You know, if there’s somebody going through our trash who doesn’t read this ‘blog, they’re gonna be absolutely baffled by the stuff they find in there this week… In addition to about ten or fifteen pounds of lacerated cranberry, there’s going to be the seeds and rinds from the dozen or so pie pumpkins that we shredded tonight.
This, of course, means that we’ve got another batch of pumpkin wine in the works. Rather sooner than we thought we would too… Our original plan was to get this batch started as a leisure time activity during Christmas break. Alas, our plans were foiled by cruel nature… The pumpkins that we had bought started to go a bit soft on us…
So, starting at about 7:30 tonight, I got to work with slicing the survivors into crescent-shaped sections. I filled a big metal mixing bowl, and my wife and I tucked in with de-gutting and peeling the sections. If you’ve never sliced up a ton of pumpkin, I highly recommend it as a whole lot of not much fun. If you approach it with the correct mind-set, it can function much like a hair shirt or self-flagellation did for medieval religious fanatics. About half-way through the whole enterprise, my wife cut her thumb sufficiently badly that it required bandaging, so she was relegated to salad shooter duty.
I finished up the last batch of pumpkin and added it to the hot cauldron of water about ten minutes ago… It should be done with the boiling phase sometime around one in the morning. So tomorrow, after work, I’ll be straining it through a funnel into our last carboy.
And that’s the problem… We’ve only got four carboys! The cranberry wine is in a big plastic fermenting bucket. It finally started percolating late on Saturday, and it’ll need to get transferred to a carboy sometime… And we’re out. One has the apple wine, one has the blueberry, one has last year’s pumpkin wine, and I’m going to be pouring pumpkin juice into the last one tomorrow…
No need to panic though… There’s plenty of time before the cranberry needs to go, and I’m sure we can either borrow a carboy or order a new one before the end of the month… It’s a pity that there’s not a good brewing supply place in Ann Arbor anymore. It used to be that you could run up to Merchant of Vino and grab a couple extra carboys, a case of bottles and a spare water-lock on a whim, but since Whole Foods relocated, that’s no longer an option. There’s a new place opening in their old digs on North Campus… The name eludes me right now, but it’s something like “Vino Libre” or something… I’ll post a review of it when it opens.