What a load of Bullock's

Friday night not only marked the first presidential debate, but a much more historic moment in the grand context of our nation's history. While the first African-American presidential nominee debated the oldest mother-effer since Methuselah, I bottled my first batch of homebrew. It'll be another 2 weeks before it's carbonated and ready to drink, but still, a huge day. 

Here's my marketing slogan: Bullock's Red Ale is a dark, hoppy brew that features notes of lemon, honey, wheat, and plastic bucket. 

You learn something every day in homebrewing, and that day I learned that beer (at least this beer) is carbonated by putting sugar into the beer just before bottling. The yeasts, now close to death, drunk, and abusive, set their sights on this new sugar and start gobbling it up, producing C02 and just a touch of sediment. The result is the familiar and comforting "pssssch" sound of a beer cap being popped off, signaling that the trapped carbon dioxide has escaped the gulag of the bottle. 

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In other Huevos Caballos Noticias, I should be receiving my wine press today or tomorrow, after which I'll squeeze all the juice from the Ruby Cabernet must, and secondary fermentation will start. 

I just started malolactic fermentation, in which some bacteria who love malic acid eat the stuff by the bucket-full and turn it into much nicer tasting lactic acid. According to Wikipedia, this process often leads to "nicer mouthfeel," which is something I think we can all get behind. 

Operation Grape Expectations, Part the Second

Day Three of the wine from scratch experiment is almost over, and it's been a good one. The fermentation seems to be moving along quite nicely.

You can tell from the before and after picture that things have picked up considerably over in the yeast department in the last 24 hours. The carbon dioxide that's constantly being produced is pushing the skins, pulp, and seeds, (or "cap," as we call it in the business) to the top of the must, and I have to stir and push the cap back down into the wine several times a day.

The cap is now sticking over the top of the fermentor, held together by what I can only believe is a diabetes-inducing amount of sugar and sheer willpower.

The grand mess that I made in the kitchen yesterday has been cleaned up for the most part, although it looks sort of like a good-natured dullard murdered someone and tried to clean it up with a bloody towel. Were this CSI: Franklin Hills, David Caruso would undoubtedly walk in and say "Sometimes...(long pause, removes sunglasses) grapes aren't the only things that get stomped."

But it's not, and I got grape juice everywhere and it's totally sticky.

Operation Grape Expectations, Part the First

I'm happy to report that Operation Grape Expectations is now fully underway. Lauren, who is a saint for putting up with all of this nonsense, and I went to Escondido yesterday and bought 70 pounds of Ruby Cabernet grapes from a very nice woman and her husband. More on that later.

We destemmed and crushed the grapes last night, and I analyzed the brix (or sugar content), the acidity level, and the pH of the must this morning. I'm happy to report all were nominal after the tiniest bit of tweaking. I added the yeast this afternoon, and fermentation should begin in the next couple of days.

In an attempt to make this blog more legit, I'll post some boring technical stuff along with the story of the grapes themselves and their eclectic international origins.

To tide you over, here's the apocryphal warning on the primary fermenter.

Try explaining THAT at your homebrew club.

Nice to Mead You, Part the First

Man, do I love Vikings. What's not to love? Dudes plundering whatever they saw, taking what they pleased, their only concern in life dying in battle so they'd get to live in a mead hall for all of eternity. By some accounts, there's a possibilty that they hunted down and wiped out the Neanderthals. I realize this is highly doubtful, but COME ON. To top it all off, there's an epic battle at the end of days, in which the earth is consumed by fire and almost all the gods die, and it's already decided and public knowledge.

These dudes were not effing around.

And they drank mead.

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Jeremy and I wrote a script a couple of years ago, which we love to no end, called ROBOT ROBOT STRIKE ZONE (which I will gleefully send to you if you'd like to read it). It prominently features a crew of berserker Vikings. It's probably my favorite thing I've ever been a part of, and more importantly, it got me thinking about mead.

Mead is one of the oldest alcoholic drinks, with the first mentions of it coming in Vedic texts, an ancient precusor to Hinduism dating around 1700 B.C.. Aristotle and Pliny the Elder drank it, presumably without sharing with Pliny the Mrs. or Pliny the Brother.

Somewhere along the way, however, we lost our taste for the drink of Leif Ericsson and Hagar the Horrible. Beer and wine supplanted mead as the preferred drinks. I blame the Germans and the French. They apparently blamed each other for some stuff as well.

After having some commercial mead, I thought 'why buy one bottle for $12 when I can MAKE 24 bottles for less than $100. That's a savings of over $8 a bottle!

I read up on mead making, which goes like this. Get some honey, get some water, get some yeast, put them all together, heat them up, let the yeast eat the sugar, wait six months, then drink the stuff. Seems easy, right?

At this point in my winemaking career, I didn't yet have a good six gallon stockpot to make my concoctions, only a tiny two gallon one. In addition to making everything take three times as long as it should, it also looks dorky. As we all know, there's no place for looking like a dork in wine making.

Anyhoo. So instead of heating up 6 gallons of water and adding my 15 pounds of clover honey all at once, I had to rinse and repeat three times, doling out the honey in highly unscientific increments. Honey, as you may know, is not known for its non-stickyness. You can imagine the countertop/pants situation that quickly developed and escalated beyond control.

I was seeing Dark Knight that evening, and I was worried that I might be attacked by bears on the way to the theater that night. Thankfully, that didn't happen.

So it took a little while, but I finally got all the honey boiled and poured into the bucket. It would have to cool down for awhile, so I happily drove to the Hughes Center with Lauren to meet Jeremy for some chile con queso and some Batman. Both went extraordinarily well, and we raced home to check on the mead.

When I arrived home, the carboy containing the mead was still hot. Not warm, hot. It would be well over 24 hours before it was cool enough to add the yeast.

I'm happy to report everything has gone normally to date. The mead has been racked off and is clarifying nicely on its own. It's currently sitting the coat closet, anxiously awaiting November, where it begins the next stage of its journey.

Announcing the Huevos Caballos 2008 Ruby Cabernet

Faithful blogateers, your two and a half days of religiously checking this blog have finally paid off. You are officially the first to know that late next year, Huevos Caballos Vineyards will be unveiling its very first direct from grape wine - no concentrate, no kits, no effing around.

If you're not busy on Saturday and want to get in on the ground floor of this truly historic happening, come with Lauren and me to Escondido for the grape picking.

It is a proud day, dear readers.