Sloe wine
Description
The wine made from sloe berries turns out very aromatic, with a pronounced berry fragrance. It's best to mix sloe with plums to eliminate excessive viscosity and enrich the wine with an amazing aroma. The homemade alcohol takes about 1.5 months to prepare and results in a truly wonderful taste.
Instructions
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Step 1
1. Sloe is a wild plum, and not everyone can consume it in its pure form due to its strong astringency. That's why sloe is usually processed and used to make homemade wine. Today I'll tell you how I made wine from sloe with the addition of plums, which helped reduce the astringency and enriched the alcohol's aroma. Plum brandy is a noble semi-sweet spirit that pairs perfectly with meat. So, after harvesting the berries, let them slightly dry out, but never wash them. I leave the berries for about 4 days under the open sky, provided the weather is sunny. During this time, yeast fungi develop on the sloe berries, and these yeasts will ferment the wine.
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Step 2
2. The next step is to obtain a uniform mass from the berries. To do this, place them into a container and crush them manually. Add an equal amount of clean water (1:1) to the resulting pulp. Cover the container with gauze and set it aside for now. When foam and bubbles appear on the surface, this indicates the beginning of the fermentation process. On approximately the 5th to 10th day, the pomace will begin to separate from the mixture of water and juice. This is the signal to start filtering the wine into a special container for fermentation.
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Step 3
3. The resulting mixture is strained through cheesecloth. Initially, I strained it through three layers of cheesecloth, and the thickest mixture—through a fine sieve. Any undissolved residue is discarded.
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Step 4
4. This process is quite labor-intensive, but it is very important to strain everything carefully.
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Step 5
5. Now we need to add sugar to the juice: 250g for semi-dry or dry wine, and 350g for semi-sweet or sweet wine. The sugar is dissolved directly in the juice. Note that the fermentation vessel should be filled no more than 75%, as foam will form during fermentation. After that, the container is closed and fitted with a simple water lock (I made mine using a piece of tubing, one end of which goes into the vessel and the other into a container of water). The fermentation process takes about a month and a half at a temperature of 20–25 degrees Celsius.
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Step 6
6. When the gas release stops and the wine ceases to bubble, it can be bottled for further aging.
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Step 7
7. This is the beautiful finished wine made from sloe berries.