Imbolc Maple Mead

Preamble: I know I haven’t posted here in a while, so I thought I’d revive this as a good place to keep my booze records. Below is the process (and eventual outcome) of a maple mead I’m brewing. I’ll keep adding to this entry gradually until it’s complete, so if you’re waiting to see how it turns out, you’ll just have to keep checking back!

Plan:

• 2 gallons light maple syrup from Meadowbrook Farms 
• 4 gallons distilled water 
• 1 packet premier cuvée yeast 
• 3 tbsp yeast nutrient 

1. Make Starter: Boil 2 cups of water with 2 tbsp maple syrup. Pour into a sterile container and cool to 100°F. Add yeast and leave to proof for 12 – 24 hours.

2. Boil Wort: In a large pot, bring 1 gallon of distilled water (minus whatever went into the starter) to a boil. Gradually stir in 6 quarts of premium light amber maple syrup and boil for 15 minutes. Pour into primary fermenter with two more gallons of (cold) distilled water and cool to 85°F.

3. Ferment: Once the wort has cooled, take your first hydrometer reading, then add starter and stir vigorously. Seal with air lock. Stir twice daily for one week, then once daily for another week.

4. Rack: At the beginning of week 3, rack the mead. Take a hydrometer reading. Add one more quart of syrup and enough water to bring the level up to 5 gallons (probably about 2 quarts). (Boil it if you want – I didn’t bother because the syrup and the water are both sealed, but if you do, make sure to cool it to at least 85° before adding to the must.) Take another hydrometer reading. Calculate the difference between the two readings to determine the current ABV*. Keep stirring every other day for another two weeks.

Calculate: To calculate the δ between gravities, first calculate the ABV of the must at its present volume and determine the exact volume of the alcohol. Seriously, write it down, because you will forget it. The second reading will tell you the potential alcohol in the must after you’ve changed the volume, but the ABV will be incorrect. Figure out the percentage of alcohol in the new volume and work backwards.

In other words, multiply the volume by the percentage of alcohol to get the volume of alcohol. Then, once you’ve added water (and/or syrup), take another reading. Divide the original volume of alcohol by the new total volume to get your new percentage, which you’ll add to any further readings.

For example, take my first topping off: SG was 1042 (8%), and the volume was 4.25 gallons. 4.25 x .08 = 0.34 gallons of alcohol. Then I added a quart of syrup and two quarts of water, bringing the total volume to 5 gallons and the SG to 1054. 0.34 gallons divided by 5 = 0.068, or 6.8% alcohol.

Rack: At the beginning of week 5, rack the must into a 6-gallon glass carboy. Again, take a hydrometer reading before and after.

Rack: Once a month for another 4 months. Be sure to take before and after readings with each racking. If fermentation has ceased after 6 months, bottle. If it’s still bubbling, keep racking until it stops.

5. Bottle: Once fermentation has ceased, rack one last time into a bottling bucket. Take a hydrometer reading and calculate your final ABV. 5 gallons should give you about 25 750mL bottles. Cork and seal. If you end up with a half bottle… drink it!

6. Age: Age bottles in a cool dark place for 1-2 years before opening. (Maybe test one every 6 months or so.) Ideally it will be ready for Imbolc on the second year.

What Really Happened...

So that’s the plan. Of course, we know how plans work. Here’s what’s actually going on:

2015.08.02 – Moon disseminating in Pisces. OG: 1103. 

The starter and wort went off without a hitch. I left it to cool overnight since I don’t have a fancy wort chiller, and cast the yeast (added the starter) the next morning with the yeast nutrient.

That’s when I discovered that I had given away all of my airlocks when I moved from Minnesota. Fortunately, though, I’m crafty in a pinch, and I managed to construct one out of some air hose, part of a hydrometer case, and some tape. Okay, it was mostly tape, but it got the job done. I like to use vodka in my airlocks instead of water because it seems to keep the bad things out a little more readily. It didn’t bubble as nicely as a manufactured airlock, but bubbles came out and nothing was going in, and that’s the point! I also high-tailed it upstairs and ordered an airlock on Amazon which I received the following day.

I religiously stirred the hell out of it for a couple of days, then mostly forgot, but managed to stir it at least once a day.

