Recipe: Green Tea & Ginger

A couple of years ago - in mid winter so there was no foraging to be had - I wanted to keep brewing. So I decided to try to make a wine that my better half would go weak at the knees for. She likes green tea and also ginger, and I reckoned this combo would work for wine. So I did some surfing and found a recipe on Jack Keller's site. I tweaked it a bit. It turned out pretty good. This year I tweaked it some more and I don't think I'll be tweaking again. So here is my version.

Recipe for 5 Gallon Batch

• 50 Teaspoons Green Tea (Sencha or Bancha)
• 500g Chopped Sultanas
• 200g Root Ginger, peeled, bruised and chopped.
• 6 Lemons, juice and zest (avoid pith)
• 3 Limes, juice and zest (avoid pith)
• 2 Teaspoons Citric acid
• 4 Teaspoons Tartaric acid
• 5 Teaspoons Pectolase
• 5 Campden Tablets
• 5 Kg (approx) Sugar (OG to 1085 - 1095)
• Yeast Nutrient
• Water to 5 gallons
• Sauternes Yeast

I don't know if the pectolase is needed but this wine doesn't seem to completely clear without finings so I tried, it still needed fining!

Method

Put all the green tea in a muslin bag, tie it closed (but keep the volume of the bag as big as possible), put this in a big pot, add a gallon of water, bring to the boil and then immediately decant liquid into your fermenting bin. Repeat with the same bag of tea but this time also add the bagged tea to the fermenting bin.
Put the ginger, sultanas and zest in another muslin bag and tie it. Again bring to the boil in a gallon of water, turn down the heat to a gentle simmer for 1 hour, then empty the contents into your fermenting bin.
Put another gallon of water onto the stove, add 4kg of sugar, bring to boil and then add to fermenting bin.
Stick the lid on and leave it to cool overnight.

Next day measure your gravity and then adjust the volume to 5 gallons using sugar solution to get the OG where you want it. Add the crushed campden tablets, acids and pectolase. Cover and leave for 24 hours. Next day give the must a really good sloshy stir to get some oxygen into it then add the yeast nutrient and yeast. After this stir at least once daily for 4-5 days. Turn the muslin bags everyday for about a week. About a week after you added the yeast you should remove the muslin bags. Rack the wine into demijohns, top them up if needed with sugar solutions of the same gravity as your original must. Fit airlocks and bliss out to blooping.

When it's finished fermenting do all the usual racking, degassing, stabilising and fining if needed. Chitin based finings work better than gelatin based for this wine.

This wine will be ok to drink after about 4 months, but will keep getting better with time.

Oh my better half loves it by the way, and I do too! It goes incredibly well with any spicy food, especially a curry. My OG was 1095 and it worked out to be 13.5% ABV.