boozes and starting a mead or two; maybe a seville orange and either the red currant or blackcurrant from my freezer. The apple boozes are long since unlabelled but I should be able to figure out which are which by taste (I'd better be able to!).

There's also a slow avalanche of homework deliverables now, but I find boozemaking and homework complement each other nicely; I do well at both as punctuated focused efforts which weave one to the other as I get tired of each.

I really miss gardening.

More another time; be well.