2015.08.09 – SG: 1072 (4.0%ABV)/4.4gal

I measured the gravity after a week and found it was up to about 4% already. I continued to stir it once a day or so, or at least a few times a week. It was bubbling at a rate of about 4 bubbles per minute (about 15 seconds apart).

2015.08.23 – SG: 1042 (8.0%ABV)/4.25gal δ 1054 (6.8%)/5gal

I didn’t rack it as planned; I just topped it off with 1 qt of syrup and 2 qts water to bring it up to 5 gallons. Final ABV after topping off was 6.8%.  Bubbling had slowed to about 3 bubbles per minute (about 21 seconds apart).

2015.08.30 – SG: 1040 (8.8%ABV)/5gal

I finally racked it, straight into the carboy. Bubbling had slowed to less than 2 bubbles per minute (around 32 seconds apart). The gravity was still strong after racking. I planned to add more syrup and top it off, but the jolt kicked the fermentation back into action, so I decided to give it a few days to see how it looked.

The only new unexpected twist was that the cap I had ordered for the carboy (along with my emergency airlock order on day 1) wouldn’t stay put. It was a sort of weird waxy plastic that kept popping out.  I solved that with about half a roll of electrical tape.  I guess I’ll deal with that the next time I try to rack or take readings.

By morning, it was bubbling at a rate of more than 10 bubbles per minute (5-6 second apart). Measuring the rate of the bubbling isn’t terribly scientific, but it definitely helps to see when fermentation is slowing or picking up again, so I like to write it down.

2015.09.06 - SG: 1030 (10.0%ABV/4.75gal δ 1034 (9.5%)/5gal

It’s a little harder to measure volume now, because the carboy doesn’t have any handy markings on it, but that’s probably pretty close. There’s a line in the glass of the carboy that I’ve decided must be the 5-gallon mark, so I’m going to use that to estimate the volume from now on. It shouldn’t be off by more than a few cups altogether.  The bubbling after racking had slowed to about 6 bubbles per minutes or a bubble ever 10-11 seconds.  

I was just going to measure it and top it off with water, but it occurred to me that I had accounted for 8 quarts of syrup in the recipe, so I was still a quart short. I also still had a few quarts of distilled water left over from the initial four gallons, so I mixed about a quart of water with a quart of medium syrup, brought it to a boil, and cooled it again to about 80°F. I topped off the mead with about a quart of the syrup mixture and added 1tsp of yeast nutrient, which might have been a little too much. ½ a teaspoon should be plenty next time. Final ABV: 9.5%

2015.09.13 - SG: 1032 (9.75%)/5gal δ 1034 (9.325%)/5.5gal

Racked the mead and returned to the carboy with enough of the leftover syrup/water mixture to bring it up to 5.5 gallons (the top mark of the carboy).  (I also took the opportunity to put gallon measurements on the outside of the carboy to make the measuring process easier in the future.)  There has been a fair amount of bubbling over the past several days (remaining consistent at about 5-6 bubbles per minute, but that’s not really reflected in the gravity readings. The gravity has only gone down by 2 (about .25%) over the past week.  So there was also little change when I topped off the carboy, giving a current ABV of 9.325%.  We’re now on to the “rack once a month” phase, though I may update more frequently if anything of significance comes up.

Oh, and I also finally did something about that airlock situation... Crude, but effective, and even kinda pretty.

2015.10.18 – SG: 1032, no δ, estimate 9.5%/5.5gal

Racked the mead, which is now getting very clear. No change in ABV, and not enough of a difference in topping off to measure. Fast-forward a couple of weeks, yeast has pretty much stopped collecting at the bottom and the mead is fairly clear. Bubbling has decreased to less than one bubble every 5 minutes. I don’t anticipate a lot of change between now and bottling time, which I still estimate to be somewhere around the beginning of February, except that the bubbling should have slowed by then to about once per hour.

2016.01.21 – Moon gibbous in Cancer. FG: 1025 (10.5%), no δ – Bottling time!

There hasn’t been much activity over the last couple of months, and although I had initially thought I would wait to bottle until Imbolc, I decided the moon was best for it today and tomorrow.  I had ordered some very nice 32oz EZ-cap cobalt bottles from Midwest Supplies, as well as some cobalt wine bottles that I thought would fit the bill. I racked the mead into a fermenter (though there was very little in the way of lees), then attached a bottling arm to my siphon and went to town.  (Some people swear by using a bottling bucket, but I just think they’re kind of a pain to clean and they don’t really make anything much easier.)

