Making Wine... the process

Like everything else we do, we took a bunch of photos last year (2010) of our wine making process. I never blogged on it, because we fully expected it to be a flop. Now that we have a successful batch, I am really excited to look back over our process so we can be sure and repeat it for 2011.

So back in May of 2010 (May 9th to be exact) we had extra mulberries




The raw weight was seven pounds ten ounces (I must have skimmed some off the top for eating, because in my notes, I see we only used six pounds of berries for the wine batch).



We dumped the berries into a clean, food grade bucket and mashed them with a potato masher (notice the hand written recipe and calculations in the background?).



mash mash mash until it was mostly liquidy



We then poured in a gallon of boiling water



then lidded the mash and set it aside for a few days in a cool dark place (our master bathroom)



A few days later, we strained out the pulp leaving a cloudy purple liquid. (May 15, 2010)



The pulp was composted.



We then added lots of sugar and left in the bucket for four more days.



On May 19th we decanted it into a 3 gallon carboy and put an airlock on it. We wrapped the bottle in a black trash sack, being careful not to seal it too tight, it needed air, but it also needed darkness. This contraption has sat in the corner of my master bathroom for 11 months. We would peek at it occasionally, for a while it bubbled, then it got cloudy, then it got clear and finally, we tasted it--11 months later.



Success! First tasted April 5, 2011.


A few notes:
1) I have the actual recipe and proportions we used in my notebook
2) We did not use commercial yeast, we intend to, but never got around to it. This was a huge chance to take and we assumed it was probably not good. By not adding commercial yeast, you are gambling that the right kind of yeast exists in the fruit or air and will make good wine. By buying yeast, you make sure you get the right kind of yeast for wine. It was really lucky that we got drinkable wine.
3) We have no idea the alcohol content of this batch, we have the tools, but we should have made a measurement when we started the process and again at the end. The comparison is what tells you the alcohol content. We do know that it has a nice kick to it, I only drank one glass and had a nice gentle buzz. Hubby drank two glasses and said he'd had plenty (man speak for a buzz?). Neither of us woke up with any bad side effects the next day (some cheap wine and I feel awful after just a glass). My understanding is that wine kind of self regulates, over a certain alcohol content the yeast will die, so it is impossible to end up with 100 proof... no plans for us to start any distilled liquors, yet. Is that even legal?
4) Did I mention it was SWEET? My dad would never drink this--he likes a dry wine, but I'm guessing my sister will love it. Hubby likes it, and he tends to like a drier wine than me. How sweet? My favorite wine is port, and this is similar to that level of sweetness. For any 'real' wine drinkers out there, don't laugh at my unsophisticated palate.

Mulberry Wine

Last year we picked tons of mulberries from a tree in a neighbors yard. We ate all we could, I made jelly, juice, and syrup, but we still had about 6 pounds of extra berries. I wrote about it here. On a whim, hubby decided to make Mulberry Wine using a recipe from a 1970's cookbook. The 6.75 pounds made about 3 gallons of what we hoped would become wine

After fermenting for 11 months in our dark, cool, master bathroom we finally got brave and tried some... it was delicious!




The wine is sweet, has a taste that is very much mulberry, but also kind of has a hint of watermelon.



It is sweet, which is what I like (I'm more of a wine-cooler than a wine kind of girl).

I should note that we are not really drinkers. Curtis has a beer occasionally, mostly when out camping or grilling out, and I sometimes have a glass of wine before dinner. I used to guess that we maybe had a glass of wine per week, but since we started our own batch, we made sure to save every wine bottle we finished over the past year... the grand total?



Eight measly bottles, so my guess of 'a glass per week' was definitely an overestimation, we did not even drink a bottle of wine per month. A few of the bottles were not even wine that we drink, it was left at our house after a dinner party. We are definitely light weight drinkers.

Hubby carefully siphoned the wine from the carboy (what the big jug is called) and decanted it into the cleaned wine bottles. When we made the first batch of wine last year, we lucked into a deal on craigs list and got some carboys, a corker and a bunch of miscellaneous brewing gear for a great price.



Ta-da!



We ended up with eight bottles of wine, plus an extra half a gallon in the fridge, less a few 'test glasses'.



(pardon the fingerprints, they are much easier to see in the photo).

We shared two bottles of wine with some of hubbies friends from work and the rest are for us.

Another big check box for our 'bizarre skills' list. We officially made our own wine, hooray!

I'm thinking of using this photo for the wine bottle label...

Mulberry Syrup

Mulberry Syrup

This recipe was inteneded to make mulberry jam, but the jam never set up so I'm calling it syrup.

2 pounds mulberries (both ripe purple berries and unripe red or green berries)
2 pounds sugar
2 tbs lemon juice




Wash mulberries in cool water and drain. Prepare sterilized jelly jars, lids and bands if you plan to can the syrup.


Combine the berries, sugar, and lemon juice in a large sauce pot and cook over medium heat stirring constantly. It will look like entirely too much sugar at first. Use a potato masher or spoon to smash the berries.


Cook and smash until the sugar is dissolved and the berries have all been smashed, about 10 minutes.

After the berries have released their juice and the seeds and other chaff is floating on the surface of the juice, it is ready to strain.


Strain through several layers of cheese cloth, or a fresh paint strainer bag squeezing to get as much juice as possible. Return the juice to the pot and continue to cook until the syrup sheets from a spoon. Ladle into prepared jelly jars and process in a boiling water canning bath for 5 minutes. Remove from canner and listen for the pops to know the jars have sealed.


