Blackberries foraged in autumn 2013, with some ale sampling as a reward. Mrs critterwines almost features, but doesn't want to be a celebrity ;-)
Recipe: 4 gallons.
7.550 Kg Blackberries (frozen)
4 Kg Sugar
5 Teaspoons Pectolase
3 Campden Tablets
1.5 Teaspoons Tartaric Acid
3 Teaspoons Citric Acid
Yeast Nutrient (Tronozymol)
Yeast (GV1)
Water to make liquid volume to 4 gallons
OG 1091 (i'm expecting a wine around 13% ABV)
Frozen blackberries, bagged
Blackberries - wash them to remove bugs, leaves, rotten fruit etc... drain them a while, bag them and tie up the bags. stick in your freezer. if the bags are likely to get encrusted in ice then weigh them first cos doing so afterwards will be a technical complexity that you won't want to be bothered with when you're ready to brew. You need to take notes like this because when you make a stunning wine you'll want to repeat it.
Sugar - no need for any fancy brewing sugar. plain white sugar does the job. I use silver spoon cos it's local. if i didn't use that i'd use something fair-trade. Some folk say that beet sugar (silverspoon) isn't as good as cane sugar, that it has a very slight earthy taste. Personally i can't tell the difference and i've been brewing for over 20 years, and have tried both extensively. if you're a reductionist materialist (i'm not) then you'll probably argue that they are chemically identical, so there would be no difference. if you're not then you'll have plenty of reasons for insisting it could make a difference. Tho that doesn't mean we can pick it up reliably. The debate will run on and on for some time.
Campden Tablets - These help with 2 things. First of all they'll stun any wild yeasts on the berries. This means your chosen yeast will be able to breed (bud) and establish a healthy colony before the wild yeasts come to. You want your yeast to do the fermenting, not take your chances with a wild yeast. More on this later in the yeast section. The second thing it does is a little chemistry. I don't remember the details off the top of my head, and they're not important. The effect is that it helps with something called esterification. ester are powerfully fruit smelling/tasting molecules. The molecules that gives pear drops or pineapple chunks their flavours are esters. Campden tablets release sulphites, probably the most common food preservative out there. Some people are sensitive to it, most are not. Using campden tablets at this stage of a fermentation (i.e. at the start) probably results in nothing detectable remaining when the wine is ready to bottle. This is about the only stage i use campden tablets at these days. But if you;re new to brewing then i recommend you use it when you bottle too. Most novice brewers bottle too soon at some stage and get exploding bottles or bottles popping their corks. Using campden tablets will reduce the risk of this happening, greatly.
Pectolase - This is an enzyme, a biological catalyst. It breaks down pectin which can cause you problems with getting your wine to clear properly. Lots of fruit has pectin in it and if clear wine maters to you then use it. You can leave this out if you're funny about adding chemicals, but you'll often end up with hazy wine. Personally i am funny about chemicals, but i still use pectolase.
Tartaric & Citric Acids - Acidity is one of the qualities of wine that makes it wine. Grapes are very acidic, most other fruits are not as acidic, so we need to add more to get that wine like feel and quality. Brewers have a limited choice of acids to add to their non-grape wines. Citric (lemons), Malic (Apples) and Tartaric (grapes). Citric tastes like lemons, malic is harsh tasting and doesn't taste like apple, tartaric is pretty much clean tasting. This means tartaric acid won't interfere with the flavour of your wine, which can be important. But sometimes the lemon flavour of citric acid enhances the other flavours.
Personally i like lemon with blackberry, so i use more citric than any other acid. If you're into natural acids then the juice of one lemon is roughly equivalent to 1 teaspoon of citric acid.
Yeast Nutrient - yeast is a complex little critter and we don't know much about it at all. However we know that it needs more than sugar to be happy and healthy. One of the things it needs is nutrients. Grapes have plenty of yeast's favourite nutrients, but other fruits don't. So we have to give them a boost. Yeast nutrient contains some minerals but also vitamins. More expensive nutrients will smell a bit like marmite cos they have lots of B vitamins in them. The one i use is getting into the more expensive options. And don't worry, that strong B vitamin smell won't be in your wine. The yeast will gobble up all those vitamins.
