2010 in Review

Back about September, I thought I was going to slow down on how many postings I did. I was starting to feel like I was running out of material, and I am not really commenting on what I was doing. So far, this blog has been more about what I’ve been learning than what I’ve been doing. However, as November started rolling around, I realized I still did have plenty to write about.

Unfortunately, my life is changing right now, so I’m going to have to ease up on the number of postings I do. Basically, it takes me some time write a post, and I’m sure I’m sort of flooding my readers with posts instead of having them a little more spaced out, which in turn results in postings not being read.  I think it could be a win-win situation if I did ease up on posts.

Hoever, in a little over a year in which I have been blogging, I have received about 4,750 hits on my site. Thank you everyone!

Reviewing, my top blog posts were:

1. Weekend Special: Liquor Initiatives 1100 & 1105, also giving my highest use day when it was posted. This posting got over 300 hits in the three weeks leading up to the election and has drawn another 100 views since.
2. Pears in Alcohol. This article would have had the #1 spot if it hadn’t been for an election year. It is the only other post I have above 200 viewings that I can track. I believe that the traffic is coming off of USA Pears, whom I linked to, creating a pingback. Thank you.
3. Cider Review: JK Scrumpy Farmhouse Organic Cider
4. Building My Apple Press
5. History of Pears
6. Review of Cideries on the Washington Peninsula
7. History of Cider Part II: Rise of the Apple and Cider Popularity in Europe
8. Drink Review: Jalapeño Infused Guava Margarita
9. Making Liqueur
10. Review: Bushwhacker Cider Bar
11. Target SG 1.090
12. My New Eco-Lawn
13. My Apple Grinder (which I don’t recommend that model anymore due to problems)
14. Making Wine with Whey
15. Apple Press

Hmm, interesting spread. No book reviews made the top list, but lots of drink reviews and various other information. I wonder where the new year will take me!

Champagne Week Part IV – Drinking

Now the champagne has been riddled, disgorged, dosaged, capped, and cellared, it is time to drink it!

First, a little education about the labeling of champagne to help you know what you are buying. According to Tim Vandergrift, the following labels correspond to a given amount of sugar:

• Brut Natural or Brut Zéro (less than 3 grams of sugar per liter)
• Extra Brut (less than 6 grams of sugar per liter)
• Brut (less than 15 grams of sugar per liter)
• Extra Sec or Extra Dry (12 to 20 grams of sugar per liter)
• Sec (17 to 35 grams of sugar per liter)
• Demi-Sec (33 to 50 grams of sugar per liter)
• Doux (more than 50 grams of sugar per liter)
• Tim’s Note: “If 50 grams of sugar per liter sounds sweet to you, keep in mind that cola is about the equivalent of 12% residual sugar, or 150+ grams per liter. Wow!”

I did review a book a while back titled The Wine Club by Maureen Christian Petrosky. It is a “guide to learning about wine with friends,” in which she spends an entire chapter talking about champagne, which would also help you to become more familiar and comfortable with it.

To serve champagne, because it is a sweet wine, it should be chilled first. The chilling process also helps retain carbonation once opened.

To open a bottle of champagne, the wire rack should be removed and then cork held while the bottle is angled so that the cork is not pointing at anyone. The bottle is then rotated and pulled away from the cork instead of pulling or pushing on the cork. This prevents the cork from shooting off, and it reduces the risk of wasting the champagne. Spraying the champagne is only something rich athletes do. Champagne can also be opened via the Sabrage method, which actually breaks the neck of the bottle instead of removing the cork. You can’t reuse the bottle after that.

Champagne is then poured into a glass while holding the glass at an angle to preserve the most bubbles. Pouring directly down will create a “mousse”, which is much like getting a head of foam on beer.

Pairing champagne with food:

• Sparkling wine: great with food
• Champagne and Food Pairings
• Quick and Easy Champagne and Sparkling Wine Food Pairings
• Champagne – Not Just for Breakfast Anymore
• Unique Champagne Food Pairings
• 10 Unexpected Champagne and Food Pairings

Here are some posts in which I have mentioned pairing champagne or sparkling wine with cheese:

• Apples, Cheese & Wine
• Cheese & Beer
• Cheese & Cider
• Cheese & Wine
• Pears, Cheese, and Wine
• Wine, Beer, and Cheese Pairing books

Additional champagne/sparkling wine and cheese pairing suggestions:

• Champagne Wine and Cheese Pairings
• Five Cheeses to Pair with Sparkling Wine
• Pairing cheese and Champagne
• Sparkling Wine and Cheese

Some other artisan sparkling cider:

• Finnrvier Cider
• Ashridge Cider (England)

I’ve also had a sparkling pinot noir from the Rusty Grape Vineyard.

