It Took Three Years To Get To Today's Harvest!

Today I went out and harvested the grapes and pulled off 17 pounds 1 1/2 ounces worth of fruit.  All the while, birds were yelling at me "Hey! Where are you going with those!". 

So here they are.  There are lots of purple, red-purple, and yes, green grapes, but today had to be the day to get them off of the vines or else the birds would have taken them all.

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Whisky helped me bring the grapes inside.

So after picking all of those grapes I called my canning resource, my mom.  She said I could juice them today and freeze the juice until I was ready to can.  So that's what I did.  I juiced those puppies.

I took this:

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And reduced it to this:

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Step 1:  Weigh grapes in batches.  I was able to get two batches at 7 pounds even and the third and final batch was 3 pounds 1 1/2 ounces.

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Step 2:  Remove stems, stems, and more stems.

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Step 3:  Reweigh grapes just to see what the stem loss per batch was.  Five 1/2 ounces. 

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Step 4:  Mush grapes (I used the food processor) and put all of the grape mash into a pot, adding 3 cups of water to every 7 pounds of grapes per the Sure Jell (aka Certo) website.

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It looks kind of gross.

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Step 5:  Bring this mushed up mess to a boil, cover and simmer for 10 minutes.

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Step 6:  Line a strainer with cheese cloth and let this goop strain for a long while.  I kept stirring it around because the cheese cloth was clogged with grape debris.  Note:  At this point the grapes are very, very hot.  I managed to splash burn myself a couple of times.

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Step 7:  Switch to bigger strainer.

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Step 8:  Become impatient and weigh down the cheese cloth mass to squeeze out the remaining juice.

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Step 9:  Wait for the juice to cool down.

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Step 10:  Will be to transfer the grape juice to 1 gallon Ziploc bags and then freeze it until I need it.

Ta-Daaa!

Here is 1 2/3 gallons of juice.  We got three bags of juice with 8 cups and one bag with 2 3/4 cups, so 8+8+8+2 3/4 = 26 3/4 divided by 16 = 1.67 = 1 2/3 gallons. 

It comes out to be about a gallon per ten pounds of grapes.  Wow.

It would have been less work to just go buy the prepared juice, but where is the fun in that? 

Comments

[Christi]

I like the Beta memo pad that showed up in some of the pics. You should have thrown that into the pot and cooked it! HA!

[Christine]

I'm too lazy to go back and crop it out. :)

[Leigh]

Great post. I used to do this with wild muscadine grapes and then make grape jelly. Yum! You will enjoy that juice!

[jackie]

Looks good! I find my self wishing that I had access to a grape vine this year.