How to Make Date Wine Easily at Home

date wine it's not just for first dates [Music] when i first heard someone say they want to date wine i thought they meant like you know for on their first date and i thought well wouldn't that just be whatever wine you have on your first date kind of like you know italian wedding soup it's whatever soup they happen to be serving at the wedding that day but um no it's actually a wine made from dates we discovered dates what like a year ago we bought some just to try we're like wow they're really good i think we were looking for high fiber foods and it came up on the list and so we're like wow where have these been in all our life they're not just like a big raisin they're actually much more complex it's like a candy yeah so we made a raisin wine several weeks back like a month ago and it was kind of a spoof kind of a joke and i kept saying we're gonna make a real raisin wine well you know what i decided let's make date wine instead it's very similar i would i would actually say you could probably just substitute the dates for raisins and make the wine and it'll probably be good won't taste exactly the same yeah um okay so what you want to do to do this is we have two pounds of medjool dates if i'm saying that wrong i am very sorry to anyone that would be offended by that but it's m-e-d-j-o-o-l that's medjool i'm an american that's how it comes out and you're going to need some black tea you're going to need a lemon actually just the peel but that's okay but right now that's not a lemon that's an orange she's right this is an orange the lemons are yellow anyway what i need to do now is chop up these dates and as you know this is not my favorite thing to do but i'm going to speed it up so you get to see the whole thing and as i do that i'm pulling the seeds out and i probably don't want to use my good knife anymore totally forgot there was seeds in these the last ones we got didn't have seeds in them did they all right i cut up all the dates i have to make a statement that was one of the most unpleasant food preparation things i've done in a very very long time but they do have these pits inside that you want to take out and don't use a good knife for it because i think i chipped mine not sure anyway we're going to move all this out of the way and now what we want to do is put some hot water over these this is water let's just fresh off the boil pretty much and i'm pouring it over and generally you want to let this steep for about a half an hour you can go a lot longer if you want to and that's perfectly okay but it all actually ends up in the brew anyway so it's not critical to go a super long time a couple things to talk about while this is steeping first we did make a cup of tea what kind of tea did we end up doing this is pg tips tea today and it's just a regular eight ounce mug or whatever ounce mug that is it's not critical it's been steeping for 10 minutes 15 minutes or so it's perfectly okay it'll cool down it's fine we will remove the bag when it goes into the fermenter it's all for adding tannins a lot of people are asking all the time oh can i use this tea or this herbal tea well you can use whatever kind of tea you want just know that it won't be the same result it's not about the flavors in the tea as much as black tea has a lot of tannins that's exactly what we want we want that kind of almost an astringent mouth feel to add to the super sweetness that's going to come from these dates now the dates themselves are going to have a bit of tannins because they have their rinds but because we know they have such a high sugar content that that tannin essence really wasn't going to come through as strong as we'd like that's why we're adding the black tea by the way if you thought they looked gross before they look even worse underwater let me show you that see check that out i mean does that look like something that you really want to put in your mouth i don't think so all right some other words about dates they are roughly two-thirds of their weight in sugar when they're dried so this is something we took into consideration when we created this recipe let me go through the recipe plan for you we did a video on this but i want to give you another example so for instance we used two pounds of dates right and i'm going to show you two different ways how that number two-thirds is accurate for the amount of sugar first if you take two pounds and multiply it out it comes to about 1.3 to 1.4 to be two-thirds right 1.3 to 1.4 pounds that is but now let me go by what it says on the package each package said it was 11 servings at 27 grams each that comes to a total of 594 grams or 1.3 pounds so ta-da there you go science math they work but anyway that 1.3 pounds gives us a 1.060 starting gravity with just the dates alone could we make a wine from that yes it will probably go very dry though and i tend to like sweet wines there's two ways that we can go about fixing that gravity and getting it to a higher level we can just use twice the number of dates which then would be like our raisin wine and i really didn't want to go through that again or we could just