Recipe; Orange & Hawthorn Blossom

If you make a wine that you're not happy with then don't chuck it out. You may just need to give it time, sometimes years. Alternatively you may find it's great for making blends with. This is what I ended up doing with my Hawthorn Blossom Wine. It tasted of nothing, but was dry and strong (15%). I didn't want to chuck it cos it didn't taste bad. So I rummaged about my wines and reckoned that it would blend well with a sweet, strong, full flavoured wine. Orange (aka citrus wine) was the obvious choice.

The first thing to do is mix a bit of each wine together and taste it. Jeez wine making is such a chore sometimes! Starting around 50/50 is as good a choice as any. For me when I did a 50/50 blend I was instantly happy with the result. The sweet strong orange wine seemed to lose nothing at all. While the Hawthorn Blossom was completely absorbed. The result as I saw it was that I now got to make my Orange wine go twice as far! So that was enough for me, I got the measuring jug and funnel out and got blending. So here is a gratuitous piccie, Hawthorn on the left, Orange on the right.

And tonight I made another 6 bottles of this blend, and I'm drinking some, and it's great!

If I lived in a country that permitted distillation of alcohol then I probably would have distilled the Hawthorn Blossom Wine. However that is illegal here, so it wasn't an option. An option that has just occurred to me as I write this is to make Jelly with it. Alcoholic jelly is great adult fun, and those strong jelly flavours would work well with the high alcohol content. I still have a gallon of Hawthorn Blossom wine left and 1/2 gallon of Orange wine. I reckon that some of the Hawthorn blossom will end up being Jelly now, and hey maybe some in a trifle too.

Recipe; Hawthorn Blossom Wine

I've only made this wine once, and I didn't really know what to expect from the flowers when we went picking. I didn't pick bad smelling flowers, but I think I could have picked flowers with a much better smell. The result was disappointing dry, strong, rocket fuel with a neutral taste that I use for blending with sweet, strong, flavourful wines.

Recipe (2 Gallons)

4.5 Litres Hawthorn Blossoms (no twigs, leaves, stems etc)
3kg Sugar
4 Lemons - Zest and Juice
2 Teaspoons Wine Tannin
Nutrient
Sauternes Yeast
2 Campden Tablets

and here's the piccies

Method

Put the flowers in a muslin bag or two. You don't want the bags stuffed, and bags make it really easy to remove the flowers when the time comes. You could use nylon bags instead. Dissolve the sugar in about a gallon of hot boiled water and pour onto the flowers. Add the juice and zest (no pith!) of the lemons and the tannin. Make up to two gallons with water. Add 2 crushed campden tablets, stir well and cover. Leave overnight and the campden will take care of any wild yeasts etc. Next day measure the OG (mine was 1100), stir sloshily to get some gasses dissolved in the must then add your yeast and nutrient and cover. Stir once daily for a few days

About a week later remove the flowers and transfer the wine to secondary fermenter(s). Rack, degas, stabilise etc as and when needed. This one needed finings to clear.

Thoughts

If I do this one again then I'll make sure to pick flowers with a pleasant strong smell. I'll also keep my OG down, about 1080 should be ok. This wine fermented down to a final gravity of 990, which gives a hefty 15% ABV. Dry as a bone, and no flavour to speak of. Hence I've used it for blending.

Orange Wine Recipe

So I've just blended two wines and I want to write about the result, which means that I have to write up the wines that I blended. It's about time I got around to these recipes. The first is Orange Wine, well that's what I have called it for years, but really it's a mixed citrus wine and that's how I refer to it in the list on the page of my brews.

