dandelion wine

Morning honeys

Just a quickie as I was so pleased with this discovery and I wanted to tell someone and who better than you.

One of my other hobbies is wine making, I should say I just dabble in it really.  Thoughts of jacks and masters rumble round my head by hey oh it makes me happy, The wine is often quite palatable for my standards, it's frugal, and really doesn't take much effort, months left to it's own devices in a demijohn.

Well the wine in question at the moment is this year's batch of dandelion, a very tasty white that I like to do each year.  Dandelions were picked back in April, being in great supply then. See what I mean about frugal, the main ingredient was completely free, and brambles times is coming soon, lovely.

Anyway the dandelions were soaked in a bucket of water for a couple of days and then that water poured with sugar, various other nutrients and the all important yeast into a demijohn and left until this morning.  As I say not a high maintenance hobby.   Today I decided it was time for the first decant, basically putting into a clean demijohn by siphoning off from all the yuck that settles at the bottom. This is the first time I have done this in the new house, before I had one demijohn on the kitchen counter and one on one of those kitchen step things, you know the ones.

Well I would always make rather a mess, as you need to stick a plastic tube into the full demijohn, suck on it for a while, no lewd jokes please, till it is full of liquid and then quickly get the end you are sucking on into the empty demijohn on a lower surface so gravity takes over and the liquid runs through the tube into the empty container. As a little bonus you get to taste a bit of the wine on the way, just to check out its progress you know and I have to say this morning taste of dandelion was quite acceptable.

But I digress again, the point being in the old house I made a mess. So this morning I stood and thought it was time to decant and then thought where? and right under my nose was the belfast sink in the lean to, I say lean to, it is a little more than that, but nowhere near a conservatory, I have plenty of room all the washing stuff there and very nice belfast sink rescued from being a plant pot in the other half's old house. Well the sink base is quite a bit lower than the counter and it's a sink; what better place to make a mess in.  Consequently I seem to not make such a mess, but that may have been just cause it was so much easier to clean up.  But I was rather pleased with the affair and wanted to tell someone.

And while I'm at it I thought I'd show you my vintage taps, a wonderful find on ebay, original 30's taps. The hot just needed a new washer and they worked perfectly.  I may tell you about the trouble we had fitting them into the counter top some other time though, suffice to say it wasn't simple, but that's a whole different story and I need to get on with real work now so,

toodlepips dears, speak soon.
ally x