Further Readings:

• Champagne (wine)
• Champagne cartoons

Champagne Week Part III – Disgorging

In making champagne, everything is leading up to somehow removing the lees from the champagne without reducing the CO₂ in the bottle. And this is where I need to step back and talk a little about safety.

Because of the increased CO₂ in the bottle, the bottles have a built up pressure. Therefore, making champagne or even a bottle conditioned beverage really needs to be done with the appropriate bottles, ones that can handle this pressure. Wine bottles are not strong enough. Beer bottles can handle pressure up to a certain amount, but not as much as champagne bottles. Tim Vandergrift claims that at 90 psi, Champagne has five times the pressure of beer or soft drinks.

Secondly, too much pressure or a flaw in the bottle can cause the bottle to crack or even explode. One would not want that to happen when you are handling the bottles, so please be careful and wear protective clothing and goggles. Here is Vandergrift’s unfortunate experience with an exploding champagne bottle. 

This stage of making champagne is dangerous, so please do not attempt this just from reading on the topic or watching YouTube videos, but instead try to find an experienced méthode champenoise maker and have them tutor and supervise you to make sure you are doing things correct and safely. Today’s blog posting is meant only to educate for the appreciation of champagne and sparkling wine, not as a how-to.

So at this point, the bottle is in a ridding rack, tipped upside down, with all the lees in the neck. From there, the bottle is removed and chilled, remaining in the upside down position to keep the lees in the neck. It is then placed so that the neck is in an extremely cold solution that freezes just the neck of the bottle.

Next, the bottle is then disgorged, in that the upside down bottle has it’s cap removed, in which the pressure causes the frozen lees to shoot out of the bottle, and the bottle is turned upright as to not lose too much of the champagne, all in one swift motion. If the bottle was not cold enough, the champagne will proceed to bubble out of the bottle, but if it was cold enough, it can be stopped by placing a thumb over the opening. Disgorging is either done outside, or in a special container.

Now all the yeast is gone, and another dosage of sugar or juice can be added back to the bottle without fear of it fermenting again. A dosage should be added to remove extra headspace for air to be in the bottle, or the CO₂ will come out of the liquid due to the extra space. After that, the bottle is quickly corked with a mushroom cork, and a cage is added to ensure the cork does not pop free from the pressure.

Champagne cork and cage

Commercial winemakers have a machine for the neck freezing, disgorgment, dosage, and corking, which makes it safer and faster.

The bottle should then be cellared for a month before drinking, monitoring for leaks and cracks in the bottle. If some is detected, make sure you wear safety gear and clothing while handling the bottle pushed to the limits of pressure, chill the bottle to reduce the pressure slightly, and drink.

Further Reading:

• I saw Time Vandergrift give the presentation “Sparkling Wine from Kits: Wine Kits” while I attended the 2010 WineMaker Magazine Conference, and I highly recommend him as the authority for the amateur winemaker to follow.
• Daniel Pambianchi, who wrote Techniques in Home Winemaking, also has some information on the topic on his website.
• What is Méthode Champenoise?

Champagne Week Part II – Riddling

Any time you add sugar to a wine with yeast, the yeast is going to eat it. It is hard to achieve a sweet wine because of this. Basically, you have to figure out how to either kill or remove the yeast. Methods include having the alcohol content to high, filtering, or pasteurizing. Thing is, to make carbonation via bottle conditioning, you still need the yeast alive at least for a little bit, so having the alcohol content too high or filtering won’t work, and grape winemakers really frown upon pasteurizing. Besides, you are still left with that pesky lee problem.

Instead, winemakers rely on time to starve the yeast to death to make sweet champagne. They place the bottle in a riddling rack, with the bottle tipped on its side initially. As the yeast dies, it falls out as lees.

Lee deposit from riddling

A “riddler” comes by and rotates the bottle about one quarter turn daily with a thunk to help settle out the lees.

Slowly, the bottle is tipped as it is rotated so that all the lees settle into the neck of the bottle, ready to be removed.