use some sugar we're just going to use plain old sugar i think ours is like a raw cane sugar so it's a little bit brownish almost like a muscovado sugar my target gravity for this is one point one two four now if you're wondering how i got that if i take the yeast we're going to use which is 71 beast or 71 b that has a 14 alcohol tolerance if i divide 14 by 135 which is the coefficient for alcohol we get 1.124 or thereabouts for an original gravity if i take that 1.124 number and subtract the 1.060 that's already in the dates by the way that's really hot i get 0.064 left 0.064 divided by 46 points per pound per white sugar and we get 1.4 pounds of white sugar for those of you that didn't get all that i'm going to do a write out of the whole thing right here right now [Music] so there you have it two pounds of our dates and 1.4 pounds of white sugar very very simple now i know what some of you are thinking 71 beasts didn't get its name by being all tame and going to just 14 well here's what i did i actually built in 20 points into that so they could go a little higher but it can also be a sweet wine at 14 which we like so even if it fermented all that out what do i do back sweeten no big deal forget about it so some things that we can do while we're waiting i can get my orange prepared this is not a lemon this is an orange and i'm just going to take a couple of swaths of peel i don't want too much pith just peel uh i could throw that right into this hot water why not living dangerously today boiling our orange peels who would have thunk how much am i using half a lemon's worth maybe orange yeah half an orange worth i got a lemon on the brain i don't know why but you might think what's that going to do and why not just use orange juice well there's a lot of reasons first what will this do it will not add an orange flavor overall to it it will add a little tiny bit of acidity it will add just a touch of a citrus note to kind of balance the super sweet dates because these things are just like it's like biting into sugar i mean they're just pure sugar almost so that little bit of citrus note we didn't want to go too heavy on the acid though because we knew we were bumping up the tannics and with the pyramid of flavor if you uh you have your base notes which is the dates in this case and then the tannins and acids are the highlights that are going to accentuate that base flavor so when you're adding the tannins and acids you want to lean to one side or the other you don't want to have them balanced or just gets too discordant okay so you're supposed to steep this for like 30 minutes it's been like 20 minutes and i'm getting impatient so we're just gonna dump it into the fermenter and let it go it's still gonna be extracting and the figs are still gonna get their thing the purpose in doing this was just to hydrate the figs a bit so that they didn't suck up all the liquid later on now we do know that this is very hot liquid and we do know that this picture doesn't like to pour very well so this is going to be dangerous not as dangerous as she thinks tweet in [Music] not the tea bag though don't put the t-bag in and don't squeeze the bag just saying don't squeeze the back are you ready no tip it some more [Music] okay should i get a spoon or something yeah it worked mostly so now we have a spoon we're gonna try this again there's just no neat way to do this something i want to talk about the little big mouth bubbler we can't get them from amazon they don't sell them so they just come from northern brewer a lot of people have been asking for a link we don't actually have a special link so just go to northern brewer and you can get them yourself that's what we did they're not a sponsor okay so at this point we have a fairly hot liquid inside this fermenter and not a lot else but what i do want to get in here is the sugar at this point so that we can mix it around so let me get my scale so we are adding 1.4 pounds of sugar there we go [Music] all right so now we have all of our sugar in now i need to mix this up which means i need my spoon of unusual sauce okay and i'm just gonna mix it up this is still really hot and has a lot of fruit in there could i have used a bag yes of course i could i don't really like using bags much i would just rather let it sit on the bottom and just you know we dump that in the composter when we're done it's no big deal the bag has never proved to be that much of a convenience to me because you got to pull it out and it makes a mess and it's just crazy why not just siphon down and you're all good personal opinion your mileage may vary people have asked about oxygenation when i'm using the stirring stick instead of shaking it up and they're right there's not as much oxygenation happening if you don't oxygenate enough you could get so2 sulfur dioxide production i've not really had much of a problem with that that's that rotten egg smell so if you get the rotten egg smell it's because you didn't oxidize enough we don't seem to have that problem i don't know why we don't always oxygenate a lot so the only one that i recall getting that on was our rosemary rosemary hydramel yep