In all, I filled twelve 32oz. bottles and 10 750mL bottles… which should be just about exactly 5 gallons. I kept them in the boxes the bottles came in and stuck them in the cellar. In six months, we’ll see how it turned out – I’ll post an update then!

2017.01.25 – Tasting!

Actually, I opened the first bottle on the Winter Solstice. I'm not going to say whether or not it was any good, but let's just say that box of bottles on the right above now only has one bottle left in it. I have to try to keep at least a few bottles until Imbolc, which is what I intended these for anyway! It's surprisingly good with cookies...

Historical Linguistics for Kids!

Dear Aubrey,

Your mom tells me you’ve been wondering about where words come from.  I’ve spent years and years learning where different words come from, so I hope I can help.

Words have been around as long as humans have, and maybe even longer!  They’re now discovering that Neanderthals (the cavemen that were here before modern humans) probably used some words as well, but because of the way their mouths were shaped, they couldn’t pronounce a lot of the same sorts of words we can.  They were only able to make what are called “high front vowels,” which are sounds like “ee” and “ay,” so they could probably say “bee” and “bay,” but they couldn’t say “bow” or “boo” or “bah.”  But anyway, if they did say any words, they aren’t the same words we have today.

Nobody really knows if all the languages the people speak today came from the same language, or if different groups of people started talking and different language families sprang up in different places. The trouble is, we can’t tell much at all about language before about ten thousand years ago, and scientists think that people have been talking for at least about forty thousand years – maybe even a lot longer than that!  People probably started using simple words to communicate with each other for hunting, and a lot of the earliest words probably sounded similar to a noise that that word made.  For example, the word for a bear might have been a roaring or growling sound, or the word for wind might have been a whooshing sound.  

Most of the words we use in English today come from a language called “Proto-Indo-European.”  This is a language that was spoken about six or seven thousand years ago in the area north of the Black Sea, probably in what today is a country called Ukraine.  (Ask your mom to show you where this is on a map!)  The IndoEuropeans were some of the first people to ride horses.  With horses, they were able to travel a lot further than people had been able to before, so they moved to lots of new places, west into almost all of Europe, and south into what is now Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, and India.

As they spread out over Europe and Asia, different areas started to talk a little bit differently from one another, just like people from different places in this country have different accents.  At first, they could probably still understand each other, just like we can understand people from the South, or from England or Australia, or from Maine or Boston, or even from Minnesota!  But before too long, they couldn’t understand each other very well anymore, just like we might have a hard time understanding people from far northern Scotland. (They speak a language called Scots, which is a lot like English, but not always quite enough to understand!)

After about five thousand years, they spoke a lot of different languages, like Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and a language we call Proto-Germanic.  Your mom said she’s told you a little bit about Latin, and that’s one of the places we get a lot of our words from – particularly if they’re big words!  We also get a lot of words from Greek, especially the ones that have to do with science, because a lot of our science started with the ancient Greeks.  But most of the common words we use in English come from Proto-Germanic. 

Just like IndoEuropean started to split into a lot of different languages, all of the languages it split up into did the same thing.  Even today, languages are changing and splitting up and becoming new languages. Languages never stay the same for very long; in fact, English has even changed a lot since your mom and I were kids! 

Latin spread out from Italy with the Roman Empire about two thousand years ago, and blended with a lot of the languages in neighboring countries.  In the north-west, Latin mixed with a Celtic language called “Gaulish,” which is kind of like Irish, but it was spoken in France, and that mix of Latin and Gaulish eventually became French!  Further south, Latin mixed with another Celtic language called “Iberian,” and also mixed in a little bit of Arabic and Gothic (a Germanic language!), and became Spanish and Portuguese. To the east of Rome, Latin mixed with Slavic languages (kind of like Russian) and turned into a language called Romanian.  Latin also changed over time and eventually became Italian. *(Sort of.  The history of the evolution of Romance languages is very complicated, and there’s a lot more to it than this!)

Anyway, ProtoGermanic also broke up into different languages.  At first it broke up into three groups of dialects.  A dialect is sort of like an accent, or a language that’s spoken a little differently from one place to another.  The three dialects were called East, West, and North Germanic. 

