wine!

difficulty rating: do you want fries with that?
i've always wanted to learn how to make wine at home and i'm told the best way is to just jump in and try stuff and learn from your screwups. so here we go. i did one bastardized red wine with wealch's grape juice and baking yeast, one simple mead with champagne yeast, and a fresh cherry wine with champagne yeast. i'm using sterilized milk jugs as my carboys and balloons with holes poked in them as air locks. all the homebrewers are spinning in their graves right now but humans have been doing this for a damn long time with much worse equipment and dirtier environments and it worked out just fine. i'm a little concerned that the cherry wine's balloon hasn't puffed up yet, which would normally indicate fermentation is taking place. could be i poked more holes or something. the yeast is all bubbly and nasty like it's supposed to look so i'm not going to worry about it too much. only issue is i don't really know when it's done without the balloon behaving itself. oh well, so we learn. i also learned that when you take a potato masher to a pot of cherries it squirts everywhere and the pizza guy thinks you killed someone :) the process really is impressively easy: mix fruit-type-thing what contains sugar with yeast, throw in some raisins, tea, and orange slices with the rinds for yeast health. add airlock, ignore for a month or two, siphon. that's it. you can age it longer and people go on and on ad nauseum about perfect sterile technique and specific gravity and and and...oh fuck it all. you're growing yeast and having them feed on tasty things and stealing the end result. stop making it into brain surgery. i'll get some pics up once i feel up to fighting with the stupid software for my phone again.