Oh yeah, the cherry/raspberry cider is POW! BAM! YOWZA! About 12% baby, using White Labs Sweet Mead Yeast after just a week in primary, a hint of fruity flavor, not sweet at all, and the alcohol skips past your stomach to go right for your head. A week maybe TOPS in the secondary and then priming sugar (4 ounces for a fizzy 3.5 liters of CO2) and bottling. Oh yeah. Fizzy fruity doom. Yum.
I _was_ hoping for a sweeter version, though. I was shocked, SHOCKED I say, when I saw the hydrometer sink well past the scale, sitting at maybe 0.980 by estimate. My starting gravity was 1.072 about (both measurements at 70ºF). Ninety points down!
This White Labs sweet mead yeast (WLP720) is good to 15% alcohol or so, but I expected it to stay sweeter. Ah well.
The ginger ciders are both ticking along at a much slower rate (the fruity cider ZOOMED through its sugars), and will be awesome, I'm sure, once they pass on to the next stages. I'll put the last one into secondary in a few days probably; it's slowing down.
On the work front, I started putting together a new computer (2.whatever GHz quadcore Intel, dual 300GB HD for RAID-1, new monitor, shiny this, fast that) to replace the marginal one I have now... which become my new test machine replacing the POS I have now. Just in time, because the Ethernet capture program, Wireshark, TOTALLY refuses to capture jack over shit on my EtherCAT project and I have a powerful need to see these packets right about now.
Next up: Putting together a toolbox for welding class tomorrow. Yay!