Yeast a plus or minus in compost bin?

[jasbo]

I have some old yeast packets from my beer brewing days. I was about to toss them because they were past prime. Then I thought maybe they'd liven up the ol' compost pile. Any thoughts?

Jim

[jasbo]

Jim,

"Left over from my beer brewing days"--I hope this is a hiatus and not a permanent condition!

Thanks, MG. It's more that I've shifted gears to winemaking. Of course that has taken a hit too, now that I'm focused on growing veggies. Seems like I can only be passionate about one hobby at a time.

Jim

[!potatoes!]

the answer - vegetable wines.

[toxcrusadr]

I've heard you can make wine from sweet peas or pea pods, also beets and onions. I always wanted to try some Vidalia Onion wine. And of course dandelion.

[shadowsmom]

the answer - vegetable wines.

My husband made wine from tomatoes once. Just once.

[toxcrusadr]

Someone gave me 75 lb of watermelons once. Naturally I tried making watermelon wine. It was the most cloying, sickly sweet smelling, horrendous wine I had ever concocted, with no real hint of the refreshing fruit that is watermelon. Word to the wise: just because you can find a recipe on the Interweb does not mean the product will be edible.

[shadowsmom]

Ah, yes, we all learn from experience. Shall I tell you about the wheat beer we tried to brew? We figured if Sam Adams could do it, we could do it. We couldn't.

I would have thought I could do it too! Sounds reasonable.

I would have had high hopes for the watermelon wine too! It would seem like it should work out well. We have plum trees and hubby has made wine from them. My grandmother liked it. It tasted more like Dubonnet than wine.

[thanrose]

My ex made wine from watermelon that was pale straw in color, thin in body, medium dry in taste. Not any hint of watermelon flavor, IIRC.

Any fruit or veg with enough sugars will make a wine. And if it doesn't have enough sugar, you add some. You kinda need a hygrometer and probably some acid blend to make most of them palatable though. Anything can happen if you are making it in a washtub... Serendipity, eh?

Many of the commercial fruit wines out there actually have a grape base. I'm not talking about a 4-pack at the local quickie mart, but small label orange wine or peach wine. Grapes are to wine as apples are to jelly. You just get a better product when you start with the traditional and then modify.

Beer is actually a little tougher, IMO. There must be thousands of recipes out there with copious notes on what worked and what didn't. I've never tried to make a wheat brew though. If I was going for a fruity brew, I can see how wheat would give you a better base.

[Gary350]

There is a lot of wild yeast in the air so adding yeast won't help all that does is it gives you a specific yeast. I make wine and beer and I dump all the left overs in my compost. It doesn't seem to do much it needs sugar to get the yeast working. One time for an experement I mixed the left over wine sedement which is loaded with yeast with 5 lbs of sugar and 5 lbs of water then dumped it over my compost. In 5 days it did what it normally takes a month to do. Bakers yeast will not work 5 lbs of sugar in 5 gallons of water would kill bakers yeast 1 lbs of sugar in 5 gallons of water might be ok. I notice when I put water mellon rine, fruit anything with sugar in the compost it activates wild yeast and it compost pretty fast right where the water mellon rine is put.

[thanrose]

Excellent observations, Gary!

My ex and I were (ARE) total geeks. We often experimented with wild yeasts on fruits, and also with creating our own vinegar mother. Results: wild yeast are unpredictable, but you still get something alcoholic to drink. It may smell like bacon, though.

And vinegar mother's origin seems to be unimportant. I mean really, who would go through that whole process of attracting the Drosophila and nursing the rotting fruit slurry to eventually get a mucus plug that will make vinegar from perfectly good wine, well, why would you need to do that twice! lol. Yeah, I'm a geek and I own it.

I would think any of this stuff left over from home brew or home winemaking would be good for a compost pile. Small doses some of the time, though. As with anything in a compost you don't want to throw off the balance too much.

I put the dregs from whatever in my compost bucket and if it wasn't emptied within an hour or so, I'd see bubbling and working in there. Hey, it saved me some scrubbing.