Citrus Wine 

Recipe (3 Gallons)

30 Oranges - Maroc or Helios
16 Clemantines
6 Lemons
2.5 Pink Grapefruit
2 Teaspoons Citric Acid
2 Teaspoons Tartaric Acid
6 Kg Sugar
Nutrient
4 Teaspoons Pectolase
Sauternes Yeast

Here's your piccie

Method

Zest 24 Oranges and 4 lemons. Take great care to avoid collecting the pith with the zest. Squeeze all the rest of the fruit for juice. Dissolve the sugar in hot boiled water. Put all the ingredients into your fermenting vessel apart from the yeast. Make up to 3 gallons with water, cover and allow to cool to less than 30'C. Then measure the OG. This one came in at a hefty 1129! No problem for Sauternes yeast tho. So pitch your yeast, stir sloshily and cover. After a few days transfer to secondary fermenter(s) and fit airlocks. Rack, degas, stabilise etc as and when needed as usual. This wine always clears unaided for me, in a couple or 3 months.

Thoughts

This is a dessert wine. It's very sweet, FG was 1021 and that gave an ABV of around 14.7%. It's good served chilled. If you don't like sweet wines then you'll want to use considerably less sugar.

The list of fruits is not set in stone. You could use jaffas, navels, tangerines, satsumas, mandarins, mineolas, ugly fruit etc. The oranges I chose are good for juicing and thin skinned. The rest I choose based on what is cheap, tastey, juicy and available on the day I go shopping.

Blackberry Kit Grrrrr

Grrrrr because I really thought it was Black Cherry. When I was checking the instructions I kept seeing blackberry and thinking they had printed the berry instructions on the cherry kit. That wouldn't have been a problem 'cos I still have the cherry instructions from the last kit. However when I turned the label over, there it was, plain as day "Blackberry", and here's the gratuitous piccie

So then I was left wondering do I start this kit up, or the Beaverdale Vieux Chateau Du Roi. Which is something like a Chateau Neuf Du Pape clone. Might seem like a no brainer, but it was a tricky decision because out of around 30 DJ's I only have 5 empties, 3 will be needed for the Blueberry & Cranberry Quickie Wine and 1 spare is always good for racking. I want to use the lees from the Beaverdale Kit straight after it finishes fermenting to start another brew. So that would leave me 1 DJ short. So, despite my impatience to try this Beaverdale Kit, I have to hold off.

Anyway, looking on the bright side the blackberry kit holds some excitement. When I read the ingredients label it says, for the juice:

• Concentrated Grape Juice
• Glucose Syrup
• Concentrated Blackberry Juice
• Concentrated Elderberry Juice
• Citric Acid
• Sulphur Dioxide

"Hmm" I thought "that's very similar to the Blackberry & Elderberry Wines (red and rosé) that I made last year". With some obvious exceptions of course like mine were done on the pulp etc. So a comparison will be kind of cute, and how timely is it that I only just described those brews too.

Bottling Again

I've just bottled a gallon of Green Tea & Ginger Wine. So it's standing for a day or so, then the heat shrink sleeves go on and it gets laid down. Not much more to say, I was going to bottle a gallon of the Cheapskate Rosé too, but it's only 3.5 months old so no hurry, tho it should be ready to drink soon enough as it used 3.5 litres of juice per gallon, rather than 4.5 litres.

The Blueberry & Cranberry Rosé is now busily fermenting

Recipe; Elderberry & Blackberry "Rosé" (2nd run)

Finally I've got around to posting the recipe and method for a second run wine. These are fun wines to make, they almost seem like you get something for nothing cos you don't need to buy anymore yeast for them. Tho you will need to buy some juices or concentrates. Still, they are quick and easy to do.

Recipe (2 Gallons)

Lees and Fruit from Previous Wine
245g Can of (Youngs) White Grape Concentrate
245g Can of (Ritchies Spanish) Red Grape Concentrate
Yeast Nutrient
Water to 3 Gallons
Sugar to desired OG

Method

Ok, you're making the Elderberry & Blackberry Wine at the moment and its got to the stage when you're going to remove the fruit (around a week in). Something I love about this way of making wine is that you can be carefree at this stage. So you can decant or siphon the must from the fruit and lees. No need to be careful about the process so you want plenty of yeast in your secondary fermenter for the red wine, but you also want plenty left in the primary fermenter for the 2nd run wine.

