Drip, drip

From the several kilos of black grapes we collected at the weekend, I've crushed them up and turned them into mush. I then put that into a colander to get the easiest juice out, which flows through the jelly bag quite easily, and then everything goes into the jelly bag overnight in the fridge to drip through.

The basic idea is juice + sugar + pectin + heat => jam/jelly. In this case grapes don't have much natural pectin in them, so I add lemon juice or pectin enhanced jamming sugar that's widely available.

The black grapes produce a wonderfully intense dark jelly which is great - we made some last year and we've almost finished it over the year, so I'm hoping for good things from this batch.

Back blip.

I did make two batches of black grape jelly, and they were pretty good when tested. The pectin enriched sugar also made for a thicker set than last year. This year we didn't have any elderberries in the mix - which is also very nice. To be honest I was so busy when we had the grapes I'm amazed I managed to get anything done - in fact this picture was taken at 23:20 when I had put the batch to bed to drip overnight!

As I blip this after the event, I can confirm that the first phase of the go-live went okay, and so did the second - though the business made a mistake so we had to back things out and try again. But we have a full audit trail of our actions so all is good. We naturally came across some bugs in the code - one made by a colleague turns out to be a good bug as if it had worked as intended chaos would have befallen us. I've had to redesign the code to make it work and make it more robust. We also discovered that the source data in production isn't perfect or as we expected....! All good fun, and we (I) will fix it, and the client will continue to like us and their customers will also be happy that everything balances down to the penny!