Bottles in a riddling rack ready for the next step

I’ll talk about the removal of the lees tomorrow, but I will say that once the lees are removed, more sugar can be added, as all of the yeast is now gone.

Further Reading:

• Riddling in the Méthode Champenoise
• Why you just can’t put the bottle upside down to begin

Champagne Week Part I – Introduction

With New Year’s Eve coming up, I want to talk a little bit this week about making sparkling wine or champagne. How do they get the bubbles in there? There are two basic methods – force carbonation and bottle conditioning.

Force carbonation is a method of adding gas, usually carbon dioxide CO₂, to the drink. A kegging system at a bar is an example of this. Also, commercial producers of beer and soda pop have machines that can achieve this affect before bottling.

But for the home beer maker who bottles, the method used is bottle conditioning. When the beer, wine, cider, etc is dry and has little to no remaining sugar left in it, leaving a specific gravity of about 1.005 or lower. From there, the product is dosed with a small amount of sugar, perhaps a teaspoon, and maybe some yeast and immediately bottled in bottles that can handle pressure. The yeast eats the sugar, creating slightly more alcohol and CO₂. The CO₂ has nowhere to go, so it is absorbed into the beverage, carbonating it. However, this method does create a little bit of lees, so the trick with bottle conditioned drinks is to pour it without pouring the lees, which would make the drink cloudy. Not pouring the lees is fairly easy to do with beer bottles.

You can find bottle conditioned beers in the store, but for champagne, this is unacceptable. First off, nobody wants to drink a cloudy champagne, and secondly, this method only works with dry wines to be carbonated. What do you do if you want a sweet sparkling wine, cider, champagne, etc?

To achieve this, winemakers start out with bottle conditioning, but then take it a few steps further in a manor known as méthode champenoise, which I will be discussing over the next few days.

Meanwhile, a little background history to champagne. Champagne is a grape growing region in northern France that is not as conducive for making wine as other regions. The grapes were growing higher in acid and lower in sugar, and the resulting wines were lower in alcohol and thinner in body. The colder winters would halt the fermentation, only to restart in the spring after the wine had been bottled, causing a CO₂ build up in the bottles. This was considered a flaw, one which who we consider the famous champagne founders were trying to remove. It was the British who developed a taste for the bubbles, and its popularity spread to the French nobility, causing people to try and figure out how to get bubbles into the wine.

Technically, the beverage champagne can only come from the Champagne region due to the European Union’s Protected Designation of Origin. Therefore, the term “sparkling wine” should be used, except that I am discussing how champagne is made, a process which can be used on other wines and ciders.

Next Post: Part II – Riddling

Further Reading:

• Méthode Champenoise – What is it?
• What is Méthode Champenoise?
• Making a dry bottle conditioned cider

Book Review: Booze Cakes

The idea of putting alcohol into cake seems to be growing at the moment, partly because of the book Booze Cakes: Confections Spiked with Spirits, Wine, and Beer by Krystina Castella and Terry Lee Stone, published earlier this year. With Christmas and New Years coming up, I thought the idea of cakes with alcohol could be a nice little thing to take to a party.

The book starts out with a very important Introduction, talking about the basics of cooking with alcohol, different types of alcohol and their flavors, quality to be used, how much alcohol stays in the cake based on cooking time and method cooked, garnishes, and seven tips for success. These pages can be read online on Amazon.com. The recipes are broken down into Classic Booze Cakes, Cocktail Cakes, Cake Shots, and Cakes with a Twist. Some of the recipes can be viewed here:

• The book’s official website posted the recipe for Tequila Sunrise Cake.
• Jenny Kraemer has on her website a few pages and recipes from this book, including Mocha Rum Brownie Bites and Shamelessly Rich Carrot Cake.
• Amazon.com lets you “Look Inside”, showing you the important “Introduction: Booze Cake Basics,” and recipes for Bananas Foster Gingerbread Flambé, Black Forest Cupcakes, and English Trifle.
• Blue Hawaii Pineapple Upside-Down Cupcakes
• Brandy Apple Chai Cake
• Dirty Girl Scout cookies
• German Black Forest Cupcakes
• Honey Spice Beer Cake
• Jelly Cake Shots
• Long Island Iced Tea Cakes
• Mexican Chocolate Cakes with Tequila Cajeta Caramel Sauce
• Piña Colada Cake
• Rum & Coke Whoopie Pies
• Rum Raisin Butter Cakes
• Spiked Ice-Cream Cake