Yeast - One of the most important choices you'll make when it comes to making wine. I chose to use GV1 (Gervin number 1) because i've used it before and i'm always happy with the results. The reason i chose it first time around was because it's low foaming (won't make a foamy head which invariably oozes out of fermenting bins and/or clogs up airlocks and is generally a pain to deal with). It's also a quick starter, which means that you'll soon see signs of fermentation. and thats good because the faster it gets going the less chance there is of your wine getting infected with a wild yeast. And it also ferments down to lower temperatures than many other yeasts. Great if you're fermenting in a cool room in the winter! Yeast strains usually come with a simple description of what they are good for. i.e red wines, white wines, low foaming, temperature range, acid metabolising or not, alcohol tolerance and so on. Picking one is quite easy. Just read the packet, you'll look like you know what you're doing even if you don't, and the descriptions really are very simple to follow.
A word on wild yeasts. Many novice brewers, especially those who are suspicious of food additives and so on, want to brew with a wild yeast, the yeast naturally present on the fruit. It sounds great and i'm sure there are plenty of commercial wine-makers doing this. However, those wine makers are in the business of ensuring that they get the desired yeast on their grapes. I don't know how they do it but i wouldn't be surprised if there were chemicals involved. Most importantly they know that any old random wild yeast is not the way to make good tasting wine. Candida is a natural yeast after all.
The reason it matters is that yeast doesn't only make alcohol and carbon dioxide. it's a little living critter of some sort (no-one knows precisely what it is!) and makes other waste products. some of which taste good, some don't. different strains make different products. Added to that is the fact that at different temperatures the same yeast will make different products. And different yeast strains have different alcohol tolerances. Ones that tolerate alcohol levels up to around 13% are not particularly common in nature. That's wine territory, so if your yeast will not tolerate alcohol above 5% then you won't get wine strength, you get beer strength. and chances are you added enough sugar to make wine. so you'll end up with a sweet fruit juice with some token alcohol content.
So combining the lack of control (through not knowing your yeast strain) over by-products, temperature requirements and alcohol tolerance means you're definitely shooting blind. If you don't mind this then go for it. Know tho that the chances of repeating a fortunate success are very slim. Natural yeast populations will vary year on year. I should add that if you go the wild yeast route you will almost certainly still like your wine. That's one of the joys of wine-making, even a failure is passable quality for the home-brewer, especially the novice or dabbler. But when you brew plenty, over many years, then you will wonder what you ever saw in those early brews when you didn't take advice. On the other hand if you want to make a wine that is fully natural and removed from artificial chemical or biochemical ingredients and processes then you have to go for it. You'll probably end up fermenting with honey, which i haven't done. Good luck with that journey, it's a whole other specialist world and if you want to try it then this blog won't help you.
Method:
Day 1 - Before bed remove your blackberries from the freezer and allow them to defrost overnight. pic below shows frozen berries in 5 gallon bucket, with my hand for scale.
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for a few kgs. Don't be tempted to use a blender. you could split seeds and these have a strong bitter flavour which you won't want in your wine.
Once thoroughly mashed to pulp tip into your super clean fermenting bucket. Add crushed campden tablets, pectolase, sugar (dissolved in water). Stir well, cover and leave overnight. this is the stage when natural yeasts will be stunned by the sulphites (they be dozy from just coming out of the freezer anyway!). and the pectolase will start working on the pectin.
Day 3 - Add tartaric and citric acids, dissolved in water. Also yeast nutrient (quantity according to instructions on the packet). Then add water to what you think will make about 4 gallons of liquid. If your vessel has marking on it then i'd take it up to 4.5 gallons cos the berries take up room and will be removed eventually. Stir it very well, and even use a whisk to make sure that you get plenty of air dissolved in the liquid, like beating eggs. Yeast needs oxygen to reproduce (bud). And the sloshy stirring will also drive off sulphites, giving your yeast the best chance to make a flying start. Measure the gravity with a hydrometer and record it. Then add the yeast, cover and leave overnight.