So you have left a yucky looking gloop of fruit and yeast (both alive and dead). Bagged all my fruit up in muslin at this stage. It just makes removal later easier. I added enough sugar solution to get me into the 1080 - 1090 range. Then water, nutrient, grape concentrates, gave it a very good stir. Then measured the gravity. 1085. so left it like that and covered it up. 4 days later I removed the fruit then followed all the usual steps of moving to secondary, racking, degassing, stabilising etc.

Thoughts

Making second run wines is great fun. There are basically two types, one uses the lees only (like saves buying yeast or oak chips). I do this with all my quality grape wine kits and make a light version of it with grape juice. The second type is using the fruit again. Tho in reality you probably won't have to ass yeast either. Which is what this wine is all about! The wine that resulted from this was far from a rosé, surprisingly. It's actually a red in it's own right. So this year I may make it again, or I may try to get the rosé I was aiming for. Heck I may do both cos this is good stuff!

Recipe; Elderberry & Blackberry Wine

Some days ago I said I would post the recipe for the Elderberry & Blackberry Rosé (the one that turned out be a very acceptable red rather than a Rosé). As it was a second run on the fruit and lees I have to post the recipe for the wine that so kindly gave us its ingredients for the rosé!

Elderberry & Blackberry Wine 

Recipe (3 Gallons)

2.7 Kg Elderberries
2.75 Kg Blackberries
2.6 Kg Sugar
Campden
Pectolase
2 Teaspoons Citric Acid
1/4 Teaspoon Tartaric Acid
Yeast Nutrient
Water to 3 Gallons
Sauternes Yeast

edit: OG 1090, FG 999 gives 12.4% ABV

Method

Remove all the stalks etc from your berries and wash them. Drain and tip into your fermenting bin. Mash them, add enough water to get them covered/floating, throw in 3 crushed campden tablets, stir well, cover and leave overnight.

Next day add 4 litres of boiling water and mash again, then add pectolase, stir, cover and leave overnight.

Next day add all your other ingredients and measure the gravity. Mine was 1090. 2 days of soaking mashed berries should have released most of their sugars into solution. Freezing berries is a good way to go as this will pop a lot of their skins so you wont have to mash as much. Now give it a good sloshy stir and add your yeast. Stir once or more daily for a few days and then remove the fruit after about a week and move the wine to your secondary fermenter(s). Remember to keep the fruit and lees tho', 'cos you want to do a second run! Rack degas, stabilise etc as and when needed. This wine did not need fining or filtering.

Thoughts

This is a great wine if you like to forage. Both the berries are abundant and easy picking in the UK, and you should be seeing berries forming or ripening all around you now. Get out there and pick 'em. You can wash and freeze them for winemaking, it does no harm at all, and hence save them all up til the season ends and make one huge batch. The higher proportion of elderberries you use the more robust red wine character you'll get. Swing more to the Blackberries and you'll end up with a more rosé like character.

Recipe; Blueberry & Cranberry Rosé

So I have 4 empty DJ's and two empty 5 gallon fermenting bins, and I'll be bottling some wine soon, all of which means I have enough capacity to get some wine on the go again!

Recipe (3 Gallons)

3 Litres Reg Grape Juice
3 Litres Blueberry & Cranberry Juice
2 Kg Sugar
Nutrient
2 Teaspoons Pectolase
3 Teaspoons Tartaric Acid
Gervin D Yeast

And now a gratuitous picture.

I made some movie clips of the whole process, which I'll edit together sometime. In doing so I forgot to take snap shots. By the time I remembered the washing up was done ... so that's why you have an image of 6 cartons of upside down juices ... all rinsed and ready for recycling (I'll just polish my halo :-) )

Method

Basically chuck everything into your sanitised fermenting vessel, make up to 3 gallons, measure the gravity and add a sugar or water to get it where you want it. This recipe came in at 1077, I'm happy with that so I made no adjustment. Give the whole lot a really good sloshy stir to get some air dissolved. Chuck in the yeast, cover it up, stir sloshily at least once daily for a few days then follow your normal procedure of moving to secondary vessels, racking, degassing, stabilising etc etc.