The next section of the book is on Homemade Booze, which is really just a section on making a few popular liqueurs, real eggnog, sour cherries soaked in sugar, lemon juice, and kirsch, and a homemade sweet-and-sour mix. The last chapter is Homemade Treats, which includes candied cherries, raspberries, strawberries, or rum ginger, chocolate covered cherries, cream puffs, flavored sugars, marshmallow crème, gingersnaps, marzipan carrots, spiked whipped cream,  and more. Not all of the recipes in the last section call for alcohol, such as the various candied fruit.

The downsides to this book is that there is no index, so if you want to look up anything, you have to scan the book yourself. Also, there is no single page of the recipes, but instead it is broken up into an index for the start of each chapter. However, I think this is a cute little book with a color picture of each recipe. If I was a baker, I would give this book a try.

Similar and further readings:

• The Boozy Baker: 75 Recipes for Spirited Sweets by Lucy Baker. Here is some video of her on the Today show.
• There is a company who will make you a booze cake and ship it to you. I have not tried this service to know how it is.
• The Oregonian: These little desserts pack a boozy kick, including recipes for Buttered-rum Lamingtons, Margarita Bars, Fig Port and Chocolate Tartlets.
• The Oregonian: Bourbon adds complexity, and a kick, to holiday desserts
• Belly up to the bar with these cookbooks. Includes some liqueur flavor information, and recipes for Pink Champagne Cake, Irish Cream Pie, Amaretto Almond Delight Cake, and Donut Bread Pudding with Tennessee Whiskey Sauce.
• The Columbus Dispatch Kitchen: That’s the spirits, including recipes for Donut Bread Pudding with Tennessee Whiskey Sauce, Jelly Cake Shots, Tequila Sunrise Cake, and Screwdriver Cupcakes.
• You can also find recipes by doing a web search for alcohol cakes, liquor cakes, beer cakes, vodka cakes, and rum cakes.

Festival Review: Portland’s 2010 Holiday Ale Festival

This is the second year in which I have attended Portland’s Holiday Ale Festival. It is usually held the first Wednesday through Sunday of December at Pioneer Courthouse Square. They set up large tents with some heating, so you are mostly protected from the elements, though there are some colder spots.

Admission was initially $25, which got us each a plastic mug and 10 tickets. One ticket is good for a 4 oz tasting of beer, and additional tickets could be purchased for $1 each. As long as you kept your mug and the wrist band they put on you, you could reenter the festival other days.

This is my husband’s favorite festival of the year, mostly because he likes porters and stouts, which are usually considered winter beers. Also, he is really into sour beers, which seem to be on the rise in Portland, and there were several at the festival.

Me and my anti-hop low IBU tastes stuck to just a few beers. Here are my tasting notes in order of which I tasted them:

1. I started with the Gilgamesh Cranberry Saison, AVB 5%, IBU 15. I described it as a wheatish beer, and that I probably could finish a bottle of this by myself. However, I found it was not dynamic at all, and that I only detected the cranberry in the middle of the taste.
2. Next, I had a Bonyard Femme Fatale, which is a sour beer fermented with raspberries and cranberries. ABV 6.5% and an IBU of 10.  My husband said it started out with cranberry but finished raspberry. All I tasted was strong roasted malt at the end.
3. I followed that up with a New Belgium Transatlantic Kriek. It was a tad sour, but I still haven’t really found a kriek that I like, and I love cherries.
4. Then I started moving into some unual beers, and tasting them in order from lowest IBU to highest. Buckman Village Brewery had a Ginger Beer with 5% ABV and 36 IBU. I said that it was a bit hoppy, but it was probably closer to what I thought the Cranberry Saison should have been like. Honestly, I’m not sure I could drink a whole bottle by myself, but I would enjoy it more compared to the Saison. The ginger was faint, but it tasted like real fresh ginger instead of syrup.
5. The next beer that I tried was because of a review from Beervana, which was the Columbia River Paddler’s Porter. It comes in at 8.4% ABV and an IBU of 46. The description of this read that there is seven malts, two hops, chocolate nibs, and Madagascar vanilla beans in it. I got the chocolate, which was more a dark style and kind of gave it a coffee note to it, and I definitely got the roasted malt notes. However, vanilla is kind of a subtile flavor, and I couldn’t detect that with all the other heavy flavors going on. I could totally see what Beervana mean by being unbeer like. I gave most of my sample to my husband, mostly because of the hops.
6. The last beer I had selected to try I knew I wouldn’t like but I wanted to know what it tasted like. It was Fort George North of the Forth Strong Ale. I couldn’t drink it because it has an IBU of 80. The description says, “With more than 40 pounds of spruce tips, 60 pounds of cranberries, and a two-pound candy cane to an 8.5 barrel batch, this unique brew embraces some of the classic elements of the holidays.” Looking at that, I knew instantly that two pounds of candy canes compared to 40 lbs of spruce tips and 60 pounds of cranberries would not really be noticeable. Thing is, I’ve had a Douglas fur eaux de vie before from Clear Creek Distillery, and they always make you taste it last because evergreens have an oil in it that coats your tongue and kind of makes tasting other things difficult. I can tell you, the first taste of this beer was much different than the second taste because of this factor, but I wasn’t able to capture it. It was a dynamic beer, but I couldn’t taste the cranberry, and I did actually pick up the candy cane in the back of the throat, like a cough drop.

