LeadDog

The next question for Steve is why wasn't it turned on from the start?

Re: Huge gusher of hot gas and mud

Spelling.. it's that damn spell checker DJ installed.. gotta click submit!

You know that the Mac's Safari has a interative spell checker built in, you just have to turn it on.

Here this page has bladder presses and explains how they work. http://www.stpats.com/Presses.htm Just think how much better a KK cooker is and that is the way I feel the basket bladder press is over a regular basket press.

Ok back to what is going on with the wine. I put fermentation bungs into the barrels to let the wine finish fermenting. The wine is still giving off CO2 and these special bungs let the CO2 out and doesn't let the air back in. The wine/grapes have malic acid and I'm going to let the natural bacteria convert that acid into lactic acid. I do this because malic acid isn't stable and I could end up with a wine that has problems if I don't do malolactic fermentation.

Up until this point you will notice that making wine has been really easy. I will use a lab test to see when the wine has converted all of the malic acid to lactic acid. There are easy tests that you can get as home winemakers that will let you know this information also.

The other thing I wanted to point out is I made about enough wine for 800 bottles. You just need to take your favorite bottle of wine and multiply it's price by 800 to see how much my wine could be worth.

I said I'd say a few things about presses so this is as good of time as any to cover them. A press really only seperates the skins from the juice. The press is also a good place for nasty organisims to get into the wine. This is a time when the wine is really vulnerable to going bad so a clean press is really important. All the presses I have every worked on we cleaned them all the time very carefully. Jasen's press is made of wood but it is sealed. I have seen it said that wooden presses are a good place for nasty organisms to hang out since they are hard to clean. Jasen's press is different than the normal wooden basket press. Jasen can fill his press full of what ever he wants to use to clean his press. This will made sure that the cleaner gets into every nook and cranny. There is another nice feature about his press. It is inside a keg so if the wine squirts out between the wooden slats it hits a wall and doesn't go on the ground. Jasen have you ever thought about putting a bladder in the press? Then it would be really great.

So, you gonna invite us all over for a wine tasting soon?? hehe

-=Jasen=-

Sure there are over a hundred wineries in the area and if you are with me you get an industry discount.

Ok I moved the wine from the fermenters into some barrels and kegs last night. First thing I did was get rid of of the skins that were in the wine and dump them into a bin.

That left me with some really easy to bucket wine in the fermenter.

Then I just put a funnel into the barrel with a screen on top to catch any more skins and poured the wine into the barrels. Easy as pie. Next year I'm getting a pump and a press.

Now there must be someone out there wondering why I didn't press the skins. I like free run wine. Free run has less tannins in it. I dumped about a gallon of wine away because I didn't have any more containers in which to put the wine. What would I have done with all of the wine if I had pressed it?

Oh I think we might have a common bound here among some of us. My first computer was an Apple IIe. They make me use PCs at work and I still hate them. I swear with last one they set me up with MS made changes to windows that even made it worse.

Seems equally configured Dells cost more these days than Mac.

http://www.systemshootouts.org/shootout ... t3200.html

http://www.internet-nexus.com/2006/08/m ... -price.htm

I know there is some debate about the Mac Pro being cheaper than the equally configured Dell but it is a interesting comparison.

Now back to the Web Site makeover. I found a recipe component/modual for Joomla. I'll be testing it soon.

I tasted the fermenting grape juice tonight and it is no longer sweet. This means the fermentation is done or real close to being done. I'll put the "wine" into barrels and kegs tomorrow night. Maybe I'll get some pictures posted then too.

Names for my new cooker. When I first saw the color tile I was thinking "Sunshine" but when I saw the pictures then I thought maybe "Colonel Mustard" from the game of "Clue". I need to see it in person before I name it.

Firemonkey I have some black powder.

Re: KK site suggestion

As far as I know you also use a Mac, don't you? There is a great webdesign-app for the Mac called RapidWeaver that I use for my site:

I'm a Mac user also. The little mock up I did was all Mac based and free. It is one of the thing I like about the Mac being UNIX based. I can use lots of cool things for free.

Curly isn't that funny that you are liking that color now? One of the names I thought of for my cooker has mustard as part of the name. I'll have to wait to see it in person before I name it.

Come on get the topic back to website design the rest of you.

Re: KK site suggestion

I think Dennis could do better with the pictures on the front page of the KK website. Most all of the other pictures, including those he posts here are exceptional.

The 2 cookers pictured on the front page of the site do not jump off the page like they should. Frankly, the dark side has a better picture on their front page. (perhaps the only good photo over there)

I figured I would look into what is possible with a website makeover. I'm new around here too so I'm not trying to upset any one. Here is a picture of a quick mockup of a KK website.

Large Image Here

Dennis of course would have to like it and that is totally up to him.