From here on you may want to stir the must, sloshily, one a day for the next 3 or 4 days. Especially if the fermentation hasn't started. But aside from that keep it covered.
Day 8-10 - Decant or siphon your wine into a secondary fermentation vessel, fitted with an airlock. Leave as much pulp behind as you can. Do it gently cos there will be a lot of sediment in the primary fermentation vessel. thats the one that you started your wine in. You want to leave most of that sediment behind because there's lots of dead yeast in it. Make sure the airlock is fitted properly. Forget about your brew. It may ferment for a week longer, or maybe a few weeks.
Finishing off
When it's finished fermenting rack the wine into demijohns, with airlocks. Leave as much sediment in the secondary vessel as you possibly can. Your wine is now in the conditioning stage, and it does need that time. The flavour will be much better if you leave it for some months. You really don't have to do anything else, but you may want to do some other things.
1. You may want to degas the wine. This will help the wine to clear. dissolved carbon dioxide adds to the density of water, and this will make it a little harder for particles to drop and form a sediment. Suspended particles are what stops your wine from clearing of course. If you don't degas then your wine may have a slight fizz to it, called a frizz. Personally i like it in rose and white wine, but don't with reds. so i degas reds, and this is a red.
2. You may want to stabilise your wine chemically. i.e. add campden tablets (1 per gallon) and potassium sorbate (1 teaspoon per gallon). The former will stun any still living yeasts. The latter will stop yeast from budding. Both are common food additives but some folk don't like consuming them. These additions pretty much guarantee that there will be no further fermentation. Which is reassuring when it comes to bottling. These days i rarely use them.
3. If your wine doesn't clear after a few months then you have some options. First for me is degassing. If that doesn't work then i stabilise. If that doesn't work then i wait til winter and put the demi-johns outside on a cold night. sometimes the cold will make suspended particles drop to form a sediment. If it still doesn't work then i usually just put it away and forget about it for a couple of years. but you could try using finings. I've had success with chitin based finings (source: shellfish). You can also get gelatin based finings (source: pigs skin usually i think). Or you could try Irish moss (seaweed). Personally i wouldn't bother with trying anything else. Bentonite (clay) is good when used at the start of a fermentation, but at the end it can strip lots of flavour and colour too. You can also try filtering, but it's a bit fiddly unless you have an uber kitchen with lots of space.
Bottling
Once your wine is at least 6 months old, but preferably a year, then you can bottle it. Tho don;t bottle it unless you want to drink it or need the demi-johns for making more wine. Before you bottle it measure the gravity. it should be low. like 990 - 998. if it's higher than this then you have residual sugar and there's a chance your fermentation will start again in the bottle. if you stabilised this won;t happen. but if you didn't then its not worth risking bottling. exploding bottles are no joke. if you must bottle use corks, at least there's a chance to release the pressure if it does start fermenting. don't use screw caps, they won't blow. If you must use screw caps then use plastic bottles cos they won't explode, they'll expand massively before they pop. but storing wine in plastic for a long time is not a good idea.
And that's all folks, it was a long one. But it's good to go deep from time to time.
EDIT: Drinking it, 6 months later.
So time has passed and the wine is ready, properly ready. deliciously blackberry, will mellow around the edges a little with time. i.e. it's a bit sharp, but it's just balance cos it's not an all round big wine, so it won't do your stomach in! That's just my opinion tho, Mrs Critter Wines doesn't agree, and neither do other folk who've tried it.
Many brewers pretty much dismiss a straight blackberry wine, saying that elderberries improve it. Well it depends on your tastes to be honest. If you only like a big bodied red wine then go with elderberries. But if you also enjoy something a little subtler then give this a try sometime. I enjoy both, depends on my mood, food etc. And sometimes i just want a drink so anything will do!
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