From Poverty Pak to Mud Pak

[AB]

LMAO....Your a sucker for punishment mate!

[growler2058]

Well this is guna be a works in progress. i will eventually cut the wings off and replace with 2x50mm OD tube on each side to improve the approach angle to the wheels at least. In one of these pics theres a close up ive drawn a dodgy line on, basically ill take a wedge out and weld the flat steel back over the top so it doesnt have that "sharp" appearance.

[snicko]

Nice looking Troll there Growlers....Looks better in the flesh!! hahahahaha Hows the lawn??

[growler2058]

Nice looking Troll there Growlers....Looks better in the flesh!! hahahahaha Hows the lawn??

Its not good I'm gunna have to do a full on lawn makeover spring next year... ooooppppssss

n

[growler2058]

Piccie of my old stock springs and the 4"dobinsons and some other randoms i found

[Wine_maker]

Good barrel mate! Is it made from oak?

[growler2058]

Yeah it's a 20ltr oak barrel that always needs filling :-)

[Wine_maker]

Grate mate! You can do your own cognac!
Of course if you have enough will power to fill with barrel by holy water (grape spirit) and wait for minimum 3 years.
By the way in any case you will lose up to 15% from content of barrel, for evaporation through the pores and cracks in wood (it calls angel's share)

End it will be called "Old Growlers Cognac". Sounds great mate! hahahahaha

[growler2058]

Grate mate! You can do your own cognac!
Of course if you have enough will power to fill with barrel by holy water (grape spirit) and wait for minimum 3 years.
By the way in any case you will lose up to 15% from content of barrel, for evaporation through the pores and cracks in wood (it calls angel's share)

End it will be called "Old Growlers Cognac". Sounds great mate! hahahahaha

ok how do i make it the barrels empty at the moment have you got a recipie

[Wine_maker]

Great! Come here everybody, let’s start our magic!

You should prepare your barrel before filing up.

1. 2 times you should beddable your barrel inside and outside with fresh cold water and you should change your water 2-3 time every 24 hour.

2. Jet steam processing 20-30 minutes.

3. Rinsing with hot then cold water.

And here we are to produce our “wine material”

1. Find the grape with 17-20% of sugar. Titles acids should be 6-7 g/dm3 (optional, just find good sweet grape, talk with farmers they give good advise which is sweeter, not very important in our case if it’s red or white).

2. Then extract grape juice (by stainless or wood hand-press or pneumatic or electric drive press) and you will got non-fermented grape mash (don’t try to drink it - my good advice).

3. Then put the mash into sterilized barrels (but please note: 1. Sterilization, 2. No smell if it’s plastic barrel, 3. Important to avoid resolving of air in the mash because bacteria’s and oxidizing processes shouldn’t be involved in our job, so reduce to minimum mash transfer from barrel into barrel.)

4. Do this water seal pot


5. Put this barrels in dark place 16-25 С with no day/night temperature jumping to prevent yeast temperature shock.

6. Also you can put the 100 g sugar per liter into mash (mix it), if the seed year was bad and not enough sugar in grapes.

7. 6-12 hours later the “first fermentation” begins. The mash begins poppling, foaming and soon gets dim so you should see this



The process can take 10-20 days.

8. If all was good –hurrah!- we have got green wine! You can taste it and it shouldn’t be sweet, just a little bit sourish.

9. Then you can put more sugar or not, it depends from grape conditions etc. (but never put all sugar at once, and the total amount of sugar in mash shouldn’t be more than 300 g/litter)

10. Then you should do this operation (do not forget about sterilization!)



it calls “racking”. After that you have clean dry green wine and the dregs. (you also can distillate but I strongly not recommend to mix it with clean alcohol, but it drinkable too, in CIS we call it ChaCha).

11. Then we start a very interesting process – distillation.

12. I think you know where you can borrow this interesting machine. (If no, ask me how to build your own)

13. In process of distillation you will have 3 fractions. (the first fraction contains 85% alcohol in volume, second fraction 62-70%, third 15-25%.). Sometimes if something goes wrong and fractions of alcohol are dim, all ready fractions of alcohol are being put in to clean distillator again and the process of distillation is repeated.

14. Then you do the blend of this alcohol as you need it but the primary fraction must be the second one (if alcohol was very strong you can add the clean soft fresh water but no more than 10%) and put it in to your oak barrel (after sterilization and the other things I have mentioned above) with 2% or less of under fill.

15. Ageing of your Cognac in barrel with temperature 18-20oС, humidity 75-85%. (If we talk about real French technology you should age your Cognac first for two months in new barrels then put it in to old barrels). Minimum ageing is 2.5 years for V.S. Cognacs maximum - 50 Years for extraordinary Cognacs.

So this is simplified winery course for home use, from certificated Engineer-Technologist of fermentation processes - Wine_maker at your disposal.