Brentwood Centre Food & Craft Show

It is nippy outside today, but we'll worth a visit as we are tasting our English Grappa: crammed full of flavour!

New molasses pump bit arrives

I know it is rather mundane, but how can you not feel impressed by this bit of kit? May have to start taking down old Tonker toys on eBay!

Minus three is back!

Just when we thought it was over. Oh well best keep warm making grappa, carrot eau de vie and vodka today

Grappa a success

Distilling the Wine Lees was not straight forward. Two goes needed. Stacked full of long penetrating heads and tails, but the good news was - like a tardis - absolutely rammed with flavour! Really looking forward to showing this at our tastings! Will be in our web shop from Monday. morn.

Wine Lees

Unusual for us to have a go at something different. Wine lees it is then! The bit left over at the bottom of the tank after wine fermentation. Stacked full of goodies and also not so goodies. First off, it was a nightmare to move off the van as it was knackered forklift day - hand-balling 1000L plus is a .... painstaking task. Next up filtering was glacial. Then an epiphany that we'll have to keep to ourselves!

The product flew of the still at 60%+ packed full of super grapey notes, honey, fennel and more. Something we'll certainly being doing more of! Should be in our shop from Monday morn!

At the same time we were running carrot ead de vie. May sound a little wacky, but delish! Fresh sweet carrot on the nose, creamy sweetness with more unravelled layers on the palate and a light sweet rounded brandy finish. Yum!

New challenge wine lees

A new challenge for us at the start of this coming week - the distillation of wine lees. These are the waste product of the fermentation of wine. The bit at the bottom of the vat that contains a lot of wine but also a lot of yeast debris.

The challenge actually began as soon as the lees arrived: our forklift immobiliser broke so we had to find a way of removing over a tonne of product without it. The ramp idea failed after several goes and eventually a drain pipe and hand-balling proved the solution!

Live and learn!