If you want to impress your guests at your next dinner party, try serving them each a glass of your own home brewed wild berry wine. This wine is fun to prepare, nice to drink and a pleasure to serve. Read on to learn brew simple wild berry wine.
Instructions
Prepare Your Wine
1. Clean the berries, discarding any that are not perfectly ripe. Place the cleaned berries into two or three cheesecloth straining bags, separating each type of berry. Tie the bags closed and put them into the pail.
2. Add 6 lbs. of sugar to 1 1/2 gallons of water in a large pot. Put the pot on high heat on the stove and stir it well. Remove the pot from the heat as soon as the sugar dissolves.
3. Crush the berries and pour the sugar water over them. Add 2 tsp. of the acid blend, 3 tsp. of the yeast nutrient and another gallon of water. Cover the pail and let it sit until the mixture cools.
4. Stir in three crushed Campden tablets, cover the pail again and let the mixture sit for 12 hours. Stir in the 1 1/2 tsp. of pectic enzyme. Cover the mixture and let it sit for another 12 hours.
5. Mix in one packet of the wine yeast, stir well and recover the pail.
6. Uncover the pail twice a day for the next five days to squeeze the bags. This will help extract the juice from the berries. Remove the bags of berries from the primary after five days.
7. Squeeze the bags once more to extract the maximum amount of juice. Add the juice to the pail and let it sit overnight to let the sediment settle to the bottom.
Ferment Your Wine
8. Insert a fine mesh screen into your funnel to catch any large bits of sediment. Stir the wine and pour it through a large funnel into a fermenting bottle. Fit the bottle with an airlock.
9. Wait seven days. Top off the wine with water and refit the airlock. Repeat after one month, two months and finally, after three months. Wait three more months before completing the final step.
10. Taste your wild berry wine, add sugar or honey if necessary, let it sit 10 days and pour it through your funnel into wine bottles. Enjoy.
Tags: berry wine, wild berry, five days, funnel into, pour through