How To Make Wine At Home
Comments OffMaking wine at home is not difficult, and it is a very rewarding hobby. In this article, we will go through the equipment needed and all the steps you take to make wine from fruit – grapes, apples, plums, pears, peaches, or whatever fruit you have.
You can also make wine at home from a kit, usually using grape concentrate, but the results are very variable, and it is much more satisfying to make wine from fresh fruit.
You probably thought of home wine making because you have your own fruit, or have been given some, or because fruit is in season in your area and you can get it very cheaply. Making wine is a great way of using fruit when you cannot possibly eat it all, or make all of it into jam, or freeze it all.
I have made wine successfully from many kinds of fruit, including grapes, apples, apricots, plums (many varieties), quinces, pears and peaches. Make sure you discard all rotten or suspect fruit right at the start.
Assuming you have your fruit ready, here are the equipment and supplies you need.
A large food grade plastic tub or stainless steel pot to squeeze or press juice into. Needs to have a lid. An electric juicer (not essential if you can squeeze or press the fruit by hand). A glass fermentation vessel like a jug, carboy or demijohn (also called a ‘jimmyjohn’) with an airlock. These are available at brewing shops. It is usually better to use several smaller vessels (of one gallon capacity) than one large one. A plastic tube for siphoning. Yeast (available in packets at brewing shops and some supermarkets). Sugar.Sterilizing solution or tablets. (Not essential – you can clean equipment with boiling water.)
With this all collected, follow these steps to make your wine.
Get your juice
People starting out with home fruit wine making often wonder how much fruit they actually need. Here is a tip I have found works – you need enough juice to fill the glass fermentation vessel you are using – your carboy or demijohn. Some recipes advocate watering your fruit juice to make up the quantity you need, but never do this. Use pure juice and your wine will be full-flavored and satisfying to drink.
You will either press the fruit, squeeze it by hand or use an electric juicer. If squeezing by hand (soft plums for example) you will need a large stainless steel or plastic container. If you have hard fruit like apples or hard plums, and electric juicer is a good investment if you don’t own one already. You can also cut up the fruit and boil it in a little water to extract the juice, but this degrades the flavor of the final wine. If you have grapes, you can try trampling them with your feet in the traditional manner. Some fruits can be cut up and left to soak for a few days in a little water to extract the flavor and color from the skin.
Some fruit, like apples, throw a tremendous froth after juicing and you will have to siphon the juice out after the froth has risen to the top.
Note that mixed fruit wines are very successful. If you have only a few apricots but a lot of apples, mix the juice to make up your gallon.
Add the sugar
Some fruit juice, like very sweet grape juice, will not need the addition of any sugar. Most other fruit wines will need sugar to be added. I normally add 2 pound of sugar to make up one gallon of fruit juice. If you prefer a drier wine, you can reduce this amount. This is the reason it is better to use several smaller glass vessels when starting with home fruit wine making – you can vary the amount of sugar in each (record this by writing on the carboy with a felt pen); when you eventually come to drink the wines, you will know which style between dry, medium and sweet that you prefer. More sugar also means more food for the yeast, and so more alcoholic wine at the end of the process.
Add the sugar by warming the fruit juice slightly in a stainless steel pan, and stirring in the sugar to dissolve it.
Add the yeast
Sterilize your carboy or demijohn with sterilizing solution, or boiling water. Put the sugared fruit juice into your vessel. Dissolve the powdered yeast in a little warm water and sugar in a cup, and leave it for a few minutes to activate. Then add the yeast to the fruit juice. Put your air lock on the vessel.
Fermentation of the fruit juice should begin soon, and you will see bubbles in the air lock. This means the yeast is converting the sugar to alcohol.
Watch and wait
Put your fermentation vessel in a warm place if possible. Ideally you should leave the wine fermenting for nine months to a year. If you drink it after only a month or two it will taste rough and poor; leaving it for about a year will let it mellow out – this really makes a difference. As fermentation goes on, you will notice a white layer appear at the bottom of the fermentation vessel. This is formed by dead yeast cells. You can ‘rack’, or siphon the wine into a new vessel, which stops the wine becoming tainted with a yeasty aftertaste. You should do this once a month.
