The hardest part for a beginner

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SteveHoward

SteveHoward

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Is the waiting. Nothing else is even close. To put it simply: I WANT IT! And the gratuity when racking/checking to see if it is ready for bottling has been good enough to really raise the anticipation.

I suppose after I've been going for a while, I'll always have something homemade and good to go with a good dinner, or football game, then I can relax a little bit, but right now, that relaxin' ain't happenin' and my brew/vint list keeps getting longer. I'm not a patient person by nature.

Ah ... there ... I feel a lot better now that I got that off my chest. I'd feel even better if ... you know ... :)
 
Making my own wines and cider has really made me a much more patient person :) now I have to brew just to keep up with party demand lol just a word of advice when you make some thing awesome and it's bottled start a new batch right away :). Have fun
 
I am going thru the same thing lol. I started in February, Now I have 15 carboys going lol. The skeeter pee helped alot, with the quick finish time.
 
That's why I started making beer. Winemaking was definitely not a quickly enjoyed hobby, but most of my beers are being consumed in about 3-4 weeks after brewing. That seems really fast, after starting with wine!
 
For me the waiting is the easiest part. I have wines bulk aging that should have been bottled months ago (according to directions), every time I taste them they are better, so i am letting them sit.
 
I think the lady of the house just took pity on me and revealed a long held secret to me: She knows how to make Makgeolli (A Korean rice-wine that was popular with blue collar people when I lived there, but I understand is drunk like a health food now :) ). Funny that we've been married for 26 years and I never knew she knew how to make makgeolli ... but I only recently tried to make any of my own drink. That takes 7 days to be ready to drink. It was apparently made in her house frequently when she grew up. I only had it when we visited someone's house when we lived in Korea.

So she started some this last weekend with me taking notes. It should be ready this coming weekend. Hopefully, that eases the itch a bit ... and it's easy and cheap enough I can make it often and tide me over.

I'm waiting to see how it turns out. If it's like I remember from when we lived in Korea, I'll post the recipe and start another batch :).
 
I'd be interested to see this recipe as well as the results.

thanks

SteveHoward said:
I think the lady of the house just took pity on me and revealed a long held secret to me: She knows how to make Makgeolli (A Korean rice-wine that was popular with blue collar people when I lived there, but I understand is drunk like a health food now :) ). Funny that we've been married for 26 years and I never knew she knew how to make makgeolli ... but I only recently tried to make any of my own drink. That takes 7 days to be ready to drink. It was apparently made in her house frequently when she grew up. I only had it when we visited someone's house when we lived in Korea.

So she started some this last weekend with me taking notes. It should be ready this coming weekend. Hopefully, that eases the itch a bit ... and it's easy and cheap enough I can make it often and tide me over.

I'm waiting to see how it turns out. If it's like I remember from when we lived in Korea, I'll post the recipe and start another batch :).
Click to expand...
 
I'm 6 brews in... I'm drinking my third, aging my 4th, and fermenting my 5th and 6th. I love this hobby like no other... I've built models (as a kid), I do some cooking, but nothing compares to sitting down each day with a glass of something I brewed. Waiting for that first one was torture, but worth it... i snuck a pint when I racked to secondary, I snuck another 2 when I bottled but nothing compared to opening that first bottle and, pfft... the color and the aroma themselves were intoxicating... but that first taste, man, like liquid heaven... I knew I had found my calling.
 
One of the strangest things I have found about this hobby (obsession) is that the longer I do it, the more I CAN wait. First batch, every bottle gone before the first 9 months, second batch about a year, third...now I am getting it...over a year to finish it all.

Now, I make a batch and sample one bottle at 9 months and see if I should wait another 6 or more.
 
Ain't that first post the truth. Once there's enough around, then it's not so bad. There's still that desire to know how the next one is going to turn out of course.

I'd be interested in seeing the Makgeolli outcome. I've seen it mentioned once in a sake forum and would like to know your process and results, and if/how you might modify the next batch.
 
