Making Blackberry, Drinking Parsnip

I have been remiss. Almost two months since I updated this blog. This is some of what I've been up to.

Making a vegetable garden.
Learning to make curry.
Saying goodbye to my darling Bonnie dog.
Watching Game of Thrones.
Reading.

And a little bit of wine making.

Since last updating I started Peach & Banana, Carrot & Orange, a Dandelion and a Rhubarb. The Peach & Banana was made from some frozen fruit languishing in the freezer. The fruit for wine I'm starting tonight also comes from the freezer. There were 4 pounds of blackberries taking up room and a little peck of raspberries. I'm aiming to get a dozen bottles out of it.

The method I'm going to use is roughly based on a Beech & Pollard recipe. It is supposed to be a dry rose.

4 lbs (1800g)blackberries + handful of raspberries, completely optional
Tsp nutrients
Tsp enzyme
2 Campden tablets
4 and half lbs (2 k) white sugar
Yeast
Water

The fruit is frozen so I have started by adding 4 pints of very hot water. When that cools I shall squish the berries with my very well-scrubbed hands. Then I shall add 6 more pints of water, nutrients, enzyme Campden tablets and sugar.

Tomorrow I shall yeast.

On the fifth day I'll strain it and make the volume up to 2 gallons (8.5 L) then I'll decant it into two flagons. After that I shall see how it goes. This is a rough guide after all.

And in other news, wine making means wine drinking. We finished the very first parsnip I made last night. It was yummy. I need a field of parsnips. What I don't use for wine, I'll roast and what isn't roasted will be given to the pigs. What a marvellous vegetable the parsnip is.

Another Book

A friend loaned me Booze for Free by Andy Hamilton. I'm very impressed with it. So much that I think I'll be buying my own copy soon. I haven't read all of it yet, just the section entitled The Basics and I've  already garnered a few new ideas from it. I like Hamilton's style. He is easy to follow and slightly irreverent, reminding us that making booze can't be that hard when prisoners have been known to make it in jail with hardly any equipment at all.

I used one of Andy's ideas when I was straining the apple wine I started last week. It's very simple and if I had an ounce of common sense I would have thought of it myself. I used plastic clothes pegs to pin the muslin straining bag to the edge of the bucket. Previously I put the muslin inside a funnel but it really slowed the process up. I added the sugar, gave it a good stir and decanted it into a sterilised demijohn. No sign of any mad fermentation yet.

Then I saw the fly. At least it looked like a fly. It had wings. I panicked and got Bert's binoculars out. You might wonder what use binoculars would be. But if you reverse the way you look through them and hold them close to the object of interest they make a rudimentary magnifying aid. The fly started to look like a broken apple seed. I do hope so. If the fermentation stops I'll know something is wrong. I have seventeen gallons of wine in jars now. They'll not all be marvellous but I hope they will be drinkable. There is still a lot to learn.

The apple wine recipe is from Pollard and Beech. It's supposed to be a dry one. Unless you're a fly.

Making A Start

I've been blogging at Nelly's Garden since 27^th August 2004 and in the past year I've often written about my adventures in wine making. It's something I used to do years ago, maybe more than twenty years ago! Unfortunately I'd given away most of my wine making equipment so I had to start again from scratch. There were a few glass demijohns stored in the shed and a couple of tattered paperbacks and that was all I had.

I started my first two batches back in August 2011. Blackcurrant and rhubarb, both from the garden. Since then I have made a further 32 batches of wine of which half has already been bottled. That is 96 bottles of wine! At this moment I have a batch of beetroot in the primary vessel waiting yeast and 6 pounds of apples on the kitchen table to be chopped and got ready. I have a lot of frozen fruit in my freezer and a cupboard full of sugar. 

Judith Irwin writes in 'A Step by Step Guide to Making Homemade Wine' that home wine making does have its problems, the chief of these being the amount of space that is needed. She cautions, "...be careful not to get too carried away. One gallon can soon multiply into ten, and then twenty, as enthusiasm grows, and all the problems multiply with them." But as Bert says, "Where's the problem in that?"