Thoughts

This is a light wine, it'll be ready to drink in as little as 6 weeks. Tho perhaps 8 is a more reasonable expectation. But as with all wine it will improve with age and you'll notice that week on week with wines like these (2 litres of juice per gallon and OG 1070-1080).

I've made an instructional vid (aimed at beginners) for starting this wine. Clicky to watch 

Edit 19th Sept 2010: Final gravity turned out to be 997, meaning 10.9% ABV.

Enjoying a Beverage

.... and while doing the racking etc of the elderflower wine what better accompaniment than a glass or two of wine. I popped the cork on a bottle of Elderberry & Blackberry. Made from the second run on the fruits and lees - reminds me that I must post the recipe and method. It was intended to be a rosé, but turned out to have more body than expected and can hold it's own as a red. Here's a couple of piccies, the first shows the clarity quite nicely, the second tries to show the colour.

3 Gallons of Busy-ness

Finally got around to racking what I call the Original Elderflower Wine. So that's the one with early addition of flowers (primary), acid blend, Sauternes yeast and a little tannin. Gratuitous pic follows

Then I degassed, first by drill/whizzstick (pic below) but also but shaking/swirling by hand.

Finally stabilised and put the DJ's away to be forgotten about for a few months.

Not Slack, Just Away

We've been to a wonderful festival called Buddhafields, in some fields near Taunton. Had a force 7-8 gale on Thursday night! But the festival spirit was unaffected and a great time was had by all. This, of course, means that I haven't been blogging for a week. It also means I've barely been drinking. As you might expect with a name like Buddhafields, drinking was not encouraged. So we took a two bottles of wine with us to drink with dinner. We only opened one, and we didn't even finish that one 'cos the atmosphere was so wonderful anyway that we just corked the bottled after a glass each and then forgot all about it until we were packing up.

Anyway, brewing normality will now resume, and I'll be adding plenty of recipes over the next 4 weeks.

In the meantime you might want to check out some of the wonderful things that we enjoyed at this festival (they also get around plenty of others). Paradox (you'll need a facebook account, then search on "Paradox Brighton"), Lost Horizons, Triban, MMM Massage, Permaculture.

Enjoying the Process

Wow, what a great surprise lay in store for me tonight. Around 2 weeks ago I added pineapple to my Rumtopf, and a couple of nights ago some apricot. Today I picked our blackcurrent bushes clean, me and Mrs CW ate some as fresh as they come, and then I put the rest in the Rumtopf. On opening the lid tho I was met with a heavenly fruity smell. It just makes me want to tuck in to the contents immediately ... but no, I'll wait, this is gonna be a midwinter festive treat!

Improved Mint Wine Recipe

So here is the recipe for the Mint Wine that I bottled the other night. If you follow this exactly then you'll end up with a very delicately flavoured mint wine. So do look out for my thoughts at the end of the post if you want more mint flavour.

Recipe for 2 Gallons

155 grams of Mint Leaves
(70% Garden Mint, 20 % Apple Mint, 10 % Moroccan Mint)
2.2 Kg Sugar
325 G chopped Raisins
Juice of 1 Lemon
Juice of 1 Lime
1 Teaspoon Tartaric Acid
1 Teaspoon Citric Acid
1 Campden Tablet
Yeast Nutrient
Sauternes Yeast

Method

You only want the mint leaves, not stems. So strip them off and then extract the flavour by steeping in hot boiled water 4 times, each time for 15-30 minutes, each time decanting off the liquor into your fermenting vessel. Keep a lid on the vessel you do the extracting in. You may get more flavour by bruising or crushing the mint leaves before steeping. I didn't do this, but will do so next time.

Here's a piccie of the amount of mint you'll need to look like 150 grams (ish). This is the sprigs, not just the leaves. Those bowls are each big enough for the trifle you would have on your Xmas table.

Add all the other ingredients to the steeped liquor in the FV except the yeast. I put my raisins in a muslin bag to make removal easy. Make up to 2 gallons, make sure sugar is dissolved. Cover and leave for 24 hours.