Bottle your wine
If the wine has not clarified, and you want it to be fully clear before bottling, leave the vessel in a very cold place for a week or so, and the clarity should improve.
When the fermentation has stopped (no bubbles coming through the air lock) you can bottle the wine and cork the bottle. Remember to sterilize the bottles and corks before you use them. If you will be making a lot of wine, remember to label all the bottles with details of the fruit, the yeast variety used and date of bottling. If you make a superb batch, you can then try to replicate it in following years.
Drink up!
Few people can resist drinking a bottle at this stage. But most fruit wines are at their best up to two years after bottling, so you can put a few bottles aside until you have some friends round, or have something to celebrate. There’s nothing quite like drinking your own wine, made the way you like it!
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Halloween Party Foods: Five Disgusting Desserts
Comments OffHalloween is the one holiday where your imagination can run wild. In addition to making food taste good, you get to make it look gross, too. Here are five disgusting desserts for your next Halloween party or get-together.
1. Slasher Cake
The idea behind this is a violent killer with a knife. Use any kind of cake you like, in any flavor. You’ll need to frost the top with a light colored frosting. Using a tube of red gel icing, or some royal icing colored red, create lines and pools of “blood.”
If you have a severed body part prop, this gets even more gross. Put the hand, foot, finger, or eyeball on top the cake, with a pool of blood icing around the cut area.
For a final sickly touch, have a large knife nearby. Put red icing along the blade and in several spots on the handle, to look like bloody fingerprints.
2. Graveyard Cake
This is fun for kids to help you with. You can be as careful and painstaking as you like, or keep it simple.
Use a cake in a large baking pan, or a sheet type cake. Frost it, preferably with a dark colored frosting for nighttime, or green for daytime. You can sprinkle shredded coconut for grass.
Add tombstones using flat cookies or brownies. Use piping gel to add small crosses, RIP, or other words as inscriptions. Stand them up in the frosting. You might need to use toothpicks if they won’t stay upright.
Make it elaborate by adding a fence from short pieces of licorice sticks or other firm stick-like candies around the edge. You can sprinkle gummy worms or fake bugs on top.
3. Black Cat Poop
These look disgusting, but they are one of the easiest treats to make. Simply use rice cereal treats made with a chocolate cereal. Or dip regular cereal treats into melted chocolate, then place on a cookie sheet to harden. Be sure to shape the treats into logs, while they are still warm, instead of letting them cool in a pan.
4. Zombie’s Alive Cupcakes
Use any type of cupcake with any color frosting. Get plastic novelty tiny hands, or make some from marzipan or modeling chocolate. Stick them on the top of the cupcake, with the fingers pointing up, to look like zombie hands coming out of the ground. You can put a puddle of red icing at the bottom, to look like the wrist is bleeding.
5. Severed Head
You’ll need a face mold for this. Place a layer of plastic wrap in the mold, then pour in a no-bake dessert. Use something like a gelatin dessert or no-bake cheesecake. After it has set, spread a puddle of strawberry or raspberry jam or sauce on a serving plate. Unmold the face on top of that.
There you have five easy, fun, and disgusting desserts for your next Halloween party. Even though these look gross, they taste terrific. Try them for yourself and see. Bone Appetit!
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Motorcycle Intercoms – How to Choose the Best Motorcycle Intercom For You
Comments OffWithout a motorcycle intercom, motorcycle riding is a solitary experience. When you’re riding alone it’s a good way to clear your head or get your thoughts together. But if you’ve got a passenger, or you’re riding with another biker, inevitably you’ll want to talk to them. Motorcycle intercom systems that mount in your helmet let you do that.
The problem is that there are so many to choose from in such a wide price range. It’s hard to decide which one to choose. And given that motorcycle intercoms have to work in an extremely difficult environment, choosing the right one can make the difference between enjoying your new purchase or hating it. This motorcycle intercom review will hopefully make your decision easier.
Let’s start with a broad overview of the types of motorcycle intercoms available.
Acoustic Motorcycle Intercom
The most basic form of motorcycle intercom is the acoustic intercom. By acoustic I mean that it doesn’t use electronics at all. It just uses hollow tubes that your voice travels through. They’re like the old ships where the captain yells down a tube to the engine room to tell them to “give it more steam.”