WIP said:
For me the waiting is the easiest part. I have wines bulk aging that should have been bottled months ago (according to directions), every time I taste them they are better, so i am letting them sit.
Click to expand...

i need to taste those wines, and you need to taste some good beers. we're in the same city
 
I agree on the hard part being the waiting... I have every wine jug and whiskey bottle ever emptied in my bubbling away right now for this very reason.

If half of these batches turn out halfway decent the party to come should be epic.
 
The waiting really killed me when I first started. Although I picked recipes to start with that were very quick. I've made a ton of Skeeter Pee. :) Now that I have a bunch of drinking stock I've been moving towards wines that take a while :)
 
I thought it was time to crack one of those bottles open and see how it was progressing. It's blackberry wine, and is only about 3 months old. This was from my first batch, and the one where I learned the most from mistakes :).

I'm probably not going to share this with anyone - it's not good enough to share IMO. At 3 months, I'm expecting it to get better still, but it is sweet and high alcohol (as I expected). I'd call it a decent dessert wine ... but I prefer dry wines.

All in all, enjoyable for my first batch, but I'm glad my first batch was only 1 gallon. I am no longer a vinting virgin.

I'm enjoying it, though, and looking forward to the other batches getting better. The gratuity at racking/bottling makes me think they will be much more to my liking :).
 
How did the Makgeolli experiment go, good, bad, meh? Curious brewers/winemakers want to know.

Ryan
 
Tom Petty said it best: "The waiting is the hardest part." Only was he talking about wine?
 
Me too! The question, I suppose, is - are you willing to buy something to drink or are you willing to drink something that ferments fast?

Sometimes I'm in the mood for depth and complexity, sometimes I'm thirsty and tired of sobriety. There's a whole world of things that don't take long to crank out that would certainly be enough to get by on.

By all means, make good stuff- you'll be proud of yourself for it. But there's no shame in cheap party hooch either.
 
Waiting is hard ... but attending to things when they need to be attended to can be too. I remember when I was starting out learning that vinting is not done on your schedule but on the wine's schedule could be a brief but uncompromising lesson. At certain times in the process "wine waits for no man". Procrastination is a guilty pleasure, if at all, in winemaking.

The other hard lesson can be sanitation. It's easy once you adopt good practices ... but until that time lessons can be harsh. Simple things like always sanitize and don't be clumsy and drop equipment or other junk into your must.
 
Tw0fish said:
Me too! The question, I suppose, is - are you willing to buy something to drink or are you willing to drink something that ferments fast?

Sometimes I'm in the mood for depth and complexity, sometimes I'm thirsty and tired of sobriety. There's a whole world of things that don't take long to crank out that would certainly be enough to get by on.

By all means, make good stuff- you'll be proud of yourself for it. But there's no shame in cheap party hooch either.
Click to expand...

I remember someone in one thread saying there was nothing better than cracking open something you've made yourself and enjoying it. Well, the first batch wasn't as good as I hoped when I opened the first one to test it, but tonight was time to try the second batch of blackberry wine ... different story.

I've had just enough to be in love with the world right now, and I'm thinking that I enjoy this so much more than i did the Merlot I had in that expensive restaurant last night ... blackberries > grapes :). And it's young, so I know it's going to get better ... if I let it that is :).
 
I made a strawberry wine for one of my first batches, when I didn't know what the heck I was doing. It turned out... barely OK. I wish I had stuck to 'easy' recipes like Apfelwein and other juice/concentrate wines, while I learned what the heck I was doing, and stayed away from whole fruit wines for a while :)
 
I definately relate! My first (and only to date) wine was a chokecherry - many years ago. I enjoyed and shared it way to soon I expect. It was more of a 'hooch' as I read above - being from my methodology or just impatience. I now look back and wonder what it would have tasted like after a year... or two... or even 6 months (just kidding). Heck, maybe my wife would have appreciated it a little more.

Time for renewal - I'm going to ferment 18# of Nanking Cherries I picked over the summer this weekend. I'll likely post a plea for suggestions but I'm going for it regardless.
 

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