My Notes:
* My jelly never gelled so it is more like a very thick syrup, which is delicious on pancakes, french toast or in oatmeal.
*I made a second batch with Sure Gel fruit pectin, but that did not gel either.
*Internet research indicated that it might gel better if I add more sugar, but I don't want to use that much sugar. I'm happy enough with a syrup.
* I added 2 tbs mulberry syrup to my 7-up and it was delicious.

50 Ways to Eat a Mulberry

There must be 50 ways to eat a mulberry...
make a jam Sam,
try it in tea Lee,
drink it as wine, B'ryn
how 'bout a vinaigrette...ummm Jet?

Okay, bear with my bad singing and botched oldies song, but I've had the song stuck in my head. I'm also looking for ideas on what to do with my latest find... tons of Mulberries!

About two blocks down from our house on our typical walk path is an empty home that has three huge mulberry trees in the front yard. Each year, we have to alter our walks to avoid the messy side walk for the month or so that the mulberries are ripe.



Even the street is stained with the purple mulberry juice. This year is different though, rather than avoiding it, the old house is the destination of our walks. Gardening is fun for me, cooking is fun for me, and eating is my favorite thing, so what could be better than free food from a tree that I didn't have to plant and I don't have to maintain? Jackpot!

Every night for the last several days, boy and I have been loading our gear into the wagon and walking down to the old house on the corner to pick mulberries. On Mother's day, I was able to con daddy and little girl into joining us to take some pictures of the process.



Mulberries are very delicate fruit with a shape similar to that of a blackberry, only smaller. They are rarely seen commerically because they are so fragile and explode with the slightest touch. Even the act of picking up a mulberry will stain your fingers. So hand picking is tedious and not really worth it, but there is an easy way to get lots of these little yummies.



I spread out an old sheet and use a hoe or other long object to whack the branches and knock down the berries into the sheet. Once most of the ripe berries are cleared from that branch, we relocate the sheet and repeat the process.



Every few branches, I carefully gather up the edges of the sheet and dump the berries into my bucket.



Boy and I are able to gather about 2 pounds of berries in less than 20 minutes each night.



Well, we bring home 2lbs of berries, we harvest a lot more than that but they somehow disappear... somewhere around a happy purple-faced little boy.

With Daddy there to help, we were able to gather six pounds of mulberries! Girl 'helps' by remaining contained in the wagon and shouting at brother to feed her berries.





So there must be 50 ways to eat a mulberry, I just have not found them all yet. Stay tuned for my recipes and uses for mulberries.. other than shoving delicious handfuls of them into your mouth.

Yummy!

Sweet Rewards

As a side product of hubby's bee extraction on Saturday, we brought a small section of capped honey comb on a plate to snack on in the house. We love to take a spoonful of wax and honey and chew it like gum. My mom was in town--she watched the kids for us during our bee class and I wanted to share some with my mom. As I dumped the comb into a jar for her I had the idea to see what was left in the cooler outside. Jackpot!

We ended up with a cooler partially full of honey comb and wax.

I cut the comb into small section to fit inside half quart wide mouth canning jars


I was careful to only grab the prettiest of the newly capped honey.





I ended up with seven jars of comb, but they looked kind of lonely there...





So I lined my sieve with cheese cloth and took the not so pretty honey comb and squeezed out the rest of the honey into the sieve.





Depending on the age of the comb, the wax formed a neat ball (for older comb)



or crumbled (new comb)





Ooey gooey fun!



I smashed up all of the capped, but not so pretty comb and allowed the honey to seep out and strain through the cheese cloth.



As the honey collected at the bottom of the bowl, I'd pour it out into the jars over the comb honey.



At the end of the process I had seven half quart jars of honey and comb as well as a jelly and half jelly jar.






Left in the sieve was the wax crumbles



Which I put into a jar of their own and I plan to melt down to make beeswax blocks for some later craft project.



Everything that was left was given to the bees for them to reclaim for their own stores. The neat thing about bees is how efficiently they will lick every drop of honey from something. It was nearly impossible to scrape all of the extra honey from our colander, but after just an hour out by the bees, it was completely clear of honey and ready to be washed.

Hill of Beans

With all the rain we have had this fall, I have not been able to get out into hte garden much. Yesterday, a rare sunny day, I decided the beans probably needed picking.



Boy did they ever! My quick stroll to the garden turned into 30 minutes of bean picking. The beans overflowed the basket I had brought. It totaled 6.5 pounds of beans, hooray!



I washed the beans by filling the sink with cool water and letting them float.



I then cut the ends off and sliced into 1-2 inch sections.





I blanched the beans in a large pot of boiling water for 3 minutes, then 3 minutes in an ice water bath before bagging, labeling and freezing. I found that about six hand fulls fills a 1 quart freezer bag perfectly.



I did four batches of beans and ended up with 3.5 quarts of frozen beans.



Notes:
-Beans were tri-color bush bean mix from NorthHaven gardens
-the purple beans were very hard to see growing against the black soil
-only 4 beans were bug eaten out of the whole batch of 6.5 lbs
-the purple beans turn green when blanched.
-I found it easiest to work in batches of about 8 beans when cutting
-I had to drain the excess water out of the bags before sealing and freezing