[toxcrusadr]

I have some wines that didn't age well, mostly homebrew stuff, that I'd like to make into vinegar, but don't know how. I thought raisins would have some acetobacter on them, so I threw some into a jar of wine, but nothing happened. Maybe I need to find a friend with some sourdough starter...

Speaking of geekdom, you have to be a real compost geek to buy 5 lb of sugar and dump it straight into your compost...

[thanrose]

Tox, was your wine sulfited at all? You'd probably have to aerate it a whole lot before attempting vinegar making with it.

I've made malt vinegar, sake vinegar, as well as different wine vinegars. Any home brew store will have vinegar mother, or jars of the slimy white stuff that needs to inoculate the working brew. There really is no difference in white wine mother vs red wine mother as far as I can tell. And the brew has to have ample sugars in it to keep the yeast happy so you have enough alcohol to keep the acetobacter from the mother happy.

You should be able to inoculate your own with health food store unfiltered raw vinegar. You won't see the mother floating on top, but it should be in there. If you see any thready strands in the bottle, that's it. I can't remember if we did any experiments with that.

To make our own mother, we hung a jar outside with young wine (no sulfites), some chunked up over ripe fruit and a bit of additional sugar. Then you let the fruit flies do the rest. After a couple of weeks, we had a rubbery translucent fruitfly studded disc of mother. The liquid in the jar was unmistakeably vinegar, but out of respect for the fruit flies that gave their lives for science, we tossed that and proceeded with more sanitary processes.

[toxcrusadr]

Yes, I do use sulfite, and the wine was pretty dry, ie no residual sugar, so maybe that's why it didn't seem like anything was happening. I may try your fruit fly method using some grape juice instead of trying to start with wine. I don't have much for brew stores here and mail order was very expensive for vinegar culture.

Time was, fresh local apple cider would turn to vinegar and that would make a great culture, but they insist that all cider sold be pasteurized nowadays.

[Runningtrails]

I make organic wines without sulfite from all kinds of things. I love winemaking! It's a great hobby! Currently I have making: strawberry wine, rhubarb wine, maple, apple and mint. I am drinking sugar snap pea pod, lilac and rose petal with dandelion aging in the bottles. I am collecting material for wine making in small buckets in the freezer. I have rose petals, raspberries and mint collecting in the freezer.

It is a lot of fun! I plan to make pumpkin/squash wine this fall, ground cherry wine, more apple when in season, tomato, hibiscus soon and collect bananas when I find them marked down and possibly chichiquelite wine.

I have considered making lemon balm wine but use all my lemon balm in cooking and tea. You can make wine from just about anything. I have a small chocolate mint plant this year but am rooting cuttings to extend down the row. Next year I hope to have enough to make choc mint wine!

I have a wine and pie garden. In it I have planted 1 elderberry, 2 black mulberry, 7 black currant, 1 Saskatoon berry, 1 wild cherry, 2 dozen blackberries, 4 gooseberries, 5 Haskap honeyberries - all babies right now. Plus a long row of rhubarb and a large patch of strawberries and six long rows of raspberries, now producing.

The wine garden is my special baby. It's where I putter and focus a lot of my attention - that and the ornamental gardens. Veggies and herbs are much further down the priority list!

I make all my wine organic, no sulfite or sorbate as it gives me severe migraines, however, I am fortunately enough to have a stone cold cellar under my house. Wine has to be kept cool for long storage without chemicals.

I wrote a little ebook on organic wine making. It's free. If you are interested in downloading it, you can get it on my farm site, link in signature. It really is just free for anyone's use.

[toxcrusadr]

Runningtrails, it sounds like you have an absolutely wonderful garden and a rare talent for making odd wines! I would love to try some of your flavors. I always wanted to make dandelion wine, but it seems like when it's time to harvest dandelion blossoms, there is so much else to DO at that time of year. I do love elderberries, they make a great dry red when blended with my own Concords.