Homemade wine from berries
Description
The recipe won't take much time. When making homemade wine from berries, keep in mind that 10-12 kilograms of berries will yield 6-7 liters of wine. I use sugar at a rate of "half a cup per kilogram." By the way, if the wine turns out unsweet, it can be sweetened later—I'll tell you about that now. The drink is ready to serve.
Instructions
- 1
Step 1
Do not wash the berries. Dirt will be removed during filtration, and by washing them, you might get rid of the yeast bacteria essential for any wine.
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Step 2
Mash the berries. You can do this by hand; sometimes I use a blender.
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Step 3
Add sugar.
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Step 4
Mix everything well, leave to ferment for a week in a warm place, stirring the mixture every day to prevent mold from forming. Then strain the juice and thoroughly press the pulp, but do not discard it. It may still be useful for preparing a new batch of wine.
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Step 5
Pour the juice into a jar, and sugar the pulp again, leaving it to ferment for another week. We will get a similar juice as after the first week, which we will then add to the first juice.
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Step 6
And a fermentation lock should be placed on the jar containing the first obtained juice. The simplest fermentation lock can be made, for example, as follows. Drill (or punch) a hole in the center of the lid that will tightly close the jar with fermenting juice, making the hole's diameter equal to the cross-section of the outlet tube (hose).
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Step 7
The tube should then be threaded through the hole in the lid, and its end should be heated with a suitable tool to expand its diameter, ensuring a tight fit in the hole.
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Step 8
That's it, basically. Put the lid on the jar, and place the other end of the tube into any suitable container with water. This way, contact between the future wine and the atmosphere will be minimal, excess gas pressure has a way to escape, and, moreover, there's no risk of the wine "suffocating" from those same gases, which often happens when using a rubber glove.
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Step 9
While the juice is fermenting, keep an eye on the re-sugared pomace. Stir it regularly. Then, after a week, remove the water lock from the first batch of juice and skim the foam that has risen to the surface of the wine using a suitable spoon or sieve.
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Step 10
The second portion of juice, which we extracted from the pomace, is obviously mixed with the first portion of juice, poured into jars, sealed with an airlock, and stored in a dark, but not the coolest place, to continue the process.
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Step 11
Continue filtering the wine every week for a month. Another highly desirable procedure is periodic stimulation (at least once every two weeks after the initial month of vigorous fermentation) of further growth of alcohol-producing yeast with a nitrogen-containing supplement. In winemaking, this is usually done using an aqueous solution of ammonium chloride (sold in pharmacies as "ammonia spirit"): just a drop per liter of wine, followed by thorough mixing. This procedure enhances the activity of the desired yeast, thus preventing fermentation from slowing down and helping achieve the proper alcoholic strength of the wine. After two months, if you taste the wine and find it not very sweet, you may sweeten it. The measured amount of sugar should be placed either into a cotton cloth bag or onto a piece of cotton fabric.
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Step 12
The bag of sugar (or fabric gathered into a bag) should be tied around the neck with an appropriate string and lowered into the container with wine so that the bag is completely submerged in the wine, while remaining as close as possible to the wine's surface.
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Step 13
The sugar will dissolve over the course of about a week. After that, you can bottle the wine, but be careful with sealing: make sure the wine has finished fermenting, otherwise the bottles might explode. Homemade berry wine turns out very rich and vibrant.