The quick mockup was done with Joomla http://www.joomla.org/ Joomla uses PHP and MySQL to make dynamic websites. The many different uses for it can be read about at it's website. There are other Content Management Systems that people may be familiar with but I picked this one because it had a theme/skin that I thought worked good for the KK site.

Oh I was looking for this one the other day

I'm also wondering how Dennis is getting any orders since the email address for the contact on that webpage bounces back to me.

You don't have spell check built into your brower?

I guess I shoudn't post from work since the browser here doesn't have a spell check and my spelling brain cells are dead.

Curly they look like they are the same color as my new cooker.

And the Chinese said a picture is worth a thousands words? I had no idea a picture of a KK would start a thread like this.

Curly I'm just so glad I didn't go with a "brown" color.

To the rest of you don't you see Curly was trying to keep me from making a big mistake by getting this KK so he could get for himself. I think he really is secretly jealous of my future cooker.

Curly how about the color Green in either texture or tile.

Ok enough joking around. To me the blue tiled cooker is the most beautiful cooker I have ever seen. The problem is I'm not a "Copy Cat" I'm a "LeadDog" by nature so I picked something different. I figured if it was yellow I would be happy with the color. It is also hard to pick colors on a computer screen and expect that is what you will get in real life. There is this "Mission Style" texturing here in California done to houses that I thought about seeing if Dennis could do but I figured that would be to hard to even come close to what I was think about over the internet. Then Dennis does this antiquing job on it and he has come real close to what I was thinking about. I'm not even going to be surprised when I get that it is even better than the pictures.

Hey Curly take a walk on the wild side go for some weird color.

Colors are here. http://homepage.mac.com/komodokamado/PhotoAlbum5.html

Color of vomit is here. http://www.soimmature.com/sub_pages/all ... vomit.html

Find a match and you have a winner.

Dennis sent this picture of my future textured OTB KK. I have a name picked out for it but I'm open to suggestions.

I photoshopped the image that Dennis sent me a little bit because he said the white balance might be off just a bit. I used this picture of the texture color that I ordered to adjust the image.

What do you think?

We make charcoal from stumps. The charcoal pit has a wall that needs to be repaired before we make our next load and I think that is a cause of this stump not breaking up. I had never seen a stump come back out of the pit looking like this. The rest of the stumps cooked into nice size lumps like what you normally see. I would bet if I busted the stump up it wouldn't be charcoal in the middle.

It came out of our charcoal pit.

This one is just hilariously huge.

I wonder if it will fit in a KK? And how long would it burn?

Time for a picture update. The yeast is now converting the sugars in the gapes into alcohol, CO2, and heat.

I just stuck my punch down tool through the cap and you can see the wine bubbling below. The CO2 given off by the fermentation carries all of the skins to the top of the vat and makes a cap. The cap is punch down three time a day so it doesn't dry out. There are some nasty organisms that can grow in the cap if you let it dry out and make your wine taste bad.

Seems that I'll be getting ready to press the grapes in a couple more days then I can tell one of the good things that I noticed about Jasen's press and design.

Oh now we have a different point of view about yeast. The adding of yeast to crushed grapes is done by many wineries all over the world but not by all of them. This is a choice that is made for different reasons just like many of us will cook our meat a different way. I wanted the wine to express the vineyard and all that it has to make the wine taste a certain way. The French have a word for this called "terroir ". We don't have a word for it in English so you just have to Google it and read about it.

I'll talk about presses when I go to press my wine off. One of my first wineries had serval huge wooden presses that they used to press wine with when they first started making wine. They did very well using them so using wood isn't the end of the world. This is just a leason in how easy wine can be made but there are choices along the way that can add to the work load of making wine. I like the easy way it is less work.

You know, we could probably accept the grape crushing photo a whole lot more if it were a nice feminine leg verses a hairy dudes leg!

That leg is for the women to enjoy looking at. The men can't have it their way all the time.

Nice looking press. The only bad thing I can say about it that the wood make for a nice home for some nasty organisms to hang out.

I was surprised no one asked why I didn't add anything to the grapes to make wine. That is because the grapes have everything that is needed to ferment them in and on them right from the vine. The whitish powder on the grapes is yeast so you don't even need to add that.

The grapes where crushed Saturday afternoon and this morning they had started fermenting really well. Everything is looking fine so far. I should end up with plenty of wine to have with the food that is cooked in the KK.

Grapes

You make wine.

That really is about a ton of grapes in the two bins. I thought some people here would be interested to see how easy it is to make wine.

The grapes needed to be crushed so they will ferment.

That is my high tech crusher smashing the grapes.

The crushing activity draws a crowd.

After the grapes are crushed I dumped them into my fermentors.

Currently the only thing that need to be done is to "punch down" the cap 3 times a day. Some wineries only do punch downs twice a day. I think I'll update the photos when it gets to fermenting really good.