that one stunk it really did every time i would just do the swirl to degas a little bit yeah i had to apologize and blame it on the dog and because we don't have a dog and because it was a wild ferment and the yeast was was hanging off of the rosemary we were just like is this wrong no it's just my thing i think it's just the reflection yeah it's hard to tell if the sugar is gone or not because there's so much stuff in here now all right i'm gonna leave the spoon in there for the moment because it's just nasty come on you want to rinse it off with some water well we're going to pour that water in here anyway so yeah let's let's do that so we're going to put put some water in go ahead oh look at that she's so smart rinsed it right off like it was nothing but you were gonna use it again yep i'm gonna use it again so we're just gonna put it together how much oh we're gonna go to this line in another video we did measurements on all these things you won't see that yet but we actually shot it before this um and we found out that in this particular which is supposed to be a 1.4 gallon one gallon's about here but up to the rim up here actually no it was like right to here was 1.5 gallons now i'm expecting to get a lot of lease on this so there's going to be some wastage what am i actually wasting water that's it and let me explain how that works i put in enough to get a gallon of wine out of this right there's going to be a lot of lee sitting at the bottom not that much probably easily that much where there's going to be some amount of wine in there but it's also mixed with all the stuff that precipitates out of a brew so i got one gallon now some people will say that i wasted wine no i didn't i wasted the extra water that i put in to make up for the difference of that fruit that's my story and i'm sticking to it what i want to do now is give this a quick stir because the bottom is hot the top is not what i want to do now though is get a temperature reading just to make sure that we don't shock the yeast and possibly kill it looking good we're at 99 degrees so this is a little bit on the warm side it's all right it doesn't really make that much difference you can look it up online and there are adjustments for hydrometer readings but uh in this case we're not taking hydrometer reading because what are we going to take a reading of some of the sugars that came out of the dates and the sugar that we added but what about the rest of the sugars it wouldn't be accurate so we're not even going to bother that's why i went with a target and calculated what's in there now i also know it's not going to be 100 effective at getting every single bit of sugar out of there but that's what the extra 20 points was for and that's what back sweetening is for no big deal but it's good to have an idea and plan it out so we know approximately where this can go we also don't have a priority on what our alcohol amount is in this we always prioritize flavor over everything absolutely so once the visual effects of fermentation stop we're going to go ahead and take a hydrometer reading then just as a reference because then we're going to wait a week and take another one and compare those two notes to see if fermentation is complete right now you can do this as a wild ferment however not the way we did it by adding all that hot water to the dates we killed off any wild yeast that might be there so instead i'm going to be using lalvin 71 beast also known as lalvin 71b and i just happen to have a half packet of it it's like the running joke half packet of love in 71b i probably have five of them in the fridge and i'm just gonna sprinkle this right in unceremoniously so it doesn't really matter and as we've been doing lately because even though there's a lot of nutrition and things in here i'm you know i just have really found that adding yeast hulls has been beneficial so we're going to add a t a half teaspoon of yeast health to this half teaspoon is the prescribed amount for a one gallon batch probably could have gotten away with a little bit less but hey you know what we'll have some really happy yeast this is of course optional for those of you playing along at home oh yeah you don't have to put these tools in it it seems to be helping with the ferments that we've done it in though so i i've started taking a liking to it and we got to do a test on that yeah we plan to we keep saying that but we're really going to do it i just want to break that up a little bit mix it in by the way this smells wonderful already you get the sweet sugary almost a smoky smell from the dates mixed with that little bit of a citrus hit from the orange it's actually really really nice already i think this is going to be a great wine i'm going to put the lid on it try not to cross thread it people have been asking us about these fermenters and what we think so far i would say that the fermenter itself is very high quality okay the glass is thick people have said that they were thin i think that's an old style the new style they are thick what you want to be very careful of is if you put a warm liquid in and let it cool you want to make sure that you