Dried Elderflower Wine 1

Started 20th May 2012

We have a small packet of dried elderflowers which should make a couple of gallons of a nice white wine. You only need a small quantity of dried elderflowers to make a gallon of wine - depending on the recipe, anything from 1/2oz to 1oz. We've chosen a 1oz recipe. If making from freshly picked elderflowers, you'll need 6x the quantity of elderflowers.

We have made 2 gallons of this wine in separate buckets. We can't guarantee the quantities used are exactly the same, so the two gallons might turn out completely differently. Just have to wait and see.

Elderflower Wine 1
Ingredients:
1oz dried elderflowers
3lb sugar
0.5lb sultanas
8 tablespoons lemon juice*
1 teaspoon grape tannin**
1 gallon water
1 teaspoon yeast nutrient
1 teaspoon white wine yeast

* we have citric acid - one teaspoon citric acid is equivalent to the juice of one lemon - information elsewhere suggests one lemon has about 3 tablespoons of lemon juice - therefore we are using 3 teaspoons citric acid
** we don't have grape tannin, so we are using half a cup of strong cold tea (no milk or sugar) instead

Step 1:
Put elderflowers in the bucket
Disolve sugar in boiling water and pour into the bucket
Simmer the sultanas in water for 30 minutes and pour into bucket
Add lemon juice / citric acid to bucket
Cover and leave for 24 hours

Step 2:
Add tannin, yeast nutrient and yeast to the bucket
Cover and leave for 5 days

Dried Elderflower Wine

Step 3:
Strain into demijohn
Fit bung and airlock, leave to ferment until clear

Step 4:
When the wine is clear, siphon the wine off into another demijohn.
Leave for 2 months

Step 5:
The wine should be clear now and the fermenting should have stopped.
Siphon off into bottles.

Dried Elderberry Wine 1

Started  20th May 2012

We had 1.5lbs of dried elderberries, so we decided to get this on the go today. The sooner it's started, the sooner we can drink it. Various elderberry wine recipes suggest it could take anything from a few weeks to several months, and most suggest it improves with age, so we'll see how it goes. 1.5lbs of dried elderberries is enough for 3 gallons of wine.

We can make a second (smaller) batch from the pulp of the first batch. Re-using pulp with the same quantities of water and sugar will make a lighter wine, but if we go for half quantities of water and sugar, it should be better.

Recipes tend to recommend a Bordeaux or Burgundy yeast. We don't have a winemaking shop nearby - the closest is about 10 miles away - so we tend to just use ordinary red wine yeast from Wilkinsons. We could order online, but we're still beginners so would prefer to buy any "special" yeasts etc from a proper winemaking shop so that we can get good advice at the time.

Note for step 1 - This recipe required disolving sugar in water, boiling elderberries, simmering currants etc. We don't have cooking pots big enough to do it all in one go, so we did it all in smaller batches until it was all in the bucket.


Dried Elderberry Wine 1
Ingredients:
1.5lbs dried elderberries
7.5lbs sugar
3 gallons water
1.5lbs currants (or 750ml red grape juice concentrate)
3 teaspoons citric acid
3 teaspoons pectolase
3 teaspoons yeast nutrient
Red wine yeast

Step 1:
Disolve 1.5lbs sugar in 3 pints water, add some elderberries, bring to the boil for a couple of minutes, empty into bucket. Repeat 4 more times.
Put 1lb currants in 3 pints water, bring to boil and simmer for 30 minutes, then add to bucket. Repeat twice more.
Cover bucket and leave to cool for 24 hours

Step 2:
Add citric acid, pectolase, yeast nutrient and yeast to the bucket.
Stir well, cover bucket.
Stir every day for a week, pushing the fruit pulp down into the bucket.

Dried Elderberry Wine

Step 3:
Strain liquid into demijohns, add bungs and airlocks, leave to ferment until clear.
Rack and bottle.

Results so far:
When making big batches of wine in this way, waiting for water to boil etc, it's easy to lose count of how many pounds of sugar you've added. Tip - don't do it when other people can distract you.
This wine actually stayed in the bucket for 2 weeks, mainly because we simply didn't have time to strain it last weekend.
There was so much fruit in this bucket, it bubbled over out of the bucket, leaving a sticky tar-like mess everywhere. On the plus side, the mess was quite easy to clean up.

Carafe 21 White Kit

Started 7th May 2012

Carafe 21 comes in both red and white. I'm not keen on white wine, but the missus likes white wine in the summer, red in winter. 

