Latest batch (March 2012)

The other week, our freezer decided to die. We did quite well, managing to save most of the food. One "almost" casualty, was some small bags of "mixed summer fruit", but I let them defrost completely, then mixed them into a must of honey (Polish Buckwheat) and water. I sulphited that, because I couldn't make my mind up what yeast to use. I ended up just chucking a pack of D21 into it. A couple of days later, I checked the gravity, and it was down to 1.060 or so, so I added a 1lb jar of RewaRewa honey (from New Zealand) and a teaspoon of FermaidK and half a teaspoon of DAP. This morning, I've checked it and it's down to 1.020, so as the fruit was looking rather manky, I decided to remove as much of it as I could with a sieve and slotted spoon. We do our weeks shopping on a sunday morning, so after sorting out the fridge, there was about 1lb of strawberries, 4oz of grapes and 2oz of raspberries left. I've trimmed and chopped them, added about 6oz of sugar and heated them to make like a fruit coulis. That's now cooling on the cooker, and I'll strain it through cloth and add that in as well. I've also bought a couple more bags of frozen "summer fruit", so that when it's finished, I'll add that in as well, to help sweeten it some, as well as adding more "fruitiness" to the batch. Ha! not bad eh? still my usual standards of "make it up as I go". I'll probably back sweeten it as well.