East Germanic eventually turned into a language we call Gothic, because it was spoken by people called Goths.  The Goths eventually conquered Rome and brought some of that language into Spanish and Portuguese too, along with the Latin and Iberian they already had. (The Arabic words in Spanish came later.)

North Germanic was spoken by the Vikings, and eventually this became a language known as Old Norse or Old Icelandic.   Just like the IndoEuropeans had horses that helped them move around a lot more quickly, the Vikings had huge ships that let them bring their language all around the coasts of Europe and even as far as back to the Black Sea where IndoEuropean started thousands of years before!  They also brought some of their words to northern France, where they were called the “North-men,” but they couldn’t make the “th” sound in French, so that part of France is now called “Normandy.” That’s also where we get the name “Norman,” and the French people from this area came to be known as the Normans.  Old Norse is still spoken today in Iceland, where it is called Icelandic, even though it’s pronounced a little bit differently.

Finally, West Germanic also split into two different groups: Sometimes they’re called “high” and “low” German (but this isn’t what we call German today).  They were called this because “High German” was spoken around the Alps, which are very high mountains.  “Low German” was spoken along the coast of Germany and Denmark and Holland which was much lower.  The Low Germans were known as the Saxons. There’s still a state in Germany today called “Saxony.”  Another group lived in a weird little crooked part of the coast in Denmark which was shaped like a fish hook.  Because of the angle in the coast-line, they said they were from the “Angle.”  They were also good ship-builders like the Vikings, and along with a third group called the Jutes, the Angles and the Saxons set sail across the North Sea, and when they landed, they kept the name “Angle” and they called the country they landed in “Angle-land,” which we now call “England.”

About 1,500 years ago, these Anglo-saxons (which was the name given to the Jutes, Saxons, and Angles who landed in England) spoke a language which we call “Old English,” (but since it wasn’t very old to them, they just called it English).  (Actually, they called it Ænᵹlısc, and it didn’t look or sound very much like English sounds today!)  But they weren’t in England for very long before the Vikings stopped there too, and conquered the country!  A lot of Old Norse words got added to English (like “husband” and “wisk” and “skirt” and “drag”).  In fact, almost any word in English with a “sk” sound probably came from Old Norse, because in Old English, this sound always turned into a “sh” sound.  We even have some words that come from the same ProtoGermanic word, but some we get from Old English and some from Old Norse, like “skirt” and “shirt,” or “drag” and “draw.”

The English fought back and took over again, and they ended up adding a lot of their words to Old Norse, like “boat”!  They went back and forth like this for a few hundred years.  Then about a thousand years ago, in the year 1,066, they were invaded from the other side of the country by the other ex-Vikings (Normans) who had decided to settle down and become French.  This is where we really start to get a lot of neat words in the English that we speak today.

The people living in England were still speaking the same old language they’d been speaking all along, but now their king and most of the nobility spoke French.  The English who lived in the villages didn’t know much of anything about being kings, and the French who invaded the country didn’t know much of anything about farming, so something very strange happened, and we get a weird group of words in English that don’t exist in most other languages!  The courtiers loved eating lots of meat from the farm, but they never saw any of the animals the meat came from.  So when they wanted a particular kind of meat, they would ask for that animal in French. Meanwhile, the people who raised the animals only knew them by their Old English names.  So they would ask for “bœuf,” the word for a cow, which then was pronounced like “bafe,” which later became “beef.”  Pig was “porc,” which became pork; chicken was “poulet,” which later became “poultry;” sheep was “mouton,” which became mutton, and so on.  English is one of the only languages where the names for kinds of meat are different than the names of the animals the meat came from!

Anyway, this mixture of Old English and French gradually became what we call “Middle English.”  Of course, just like with Old English, they just called it “English” at the time.  Later on, during what’s called the Renaissance, we added a lot of Latin and Greek words to the language as we started learning more about the knowledge that had been lost before the Middle Ages (which is another language story altogether!) 

There was also something that happened called the Great Vowel Shift.  This happened in part because the plague that was sweeping through Europe was forcing people to move around quite a lot, and people from all over England were coming together in London who spoke very different dialects of English.  At first they couldn’t all understand each other very well, but eventually something happened called “levelling,” and the language changed to one that was very regular that they could all understand pretty well.  What happened in the Great Vowel Shift was something called “Vowel Raising.” (This is a little hard to understand, and maybe a little boring, so you can skip this part if you like.)