Carafe 21 White Kit

30 bottles of white in 21 days sounds pretty good to me, so we've given this one a go too. If the missus doesn't like it for drinking, she'll use it for cooking.

The kit containes all the ingredients except the water and sugar. You also need a big 5 gallon bucket.

It helps to have a hydrometer - you have to test the gravity at 12-16 days to check the ferment has finished. If the gravity is below 1000 after 16 days, it's ready for the next stage. If not, you have to wait longer for the ferment to finish, which means the wine will take longer than 21 days.

From what I understand (which isn't a great deal at the moment!) there's no real harm in moving on to the next stage sooner - it just means the wine will be sweeter and less alcoholic as some of the sugar won't have fermented.

It's also handy to have a thermometer. The instructions say to dissolve sugar in water and pour into the bucket - the easiest way is to do this in a pan on the cooker, but that means you end up with warm water. If the water / liquid is too warm, there's no point adding the other ingredients, especially the yeast - heat will kill the yeast and the best you get is mould growing on the fruity liquid. A long thermometer only costs a few quid.

The buckets are on the go now, we need to add more water and sugar tomorrow then leave for another 9 days .... fingers crossed!

Verdict:
Bottled this 11th June 2012. Like the Carafe Red, it took a bit longer than expected.
We got 26 bottles out of it, so I definitely miscounted when adding the water.

On the plus side, it tastes really good. I'm not a lover of white wine, but this is a very good white, definitely as good or better than some of the well known labels in supermarkets. It could be that it tastes better because I was short on the water, but can only tell if I do another kit.

Would we buy it again? Absolutely!

Other home made white wines like gooseberry wine can take several months to mature, sometimes over a year, but this is ready in just a few weeks and it's really good.

Carafe 21 Red Kit

Started 7th May 2012

We took a trip to Kingston for a pub lunch and took the opportunity to pop in Wilkinsons. There aren't many shops selling homebrew kit, but we know Wilkinson's does, so we had to see what they had. They had a small range of basic chemicals and "bits" like airlocks, a few "quick" kits.

One kit we found there was the Carafe 21 kit - makes 30 bottles of red in 21 days. As our fruit wines will take several weeks at least, this seemed like a good idea. Even better, we already had a 5 gallon bucket for it.

It seems to be a fairly simple kit - nothing difficult - just follow the instructions. It's all done in the one bucket, no straining, no racking, no nonsense. The kit includes everything needed except the bucket, the water and the sugar.

Getting started was easy - it's sitting there in the bucket, hopefully only 3 weeks left. It's been fairly chilly weather though, and we haven't had the heating up high, so it's not been too warm indoors - therefore it might take a bit longer to ferment. We need to test the gravity (with our hydrometer) in about 12 days time.

After we'd started the kit, the missus checked up on the Internet for reviews of this kit - she said all the reviews were good, no complaints, everyone seems happy. All sounds good to me!

Cost £19.00 + about 10lbs sugar (£3.99 for 5k /11lb bag)
= approx £23.00 for 30 bottles
= approx £0.77 per bottle

Verdict:
The wine is ready in 21 days, IF the temperature is a constant 25C. It's been a bit chilly here and we haven't had the heating on, so it's taken longer to finish fermenting. We finally bottled this on 10th June 2012.
We didn't quite get 30 bottles out of it, maybe 29, but we may not have been as careful as we should have been with the measurements. And of course we had to fill a few glasses while bottling.
It's a fairly basic red table wine, nothing special, but very passable. It doesn't touch a nice Shiraz, but we're happy with it, especially as it's far less than £1 a bottle.
Would we buy it again? Yes, but probably only if we're likely to run out of our fruit wines.
We might try other kits later too ....

New Wine Cabinet

We have a big collection of winemaking kit and buckets of wine on the floor in the dining room, which isn't really ideal. I suggested to the missus last week that we should get a cupboard for the dining room so we had somewhere to store the equipment and somewhere "dog proof" for the buckets of wine. She agreed.

While out shopping at the weekend, we took a minor detour to the British Heart Foundation shop in Wallington. We found a big pine computer cabinet that's ideal for a couple of big buckets of wine and various equipment. It's been well used and needs a bit of TLC to bring it up to scratch - the missus love restoring old furniture too, so that's another piece she can work on!

Gotta love the British Heart Foundation shops - they always have a really good collection of 2nd hand furniture and most is in very good condition. Some BHF shops, including the Wallington one, also sell cookers, TVs, fridges, washing machines and so on. Definitely worth a visit. And if you see something in one of their shops, snap it up quickly or someone else will!