Cherry Vodka

It’s raining but that gives me time for a catch-up post on making the cherry vodka back in June.

While the spring here might have left a lot to be desired, the sour cherries took it all in their stride and produced a good crop back in the early days of this summer.  As I’d also had a good crop of the late dark cherries, which are far sweeter for eating, this year these cherries were just for Cherry Vodka and the rest left for the wild life.

Since I first started making cherry vodka back in 2008, the recipe I use has changed a little, basically because I have less time and do it from memory.  It may be simple but it is also very tasty – safety note here, consume in moderation as alcohol is dangerous in excess!

So, all you need are the sour cherries, or griottes as they are called here, vodka, large plastic bottle, and some sugar – as I said it’s really simple but it takes a bit of time.

I use around 1 pint of cherries for a 75cl bottle of vodka.  I also take the time to stone the cherries as having soaked them in vodka for 6 months, I have no intention of just throwing them away at the end of the process and stoning them now saves having to spit out the stones at a later date when you eat the vodka soaked cherries.

The griottes are quite small and I find it better to use the individual cherry stoner otherwise a very large proportion of the cherries are left with the stone in if I use the table-top one I show back in this post.  I stone the cherries over a bowl and the cherries are then dropped into the plastic bottle. 

I generally use 2 litre diet cola bottles I collect over the year and there is a reason for this.  I’ve discovered by trial and error that if you store these bottles without rinsing them nothing grows in them during storage – makes you wonder about what is in the drink though!  I give the bottles a quick rinse just before I need them and drain well.

Once all the cherries are done I then strain the liquid that has come out of the cherries along with the stones, from the stones and add that liquid to the bottle.

Next step is to add the vodka, but save the vodka bottle so you can refill it with the cherry vodka at the end of the year.  You will need an extra bottle then as the vodka will also contain cherry juice and sugar.

Then I mark the bottle with the contents and year.

After that comes the long bit.  Each day for a couple of weeks or so I invert the bottle once or twice and the colour of the cherries begins to colour the vodka.   Then I put it aside usually until the end of October or the beginning of November.

That's when the sugar is required – I hadn’t forgotten about it!  I think the original recipe said add 300g of sugar but I found that a bit too sweet for my taste so I add around 200g of sugar.  The bottle needs to be gently shaken each day until the sugar has dissolved.  You can then taste the vodka to see if you need to add any more sugar – hic.

Normally at this point of the year I would have to wait until I was adding the sugar to get photographs of the final stages but I forgot to do last year’s batch until just before I made this batch.

Once the sugar has dissolved, separate the cherries from the vodka; pour the vodka into the saved bottles and store the cherries in an airtight container.

The vodka cherries are a wonderful, if rather potent, adult hors d'oeuvre and a few of them with a drizzle of spiced cherry sauce on vanilla ice-cream make a lovely dessert too.

Wassup!

Still here and still working. 

I seem to have had a succession of days where I feel I’ve worked all day but have nothing to show for it at the end.  It would be nice if those days were balanced out by days where I feel I’ve done nothing but loads gets done. 

I can but dream

Spinning Suri

Amongst other craft work and farm work I’ve been spinning my first Suri fleece, Mr Frizzle’s to be precise. 

Suri fleece differs from the Huacuya fleece by not having much crimp and by being silky and hanging in ringlets.  The lack of crimp means that longer fibres are required in order to get a thread that doesn’t break which is why Suri alpacas are usual shorn every other year.

I was told that it was simple to spin Suri direct from the staple, (the ringlet) but I didn’t find it worked for me.  So after a bit of experimenting I ended up with the following method.

Starting at the left of the picture above is the raw fleece.  There is no need to wash it as unlike sheep’s fleece there is no lanolin to contend with.

I separated out the locks into manageable pieces; they are shown above the hand carder.  I then drew each lock across a hand carder until I was left with a lock of straight silky fibres – the lock to the right of the hand carder. 

The soft fluffy fibres I removed, shown at the top right in the patch of sunlight will not go to waste.  They will all be drum carded, the fibres on the roll at the bottom right, and spun at a later date.  I will then compare the two types of yarn I produce.  But at present I’m concentrating on the long silky fibres and trying to produce a worsted type of yarn.