After that, I had a little agave mead from Mountain Meadow Meadery to use up our last tickets and to kind of end on something I would like. I also had myself a full mug of water from the sinks at the festival before exiting.

Turkey Baster as a Wine Thief

When making turkey dinner, please observe the use of the turkey baster. It is usually used to suck up juice from the pan the turkey was cooked in and placed in another pan to make gravy.

Well, I have found that a turkey baser works quite well as a wine thief. It is faster than a glass wine thief, and cheaper to buy. However, if you decide to use a turkey baster as a wine thief, do not use it for anything else, especially making turkey gravy. This would prevent contamination of the wine.

Amateurs Winemakers and Water

I was talking to a licensed county wine maker the other day, and she told me that the federal government TTB really does not like the use of water in wines. She gave an example of people asking her why she did not make dandelion wine, which is mostly just fermented sugar water flavored with dandelions. The TTB does not consider this to be wine, so she cannot make it.

Thing is, so many country wine recipes call for water. In fact, I have developed my 3-2-1 ratio based on it, where I have 3 lbs of fruit, 2 lbs of sugar, and one gallon of water. To become licensed, I would have to abandon the water apparently. Granted, that would make for a better product, yet it also makes it expensive to produce.

Yet, this explains why apple juice is sometimes detected in a country wine that we buy. Rather than have x amount of fruit, like say a blackberry, they ferment a blackberry/apple juice mixture, as the apple juice won’t really change the flavor that much, and it does add a little sugar. It reduces the amount of blackberries needed, yet keeps the volume up.

As far as the dandelion wine goes, the other alternative I see, which also strikes me as odd, would be to produce a dandelion mead, which is fermented honey and water. A little odd admittedly, and I could be wrong about the TTB even allowing that.

This fall, I started a strawberry wine and a blackberry wine in which I put the fruit into sacks in buckets, hand crushed the fruit, and then let it ferment for a week before removing the fruit. There is no water added, and I have to say that there seems to be more body to the wine and better flavor. I’m impressed. However, being an amateur, I’ll use water now and then if I deem the source material to difficult to get juice out of alone.

Clark County Winery Ordinance Passed

Clark County, WA started having a growing wine industry, and they realized that while they needed to support the industry for economic reasons, they needed to set out some regulations to help keep the peace. I had talked about it before in July.

County staff wrote up code regulating winery usage, and had some meetings to discuss it, of which I went to one. Basically, the issues with wineries wasn’t the actual wineries, it was the events held at the wineries. As a result, a lot of the code is aided at the events that would take place, such as concerts, weddings, etc. One piece of the code I find interesting is that 20% of the land must be in production to make wine. This is fine when you have a small area like 5 acres, but much more difficult to develop if you have 100 acres. One man at the meeting I attended suggested growing blackberries to solve the problem. Blackberries are a weed in this region, but can make wine!

On October 5, 2010, the Clark County Board of Commissioners approved the winery Ordinance 2010-10-02.

News:

• The Oregonian: Clark County commissioners approve winery ordinance (see also Growing a Clark County wine industry)
• Wines & Vines: Making a Wine-Friendly County