tighten this down because it is plastic and the glass seems to shrink faster than the plastic we have found that after cooling many times we'd have to tighten it further yeah the seal being that it's like a foam rather than a real silicone doesn't seem to be as effective as some that we've seen this is better than the buckets we were using i will say that more expensive too but much better than the buckets i'm much happier with this i like the airlock setup and things like that there's a lot to really like about this fermenter i just really wish that the seal was a little bit better that's probably my only real gripe other than that the glass and everything is beautiful i think these are really great fermenters the size is like perfect so what's gonna happen now it's gonna sit for anywhere from an hour to a day depends on how long it takes for this sucker to start up if it starts up pretty quickly you'll see this in just a few seconds and it'll will show the activity and talk about the rest of the things if not it'll be like a day but for you it's still going to be in like five seconds and we're back it's been about an hour and a half as you can see some things have occurred now something else i'm realizing is there's going to be just a ton of lease in here so we're going to end up racking this twice easily twice it'll be like the strawberry jam wine that you haven't seen yet either but that had a ton of fluffy leaves in the bottom then we're just going to rock it out no big deal i'm expecting to get about a gallon out of this we're up past the gallon mark but let me show you what's going on inside first looking at the airlock i mean obviously it's bubbling there's no doubt every once in a while it's like three bubbles too which is kind of kind of neat but as we start looking down inside the fermenter obviously foam i mean that's a sure sign right there it's foaming up that's a croissant forming right there we might even need a blow-off tube for this one again but as we start getting down inside now you can start seeing some of that wispy lease in the bottom there that's the stuff that we don't really like seeing it just takes up a lot of space and it's just kind of a pain so what's gonna happen next it's gonna sit and after that it's gonna sit some more no um what we're gonna do is we're gonna keep an eye on it brian's gonna give it the swirl every once in a while to make sure that everything is agitated well um i expect probably making more of a mess yeah and so after we stop seeing any signs of fermentation we're going to go ahead and take a hydrometer reading and then we're going to wait a week and take another hydrometer reading because we don't have a basis to determine what the actual gravity is we're not really concerned about the alcohol percentage what we're concerned about by taking those two readings is if the fermentation is actually done because as we've said many times before just because there's no activity doesn't necessarily mean it's done and just because there is activity doesn't necessarily mean it's not done it's those numbers that are going to tell you the facts about whether it's done or not now something interesting just happened as i shook this up derek had noticed that it went to a negative pressure it filled up the the wrong side of the airlock and i took the airlock out and reapplied and i'm thinking it could be a little bit of a seal issue in here which we talked about that they could have that problem i don't really know it doesn't really matter all that much to me i like watching the things on the side the croissant forming stuff like that those are more or less your signs of fermentation but at this point like she said this is gonna sit it's gonna sit for a while because you know it's gonna take some time but what you're going to see next in the next installment is going to be all the measurement that we do where we check it then we wait a week check it again then you're going to see us rack it probably twice maybe even three times who knows then you'll see it bottled and that'll be all in the next video so it's going to be a little while people have been asking us lately oh so where's the installment of this we're the installment of that and well we've decided that having fewer videos seems to work better for most people so that's why we went that way uh if that changes we might go back to the old way but i don't think so i like this because we get to show you all the steps along the way a little bit better rather than showing you a 30 second video saying hey we checked it and that's it but if you like this video we have a few hundred videos on our channel of how to make wine cider meat and beer we also have two sister channels city studying garden and grow and city setting bread and beyond thank you for liking and subscribing as always thanks for watching have a great day bye [Music] you

Channel: City Steading Brews

Views: 44,719

Keywords: date wine recipe, date wine, how to make date wine, easy date wine recipe, date wine at home, homemade date wine

Id: JCHOy6oJcdM

Length: 22min 6sec (1326 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 04 2020