The colour changes in producing the yarn is also impressive.  Alpaca wool may not contain lanolin but anyone who has watched alpacas in the field will know they love to roll on the dirt.

So on the left are the carded locks, in the middle is the plied yarn having come off the spinning wheel and on the right is the balled yarn after it has been washed. 

It’s really hard to believe that it’s all come from the same fleece.

I’m really looking forward to spinning the combed out fibres too; they are much softer and fluffier that what I’m spinning at the moment and I want to try and spin them in a woollen style and compare the two types. 

Boys Toys

I’ve started on converting my oil storeroom into a work room.  The earth floor has been replaced with concrete and next up was replacing the Perspex sheet I’d put in a few years ago to block the hole in the wall, with a real window.  I didn’t want to go upwards as there was already a lintel there and I didn't want to go down as the hole in the wall is only a couple of feet off the ground as it is.   Eventually I found a window of the right depth that tipped inwards rather than swing open.  It was however wider than the original hole.

No problem, I thought; I’ll just get out my trusty angle grinder and cut through the concrete blocks.  After an hour I stopped and assessed how far I’d got.  The cutter disc had been glowing red and I’d donned my hard hat to protect my head from the hot pieces of disc and brick that were flying about.  I was also wearing goggles and had my arms protected too.  I had only managed to cut a groove of about a millimetre or two depth on each side!  This was going to take ages.

Enter knights in shining armour, both male and female.  Friends said, “we have a proper stone-cutting angle grinder” and what’s more, B said he would do the cutting as well.  I’m really pleased he did as I’m not convinced I would have had the strength to control the cutter safely. 

Comparison picture!!

Even with the proper cutter it took a good hour to cut through; goodness knows what had been done to these concrete blocks, I think they must have been designed to be bomb proof.

But before long the window was in place and the foam filling in the gaps was left to set.

Next day I trimmed away the excess foam and am now cementing in the gaps.  Outside there is a bit more work to do as the edges and windowsill need rebuilding.  This will take a little while as I can only do it in the morning before the sun gets there and it also needs to be built up.  I think I’m going to need to rig up some shuttering but at least I can get on with the inside here it is cool enough to work.

So next up, I will be learning how to apply doublage – plaster and polystyrene panels.

A Bit More Bees

I collected my wild colony of bees in a standard Langstroth brood box, but because of my height or rather lack of it, I don’t want to be lifting heavy supers so I’m trying out the horizontal version of a Langstroth hive.  While the hive itself is more difficult to move, the frames are always easy to reach.

So the morning after collecting the colony I put the traditional hive in place and let the bees out and gave them a couple of days to orientate while I fed them sugar syrup to help persuade them to stay put.  As they didn’t all fly away immediately I was hopeful that we had got the queen.  Even if we hadn’t  I knew we'd got eggs and uncapped larvae so they could raise a new queen.

As I still had bees after a couple of days it was time to move them to the long hive. There is a rule of thumb for moving hives, you either move them to a spot less then 3 ft away or more than 3 miles away.  So despite the two hives looking slightly different I decided to just exchange them but making sure the new entrance was in the same place as the old one and transfer over the frames.

So we went from

to

My experiences as a beekeeper are rising exponentially at the moment, every check of the hive is another learning opportunity.  I’ve fed the bees for about a month but now they have had time to mature and have a complement of flying bees along with the improvement in the weather and the return of flowering plants, I’ve stopped.

I’ve still not seen the queen though, partly due to not yet being able to make a proper inspection.  One of the reasons for this is that where we’d used rubber bands to to hold the wild comb against the frames the bees weren't keen on them and had started chewing through them before they’d built up enough new wax to hold the combs in place.  The combs were falling off the frames and into each other and in general a total mess was in process of starting.

So a carving knife joined my beekeeping kit and I bought some different stuff to tie on the combs.  The ties are lengths of thin plastic tubing that is slightly stretchy and designed to tie in plants.  The knife is to cut the comb between the frame and the scissors to trim the tied ends of the tubing.

Considering what I was doing to their home the bees were really calm.

A week later, another check showing a bit more of the kit and a couple of extra frames with foundation.

I’m gradually getting better at keeping the smoker alight.  I’ve once had it go out mid inspection but was able to continue as I had my water spray and could ‘persuade’ any bees that were taking too much interest in me to head back to the hive.  I also use the water spray to clear away any bees that may have landed on the back of my bee suit before I take the suit off.