Next day give the must a really give stir and get as much air dissolved as possible. Then add your yeast. This is important because yeast needs dissolved oxygen to multiply. You should stir in this fashion for the next few days. After about a week remove the raisins and move the wine to secondary fermenters with airlocks. From then on follow the usual procedure of racking, degassing, stabilising etc. I needed finings (chitin based) to clear the wine of a haze.

Further Thoughts

When I made the trial brew for this last year I added a sprig of mint to each wine bottle. It looked wonderful and certainly gave much more mint flavour. I haven't done this for the first batch that I bottled this year. But when it comes to bottling the second gallon I think I will. It certainly adds more mint flavour. Alternatively you may go with a gentle but slower procedure for extracting the mint flavour.  Bruise the leaves, bag them up and add them to the primary fermenting vessel without doing any hot water extraction first. Or if you have a wide necked secondary fermenter then you could try a late addition of bruised leaves. Or you could try making a tincture of mint by extracting in a spirit. Perhaps Vodka for a neutral taste, tho if I went this route I think I would use a small amount of cheap cooking brandy as there are raisins in the recipe anyway.

certainly bottling with a sprig of mint works, tho it does give also give the wine a slight green taste, like of nettles.

A big Thank You

Thanks to all of you who come here, De.rmot and whoever you are, and for whatever reason. I have reached 100 + visits on the counter. And the counter is set at the lowest level, like one person browsing different pages DOESN'T up the count with each new page, neither with each refresh. And the same person visiting twice doesn't up the count unless someone else has visited in between - regardless of whether that is minutes, hours, days, weeks or months.

So here's to us (raises glass) reaching a small landmark together!

Quickie Elderflower Brew

The Quickie Elderflower wine is coming along nicely. It stopped fermenting a while ago and while I dilly-dallied about getting around to racking etc it has nearly cleared. Today I finally got around to racking and stabilising. There were 5 gallons in total, here's 4 of them.

It's tasting good too, and so it should do 'cos this is meant to be a quick one, I'm hoping it'll be ready in a couple of weeks (started 12th June). Tho I do expect it will improve noticeably over the subsequent 6 months or so.

So why did I want a quickie brew? I just love Elderflower wine and as it took me years to getting around to making it it still feels very new to me. The result is that the wine ends up getting rationed ... never a good thing! This year I hope we can enjoy a bottle whenever we fancy one and still have some left when next years brew is ready to drink. Without doing the quickie brew (late addition of flowers & light table wine style) it's all just too labour intensive to make an appreciable quantity.

Improved Mint Wine

First time round the mint wine was very much an experiment, proof of concept if you like. It worked well enough to warrant a proper run, so 2 gallons got put on in November last year, made with mint from the garden. Varieties included Garden (70%), Apple (20%) and Moroccan (10%). OG was 1089, FG 993 gives 13% ABV.

The result is a medium wine, typical white wine colour, light golden/straw. Clear as a bell. The mint flavour is quite delicate, as is its cooling effect. I suspect this wine will be a great one for clammy summer evenings. I'm also keen to find out how it goes with food, a mild curry perhaps. I reckon we'll drink it chilled, maybe even with ice!

I'm pleased with it, and we have plenty of mint in the garden again this year so more will be brewed soonish. Here's the recipe. In the meantime the 5 and 1/2 bottles left and the full DJ yet to be bottled, will just have to keep us going through this summer!

And here is a gratuitous picture of some of my bottled mint wine.

Another Rosé

Apologies for the lack of posts ... good weather, good surf, bbq's ... what can I say.

Tonight I bottled a gallon of Blackberry & Elderberry Rosé. This was made from a 2nd run on the fruit after making the Blackberry & Elderberry Red. It's just over 10 months old and my patience couldn't hold out any longer. The good news is that it's not too young to drink.

I suppose some piccies would be good ...

This is the freshly filled bottles. No heat-shrink neck covers yet, and the bottles will stay standing for 24 - 48 hours before they get laid down. The small plastic one is for me ... now as I write this. The small glass one is for Mrs Critter Wine's special reserve. The rest are all for sharing.