These systems have rubber-tipped tubes that insert in your ear the same way an earplug would. There is also a mouthpiece tube for you to talk into and all the tubes connect into a junction box.
One of the positives is that there are no batteries or electronics to mess with. That makes them very dependable. However, there is no amplification which means there is no way to adjust the volume or filter out wind noise. So at higher speeds, it will be more difficult to hear. Another problem is that some people find the “earplugs” uncomfortable in their ears for long periods.
Obviously these acoustic intercoms only work for rider-to-passenger and not bike-to-bike.
Wired Motorcycle Intercom
The next step up is wired intercoms. These systems have wires that run from the rider and passenger into a central control box that houses the electronics and battery.
Just like the acoustic intercom, with a wired system you don’t have to worry about any external interference like you do with wireless technologies, unless you add a radio handheld communicator for bike-to-bike talking to your system. Some wired units let you plug in an FRS/GMRS radio, which is described in the wireless technology section below. The radio requires voice activation for it to work.
One of the issues some people have is that the wiring can be a little bit of a pain. Every time you and a passenger get on and off the bike you have to remember to unplug the units. Depending on how you have it set up, this could be two or three plugs.
Wireless Intercom Technology
There are four types of radio technologies used in the U.S. for motorcycle intercoms. They are GMRS, FRS, FM, and Bluetooth. There are also wired intercoms that enable you to plug into a handheld Citizens Band (CB) radio that has voice activation.
Frequency Modulation (FM) radio is similar to the FM radio you listen to, but for motorcycle intercoms a narrower frequency is used. Like FM radio, these systems can produce clear sound, as long as the distance between them isn’t too great. FM radio works best when there are no obstructions such as hills between the transmitter and receiver. If long range is the most important feature, then GMRS intercoms will provide better performance.
The Family Radio Service (FRS) and the General Mobile Radio Service (GMRS) are the modern equivalents to the old walkie talkies you may have had when you were a kid. FRS radios typically have a maximum range of two miles with few obstructions in between, while GRMS radios communicate up to several miles. Like FM, these are public frequencies so other people can hear your conversations and vice versa. In some heavily populated areas these FRS/GRMS radios are heavily used, while out on the open road you should have fairly private conversations.
One nice thing with the FRS and GMRS radios is that you can go to your local discount store and purchase a cheap handheld radio that will communicate with these units. If someone were following you in a car, or they had a wired motorcycle intercom system that lets them plug in an FRS/GMRS handheld radio, they can communicate with you. The downside of this was just mentioned in that there are millions of these radios out there so in heavily populated areas you’ll pick up lots of other transmissions. Also GMRS radios require an FCC license for legal use.
Bluetooth is the latest technology to hit motorcycle intercoms. Not only can these systems communicate totally wirelessly from rider to passenger, they can be used to communicate from bike to bike. Although with these systems the range is not in miles, it is in hundreds of feet. Since you are likely riding close to your buddies, this is not usually a problem. Although, range can be as much as 800 to 1600 feet.
The Bluetooth range limitation actually works as an advantage since it limits the amount of outside interference you’ll get. Also, since you must program two units to work together, you won’t pick up conversations from other people with Bluetooth devices…and they won’t be able to hear you. You won’t have to worry about your conversations listened to by anyone else.
If you want Bluetooth wireless communication there is one thing to watch for. Some units that say they are Bluetooth use FRS or GMRS to communicate bike-to-bike and the Bluetooth is just used to communicate with a Bluetooth enabled cell phone or other device.
Bluetooth intercoms also usually have some other features you won’t find on other types of intercoms such as:
Integrate with Bluetooth enabled cell phones and automatically answer calls totally hands free.
Enjoy your favorite stereo music from your A2DP enabled cell phone or MP3 player
Listen to the audio navigation message from your Bluetooth enabled GPS.
Some Bluetooth intercoms only have one ear speaker while others have two.
Motorcycle Helmet Intercom Features
Here are features to look for as you are shopping for an intercom to use with your motorcycle helmet:
If you may be riding in the rain, get a system that says it’s waterproof and not just water resistant. Some riders will put a water resistant system in a plastic baggie and that works for them.
