Another 15 gallons...

Yesterday I started a 6 gallon batch of dandelion mead and about 9 gallons of banana wine. Yum!
Crackberry... The only way to fly.

good stuff

Yesterday we bottled a bunch of my wines and meads and I have to say
that I impressed myself. I do some pretty good work. Now the real test
will be to see if I can duplicate my efforts. Here's what we bottled:

Strawberry wine (6 gallons) - still needs a few months but tastes and
smells good.
Apple wine (6 gallons)- it's a subtle flavor but quite tasty.
Apple with brown sugar - Much more aroma and flavor thean the batch made
with white sugar. I will be making a bigger batch sometime for sure.
Banana - Oh heck yeah! I'm planning to start a 7-8 gallon batch within
the next week (this was only 1 gallon). This stuff is killer, lots of
aroma and tastes like bananas. :)
Clover sack mead - I definitely need to try and duplicate this. It's
only 6 months old and already is incredible. I don't know if it's the
recipe or the 5+ year old honey that did it, but I plan to try and
replicate this one real soon too.

Bananas with cocoa - its real dry and needs some more flavor, so I added
sugar and airlocked it again. I'll try again in a few months to see how
it's doing.
Sweet mead - it tastes quite good. Racked it and it needs more time
before bottling.

we had a good vacation

Overall our vacation was pretty good. Thursday afternoon I loaded the
blue jeep and had it all hooked up and ready to go. When I was doing my
last minute check, I noticed it had a cracked rim, so we did a Jeep
change real quick and took the black one instead. We headed for Pennsic
around 5am and made decent time to the site. We arrived at around noon.

We had a pretty uneventful time there. It averaged in the low 80's every
day and was pretty warm at night too. We got some rain, and about 1 1/2
hours into a serious downpour we started leaking through the roof.
Luckily we were able to borrow some tarps to keep dry. I re-coated the
roof when we got home to make sure that doesn't happen again.

finally loaded...

Well, only a few hours behind schedule we are finally loaded and ready
to roll in the morning. I had the coolers iced down and loaded in the
blue jeep around 4:00 and the rest by 5:00. When I was doing my last
inspection, I spotted a cracked rim on the front of the Jeep. Since I
did not want to do a 400 mile run on a cracked rim, we unloaded the blue
jeep and loaded it all into the black one. I am so glad we have 2
vehicles capable of towing a trailer. When I was doing my light check, I
noticed I had no running lights, so I had to do a quick bypass of the
light controller for the trailer and tapped it into the vehicle
directly. Since we plan to leave before dawn, having runnign lights is
important. If we were going to leave during the day I would have left it
alone since I would not have needed them for the trip. The important
thing is we are loaded up and almost ready to leave now. Only about 8
hours until departure. :)

26 hours and counting till vacation

26 hours until I am officially on vacation.. woohoo!

The trailer is packed

Sunday I got the trailer all packed for Pennsic. All that is left is to
pack the coolers, perishables and stuff that I can't pack till the night
before and we're ready for war. :) It's good to be going home again.