The wine has plenty of body for a big Rosé, infact its not far off being a Red, which makes the Blackberry & Elderberry Red an exciting prospect. ABV is 12.8%. It's fruity, med/dry despite fermenting down to 0.991. Has a nice edge but is far from sharp, infact its surprisingly smooth and I wonder how, or if, it will improve with time?

There will be plenty more 2nd run Rosés with these fruits! Recipe will follow in time ... do prompt me if you feel impatient 'cos both blackberry and elderberry season will soon be upon us and you may want to know how I did it.

A Good Few Days

As well as the great company mentioned in the last post, we at Critter Wines also got out to the coast on a hot, sunny, breezy day at high tide. It was local surfing, around an hours drive, and the surf was good. We both caught some nice rides and came home with grazed knuckles (from riding rides right up onto the beach) and big cheesy grins courtesy of mother nature.

So here I am, sipping Orange & Hawthorn Blossom wine and wondering if I should blog again with no images! And the answer that came back to me was yes. So thanks for reading on, but as a reassurance please know that I do aim to put up piccies often, so there will be more soon. Just now tho the brewing has gone quiet while chores and body-boarding fill up the spare time.

But like I said, I'm drinking and I want to pass on a tip that made this wine work.

The Orange wine I make, more accurately described as citrus wine, is very sweet and strong. It also has plenty of body and as you would expect plenty of acidity. So the whole thing balances out nicely. The recipe was inspired by CJJ Berry, and if you follow his recipe and method you'll also get a great dessert wine. I'll post my recipe and method soon.

This Orange wine is so big and sweet and strong that its a great candidate for blending with other wines that for some reason are not good for drinking as they are, but (and this is important) don't have any flavour faults. Some time ago I made a hawthorn blossom wine. It was my first try and the flowers I used didn't have much of a scent. The resulting wine is simply hooch. Its lack of flavour and body means it's just loopy juice that'll get you drunk but won't do anything much for your taste buds except burn them gently. So I blended it 50/50 with the Orange wine. I still have a cracking, strong, sweet, big dessert wine. But I don't have any waste Hawthorn blossom wine!

For those who like a sweet wine, but are not nuts about intense sweetness, this wine works so well! For those who want a full on dessert wine then the orange works better, but this would be satisfactory. I must say here that I have only blended wines a couple of times. Every wine that I have made before the Hawthorn Blossom had a time and place. So there was need to blend it, rather simply bring it out at the right time. I'd advise that as a way to go, unless you brew such vast quantities that you have ample to experiment with. In which case please feel free to advise me on blending. I'd also advise you not to blend a bad wine with a good one cos the chances are you'll end up with with a whole heap of bad wine. But a very neutral tasting wine is good for blending, whether dry, sweet, hot or thin. Just be sure to choose a partner that can take it, like big in all the areas that your disappointing wine is lacking.

What a Good Night

Throughout the week I've glugged my way through a few bottles of wine, and I haven't blogged .... naughty me! But tonight a neighbour dropped in and we opened a couple of bottles. So as best as I can reliably describe opinions here we go ...

We started off with a commercial Aussie Shiraz from Margaret River. Delicious, fruity, medium, soft, easy drinking. Served at room temp. Meanwhile a blackberry wine was being hurredly chilled in the freezer followed by the fridge. The blackberry was well received as a big rosé (more body than is typical of a rosé), tho a touch sharp. Having despatched that, and with the clock marching on, a dessert wine was suggested. So the Orange & Elderflower was rolled out. This went down a storm. Described as being very much a dessert wine, elderflower dominating, citrus giving a frizz like feel, plenty of viscosity, loads of body, ample acidity for balance. Not typical of a dessert wine cos of the citrus edge and the flower bouquet but nevertheless completely at home as a dessert wine.

So I feel good! The blackberry wine was simply an on the pulp wine, but made with blackberries from a trained and pruned cane. The Orange & Elderflower was a 50/50 blend, that largely resulted from the better half suggesting that it would work. I'll post recipes in time. I hope you stay tuned, our neighbour has a palate that I trust but to say more than that could be seen as bragging. Which leaves me in a pickle cos now I have said too much already!