My bees, they really are there, they just carry on working on the comb as long as I don’t keep smoking them.

The smoke agitates them so I use it by the entrance before I start the inspection so they fill up on honey, (they are less likely to sting if they are full of honey), and then try only to use it around me if I have a bee that is insistent on flying round me.  They really are very calm and as long as I don’t drop the frames or knock them they tend to leave me alone to get on with the inspection.

I’ll be inspecting them again early in the week and really hope to see the queen.  There were lots of uncapped larvae last week so something has been laying eggs but it could be laying workers so I really need to see the queen.  One positive sign though is that while I have spotted a couple of queen cups I’ve not seen any queen cells.

Bees like all insects need water but can’t take off from the surface of water and drown if they land on it so I’ve put in a bee drinker for my bees and any other insects that need it.

More Bee Stuff

Before I could get the bees, I needed to wire some frames to accept the wild comb.  After a bit of research I realised that there are almost as many ways to wire a frame as there are beekeepers!  So this is my way, based on how I was shown by Frederic a local French beekeeper, but I’m sure it will evolve every time I have to do it. 

This is my frame wiring kit: Empty frames, tacks, tack hammer, pliers, cutters, stainless steel frame wire, crimpers and a board.

First up I place the two tacks that will be used to secure the wire.  These are just off the line of the pre-drilled holes – these frames are wired side to side not up and down – in order to not weaken the structure.  The tacks are put in enough to just poke through the other side but still leave enough protruding to wrap the wire around

I then pass the wire through side to side starting by the tack nearest to the top of the frame and finishing by the tack at the bottom of the frame.

I then wind the end of the wire a few times round the bottom tack to secure it.  Working back towards the top of the frame I hand tighten each length of wire, securing it in place by folding it down the side of the frame with my thumb.  When I get to the top of the frame, I at first tried tightening the wire a bit more using the pliers but quickly decided that it didn’t make enough difference to warrant fiddling around with the pliers.  So I just pull the wire hand tight and wind it a few times round the tack to secure it before cutting the wire from the reel.

The tacks are then driven home to secure the wire and the ends of the wire trimmed so that they don’t interfere with the edges of the hive and don’t rip your gloves.  I then trim most of the excess off the end of the tacks so they don’t poke too far into where the foundation and comb will be.

While the wire is now reasonably tight, it’s not tight enough to keep the foundation rigid.  This final tightening is achieved using a crimper.

I run the crimper over each strand until each is no longer loose but not so tight that it is in danger of breaking or warping the frame.

The frame is then ready to take the wild comb or to mount a sheet of foundation. 

I did prepare quite a few frames of foundation as well but completely forgot to take any photographs so that will have to wait for another day.

Last of the Lofting!

 

Once the hay has been baled, I have to get it into the hayloft, not the easiest of tasks as it is a loft and access is by a ladder.  So I use the first few trailer loads, that’s the corner of the trailer in the bottom right corner, to build a staircase.

The tops of the bales are covered with planks as I found by experience, the bales either break up or you invariably step between the bales, very scratchy.  The lonely bale on top is the first of the ones I use along the edge of the staircase to hold the planks in place.

By alternating the direction of the bales, it makes a structure that is stable enough to get the 250 or so bales I and my wonderful friends needed to lift, into the loft.

However, there is always the problem of getting the staircase bales up there.  I will admit I try to forget about it as exhaustion usually sets in after getting the bales in but my baler, which is undergoing repairs at the moment, is likely to be returned at short notice if the weather breaks and the rain returns.  Balers, it turns out, are very susceptible to rain and have to be kept under cover.

So suddenly removing the last bales hit the top of the to-do list.  First up was to use shorter planks on top of just one half of the staircase.  As it was just me the narrower width was OK and I could take my time and didn’t need anything to secure the planks. That did mean I couldn’t use the top securing bale as another step up into the loft so after lifting 3 bales, all that there was space for above the staircase, I then had to go round and use the ladder.  Thankfully there was just enough space still in the loft to store the bales that made up half the staircase.

And that just left the last 12 bales and there was just enough space on the side out of the way for them.  So the hot weather should continue as I’m now ready for the baler