Home Made Sherry from an Aquarium CO2 system
As you know from my recent post about resurrecting the fish tank, I like to do things a little differently. Rather than bubble air through the tank to aerate the water for the fish, I bubble carbon dioxide through the tank which promotes really lush plant growth and the plants in turn filter and aerate the water for me.
In order to do this I need a source of carbon dioxide. You can of course buy it in cylinders, but that is quite expensive. The regulators and such like that you need for such a system were only just being developed when I first started doing it so were way out of my price range. They have come down in price now that they are more commonplace but as we were resurrecting the fish tank on a tight budget we are going to stick with my home made method.
In order to make CO2, I mix up a batch of sugary water with some gelatine to form a sweet, sugary jelly that I allow to set at the bottom of some bottles. These can then sit there for a while primed and ready to go. Sometimes there may be a bit of fungal growth on the jelly if left for several months but that never seems to do any harm. When I’m ready to use it I then add a teaspoon of yeast and top the bottle up with water. The yeast then springs into life, starts growing and reproducing using the sugar as an energy source and in turn gives off CO2.
CO2 Production Plant
The CO2 is then piped into my tank and dissolves in the water where the plants can use it during photosynthesis. It always seems to work well and is a cheap and efficient source of CO2.
However, as I mentioned in my earlier blog post about the fish tank, it had been left in a state of dereliction for about 5-6 years and the bottles of fermenting yeast and sugar solution had been left along with it. As part of the tank resurrection and clean out I had to empty out the bottles. I opened the first and tentatively sniffed it – I’m not sure why really, but when opening such things it just seems natural to sniff it, I’m not sure if that is just me and my inquisitive mind at work or if everyone does it but that’s what I did.
I was expecting a horrible, putrid, rotten smell from a bottle that had been sat there for 5-6 years hence the tentative nature of the sniff, but I was taken aback by a lovely sweet smell – in fact, the next sniff confirmed it, it smelt just like a lovely sweet sherry. I couldn’t believe it! Anna had a sniff and agreed it was definitely sherry. We tried the same with the other two bottles and they seemed to contain sherry as well. Either this was Anna’s secret stash or we had brewed a top notch sherry from next to nothing!
It smelt so much like sherry in fact that we had to have a little taste. This was done with some trepidation as we really had no idea what we had concocted, but it tasted like sherry too. We couldn’t quite bring ourselves to drink it properly though so it was only a little taste, but as we poured the rest of it down the sink it looked and smelled like a good quality sherry and it seemed wrong just pouring it away. I still feel bad about wasting it now, but drinking it wouldn’t have been right either!
