Feedback on ELDERBERRIES
(Page 2 of 2)
May/June 1974
by SANDRA ODDO
Here's a useful hint for the home winemaker: Wine yeast can get a better jump on wild strains if you start it working about 48 hours before you want it. Take 1/2 cup water, add 1/2 cup orange juice (fresh) or juice from the berries and boil the liquid with 2 tablespoons of sugar. Let the syrup cool to lukewarm and add one package of wine yeast. Finally, put the mixture into a quart soda bottle and stop the mouth with cotton.
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A good starter will be enough for about 10 gallons of wine . . . or you can stretch it by using half (for five gallons), then adding water/juice/sugar to the remainder in the original proportions and letting the stuff go to work again. The yeast mixture can be kept in the refrigerator from two to three weeks if you don't want to use it right away, but allow it time to warm up and become active before you add it to your future wine. Starter, in other words, can be made to work more or less like sourdough to cut your initial investment in yeast. One package, however, shouldn't be stretched for more than about five batches of wine.
Honey can be substituted for sugar in almost any wine formula. The drink will never clear, though, unless you use the following trick: Mix the honey with the water which is called for in the recipe and boil the whole business at least 30 minutes, skimming well. By the way, don't cook the fruit juice itself in this step or you'll end up with a cloudy beverage.
Honey is deficient in some of the acids or whatever that wine needs, so adjust the acidity of your blend accordingly. (We use lime juice for this purpose, but lemon would work as well.) Of course, honey plus lime juice makes a perfectly elegant drink all by itself. To produce five gallons of mead you need about 13 pounds of honey, about two dozen limes and a packet of mead yeast.
Final note: Recycle used wine bottles, and shell out for a corker and new corks. It's dumb to put so much time into making a good drink, only to serve it up in tacky old soda bottles . . . and it'll most likely be vinegary, too, since I've yet to meet with a screw cap that can deal—as a wine cork can—with the delicate problem of exposure to air. There's a better way to reuse soft drink containers: cut them off to make glasses from which to drink your homemade wine.
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