If you draw a map of the shape of your mouth and put on that map all the different places where we say vowels, it looks something like this:

i              u

e              o

ɛ              ɔ

a

Since these aren't quite the same as the sounds of the letters you've been learning up until now, if you click on each letter it will take you to a page where you can listen to what each one sounds like.

In the Great Vowel Shift, each of these letters moved up by one, and the top letters, i and u, turned into double-vowels (called diphthongs, but there’s no reason for you to know that word before you’re 20!) which are written phonetically “ai” (pronounced like “eye”) and “au” (pronounced like “ow!”) I can teach you more about this later on if you like, but the point is that the language that everyone spoke after the Great Vowel Shift is pretty close to the language we call English today. This is the language that Shakespeare wrote in, and even though the style he wrote in sounds kind of old, and some of the words mean different things today, the words were pronounced pretty much the same.

Since then we’ve borrowed a lot of other words in English from a lot of different languages. A lot of other languages have also borrowed a lot of other words from English.  In fact, there’s a language called Tok Pisin which is made up of almost entirely English words, but it’s not English.

Anyway, that’s pretty much where words come from.  If there’s any more that you want to know about, please ask me, and I’ll do my best to answer!

Love,

Uncle Jamin

The Jamin & Karen Supper Club: Midori's Floating World Café

Actually, the title is a little misleading: I went to Midori the other night with The Sweeties, not with Karen.  They treated me to what is possibly the only sushi place in the Twin Cities that i haven't been to yet in exchange for some laptop fixin'.

I wasn't really sure what to expect from Midori's Floating World Café, but what i definitely did not expect was how overwhelmingly cute it was!  It's just adorable.

We got some tasty beef pot stickers as appetizers with our drinks, and i was very pleasantly surprised by the delicious peach sake cooler - pretty much a sake spritzer with peach syrup in it.  Very refreshing. Then came little octopus dumplings and some sort of tofu salad.  As cute as they were, i need to accept the fact that i just don't like octopus. 

For an entrée, i got the sashimi and tempura bento dinner, and it was nice enough, pretty; nothing special.  The tempura was particularly good - especially the sweet potato; the sashimi was fine but nothing to blog about... and, having just relearned my lesson for the nth time, i gave the tako to Ms. Fledermaus.

Gothic for Goths Lesson Six Online Now!

I just put the finishing touches on and uploaded Gothic for Goths Lesson Six: Raþjan.

Check it out on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmdqggY40_Y

Or check out the companion site with script and new vocab at: http://ling.everywitchway.net/germanic/east/gothic/gothic-for-goths/lesson-06

Not the most exciting work i've ever posted, but necessary when we start reading recipes in the next lesson.

Enjoy!

Gothic for Goths: Lesson 6, coming soon!

A new Gothic for Goths lesson is percolating. It's a few weeks from completion, but at least it's moved into the conceptual phase. The next lesson will be "Matjan miþ þaim Gutam: Cooking with the Goths" and will include an instructional video on making the perfect yoghurt.

I've been having a great deal of fun all day coming up with gothic words for things like twisƕair (double-boiler), jōgaúrtareis (yogo-therm), and faítlaúss þaúrsus milukastubjus (non-fat dried milk powder), though that last one is a little bit of a stretch. Not to mention matlapin (tablespoon), drigklapin (teaspoon), and gamitastikls (measuring cup).

I have a floating holiday coming up, so i might have time next weekend to get it done; i hope my subscribers will forgive that the video portion will be taken courtesy of my phone and/or laptop.  I might have to invite some neighbors along to help with the preparations.

Gawizneigai sijum!

Ginger v2.0 and Judi "with an i"

So it appears we're getting two new chickens from The Chicken Martyr (no, seriously, "...she does good things...") named Ginger-Georgia and Judi-with-an-i. They're 1 1/2 year old Buff Orpington twins who were rescued from a gloomy basement.

Their names are a little hard to pronounce, and we already had a Ginger. Since they're the Buff Orpingtons that Phyllis has so long coveted, i think she should get to name them.

I feel bad for them, though, coming to our coop, because while it's a little more spacious and friendly than a basement, they've never been outside before, and when i left the house this morning it was six freakin' degrees below freakin' zero! And i don't even want to mention the wind chill of -30. And yes, as screwey as the weather has been this year, tomorrow it's supposed to be in the 40s. 50s on Saturday!