The Dragon's blood is bottled now.  I really like the way it came out.  I found it does need some back sweetening due to the sour taste the berries can have.  Now (speaking of sour berries) I am thinking of trying a test batch of  a cranberry mead. 

I decided to seal the Dragon's blood with wax.  I like the way it looks and its less plastic.  We don't need more plastic in our environment so I'm not interested in buying plastic sleeves to seal my bottles. 

I did this once before and ran into a similar problem, the wax just drips way down the bottle.  I'm using wax beads like this
https://www.amazon.com/Bottle-Seal-Wax-Beads-Green/dp/B07KT85D2V/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1547130828&sr=8-8&keywords=wax+wine+seal

to seal the bottles. 
I found this video and he has a better technique than I do.  I'm going to test one out this way and see how it works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9uZqDqSoMw

Clearing your Wine

Many people I know just don't like floaties in their drink.  There's the pulp in orange juice; at least we know what is floating in there.  Then there is the bottle of water someone just took a sip out of, and I think that's the worst.  I never minded a little cloudiness in a beer, but wine is really meant to be very clear.

I started out in this brewing endeavor by making beer.  I just took a chance and tried some wines and now I've bee hooked.  What I have been doing is just putting as little as possible (ingredient wise) into my wines.  If I can let the sediment drop, why add something else to do it for me?  I've sometimes bottled wines a little too soon and had problems.  It looks a lot clearer than it started, the fermentation has stopped, so I bottle it.  Then a week or so later I see sediment in all the bottles, and this is why I like to just wait.  I've had my pumpkin mead in a carboy for a long time now.  I don't even think I can remember how long.  It might have been since January.  The fermentation is definitely over and it has cleared up very nicely.  This, however, is what happened with my watermelon/strawberry wine:

So what is your take on clearing a wine?  Have you had better luck using findings or some other method?

Bottle Conditioning

The brewery is busy.  There's a strawberry watermelon wine bulk aging (this means it's aging but it's not bottled yet) as well as the pumpkin mead in the previous post, that is also bulk aging and a Stout I  brewed with oatmeal and coffee that is conditioning in the bottle.

I made the mistake of putting some beer bottles in the cellar last winter to condition, and I had very mixed reviews.  I was sure I put in the right amount of sugar for priming and I had mixed it in very well before bottling, but still some bottles were almost flat.  I thought about it and it I wondered, if I had so many flat bottles why was I not getting any bottles exploding?

Eventually with the help of some friends I realized that the temperature in the cellar was just too cold for the bottles to continue to bottle condition.  These stout bottles are sitting up on the first floor in room temperature, (68 - 75 degrees F).  I want to make sure the bottles are up in that environment for at least 3 weeks before I try opening a bottle.  No one likes a flat stout.

I brewed this stout with coffee one other time.  This time around I changed my recipe a little by adding 1 pound of oats in the boil and I racked onto 1/2 cup of coarsely ground coffee beans in the secondary in addition to the coffee I steeped at the end of the boil.  This was a great brew.  My wort chiller proved to speed the cooling significantly and my bottling bucket made that whole process much easier as well.  Feel free to drop a line, let me know about your brewery upgrades, or let me know if you are interested in the coffee/oatmeal stout recipe.

Cheers from the Kitchen Brewery