You can get systems that have a headset speaker for one ear or both ears. Installation and moving the intercom to another helmet is easier for systems with only one ear, but some people want to hear sound in both ears.
Most systems have voice activation of some kind to keep the headset quiet when no talking is occurring. This voice activation often has the ability to be disabled and a push-to-talk switch used instead.
Many intercoms have noise reduction capabilities with digital signal processing to help reduce the noise they pick up from the microphone. The faster you drive, or the windier it is, the more important this feature is.
If you want music, look for a system that has a built-in FM stereo radio tuner or an auxiliary stereo input for a Walkman, MP3, iPod, or satellite radio unit. You can also use this input to receive driving directions from a voice prompted GPS unit.
Some systems mount on your helmet, while others have capability to mount on your belt clip or bike. If the system is big and bulky, you may want the ability to mount it on your bike.
You can integrate some intercoms with cell phones so you can talk while you ride. They require special cables or you can get motorcycle intercoms that have Bluetooth capability so they connect to your Bluetooth-enabled phone wirelessly.
Once you find the right motorcycle intercom for you, it will really make your ride with other people much more enjoyable. You’ll wonder how you got along without it. You typically get what you pay for when you buy motorcycle intercoms, but even a bad motorcycle intercom is better than none at all.
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Bubble Lights – A True Retro Christmas Classic
Comments OffNo type of vintage Christmas decoration is more of a retro classic than bubble lights, the fascinating heat-activated ornaments that brought a unique sparkle to the holiday decor of the post-war period.
Bubble lights for use in eye-catching display signs were invented in the 1930s and variations were actually patented by several people as early as 1936. But the man whose design became the basis for the popular holiday ornaments was Carl Otis, a hobbyist inventor who worked as an accountant for retailer Montgomery Ward. His firm declined to support or purchase rights to his invention, however, and he eventually sold it to a Christmas lights manufacturer called NOMA.
As early as mid-1940s the lights were being sold in both the US and Europe, and by the 1950s they had become wildly popular. Though the original light sets were expensive, heavy, breakable, and temperamental, they were a holiday must-have and just about everyone who can recall the fifties and sixties will remember a string or two of bubble lights in a place of honor on the Christmas tree.
There was always a period of anticipation – often accompanied by some judicious tapping and repositioning – between plugging them in and seeing the first bubbles, but once they were going the effect was outstanding. Fortunately, modern reproductions are lighter, more durable, and more reliable, but they still work on the same principle.
The Science Behind The Bubbles
Bubble light ornaments are actually a surprisingly complex and scientific creation, consisting of two parts: an electrified base unit, which holds a small incandescent light bulb, over which a slender, pointed fluid-filled vial or tube is affixed.
In the classic fifties lights the base was generally made of two-tone ribbed plastic, with the bowl that held the bulb in one color and the lid or cap in a different color. The vial was usually heavy glass, most commonly clear or amber colored, but also manufactured in shades of blue, red, or violet. In modern sets the vial is often made of durable acrylic, which makes them lighter and more break-resistant.
The vial is filled with a fluid that has a low boiling point. The earliest lights used lightweight oil, which was later replaced by the organic solvent methylene chloride. When the lights are plugged in, the heat of the small incandescent bulb brings the fluid a boil and the bubbles rise and float up the vial, creating a fascinating movement and sparkle.
New Variations On An Old Favorite
Though the basic premise behind bubble lights remains unchanged, modern innovations have introduced changes that only increase their appeal. New versions of the popular lights are made of rugged, lightweight materials like acrylics that resist breaking and cracking, and the light-holding bases are often shaped like characters.
The lights have also been successfully miniaturized; the originals were generally four or more inches long from the tip of the vial to the bottom of the base, but “mini bubblers” as small as two inches in length are now available.
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Clear Tygon B-44-3 Beverage Tubing, 1/2″ ID, 3/4″ OD, 1/8″ Wall, 50′ Length
Comments OffClear Tygon B-44-3 Beverage Tubing, 1/2″ ID, 3/4″ OD, 1/8″ Wall, 50′ Length
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Clear Tygon B-44-3 Beverage Tubing, 1/2″ ID, 3/4″ OD, 1/8″ Wall, 50′ Length Overview
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