Make Elderberry Wine with this Easy Recipe! Join us @idamandahomestead4221

[Music] foreign hello and welcome to another episode of I demand Homestead my name is Amanda today what we're going to do is we're going to show you how to make Elderberry wine and Elderberry wine makes a beautiful kind of red wine if you don't live somewhere where red wine grapes grow very easily like we don't here in Southern Ontario in Canada it's just not warm enough for them then elderberries make a really nice substitute for a red wine that you can grow in your own backyard in fact we started with just three Elderberry plants and they within three years they were huge probably at least 12 feet tall and from those three plants we got about two bushels of elderberries and elderberries they um they grow kind of on a floret and as you can see this is kind of when you want to harvest them when they're really kind of dark purple beautiful berries like that so then you pick you just snip off the whole floret you bring it inside in your bucket or whatever and then you strip off the berries with a fork and then once you do that you wash your berries and depending on what you want to do you either use them right then or you do what I did which is you freeze them okay we had so many elderberries and it was right kind of at the tail end of summer for us that it just I just didn't have time to do anything with them at that point but freezing them is actually a really great idea because then the juice comes out much more easily anyhow elderberries are good for lots of different things you can make them into syrup which is really effective in fighting colds and flus you can make them into pies you can kind of put them in muffins or whatever the trick with elderberries is you cannot eat them raw that's important because they are slightly toxic okay so they make you feel a little bit sick you can have a few of them if you want but not too many but don't let that kind of deter you from growing elderberries because potatoes you can't eat raw either because they're a little bit toxic but everybody's okay with eating potatoes so you just need to make sure you cook these first all right so today what we're going to do is we're going to make a batch of wine which is a 5 gallon batch of wine all right so that's going to be about enough for about 28 bottles of wine so based on my calculations I'm going to need about 13 pounds of elderberries and luckily for me I have packaged these in one pound bags which means that it's really easy for me whenever I'm making any kind of recipe just to pull the right amount out okay so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to open up these bags I'm going to put them into my big sanitized primary fermenter and then we'll show you how we go from there all right see you in a minute okay so here is our 23 liter primary fermenter and it is full of elderberries all right so as I said before um you do need to kind of cook these berries a little bit so what we're going to do is we're actually going to cover the berries and the juice with some boiling water um so what I've got going on it's a bit rich is boiling and so what we're going to do is we're going to pour that on top of the berries the elderberries and the juice okay so now what we're going to do is we're actually going to leave this um I'll put the the lid on of our fermenter there and we're going to leave this until it comes to room temperature all right so here we are now we're day two our um Elderberry juice has cooled down to room temperature and now we are going to add a few more things to it before we throw in our yeast okay so the first thing we want to do is add a little bit more sugar so elderberries don't have enough sugar to kind of make a strong enough wine because we're aiming for that 12 percent so I'm going to put in Sugar now um we're supposed to put in about one pound well maybe a little bit less maybe about two-thirds the amount of sugar as the number of pounds of elderberries so if we're gonna do about we'll round up 15 pounds of elderberries then we need about 10 pounds of sugar okay I'm gonna do this a little bit slowly because um last time I made this I I put too much sugar in and man it was a strong wine a little bit too much so I'm gonna do this a bit slow and add it kind of a bit at a time so you can check the amount of potential alcohol with something called a hydrometer okay which is actually a really useful thing if you're going to get into making wine because what it has potential percent of alcohol okay and that will tell you if you're if your fermentation goes all the way through to dry how much alcohol you should end up with okay so that that way you could actually be pretty precise all right so we want to add sugar we're going to check our alcohol with our hydrometer the other thing we're going to do is we're going to put some pectin enzyme in there and that's to kind of help break down the pectin because um the pectin can the pectin can cause your wine to be cloudy so that's why we want that we're going to put in the juice of two lemons because the elderberries don't have quite enough acidity and that'll kind of make for a better flavored Wine Not 100 necessary but we like it and then the last thing we're going to do is we're going to put in something called um yeast nutrient and again this is just because it helps to kind of give the yeast all the vitamins and and um all the stuff that it needs to grow properly and helps that yeast keep going so that it will carry through the fermentation all the way okay so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to sterilize a stirring spoon and I'm going to sterilize my hydrometer and then we're going to start adding our sugar in and see where we are okay so here is our Elderberry juice looks pretty darn good to me and all the berries have kind of settled down to the bottom here okay we'll filter all them out we'll strain them all out later so we don't really need to worry about that the nice thing is that the skins of the Elderberry will actually give us some nice tannins in here which will really make a nice wine okay so we're going to start with our juice of two lemons put that in there and then I'm going to start with I think I need about 10 pounds of sugar I'm going to start with about eight and then we'll take a measurement reading [Music] you could do this while the berries were still warm and your sugar would probably dissolve faster I didn't have the sugar at the time so I didn't do that but you certainly could do that when you pour in the boiling water you could put your sugar in at the same time and then it would melt faster as it is I'm going to probably have to wait a little bit and stir this a few times before I take that measurement reading wow that's a lot of sugar people that's a good thing it's gonna turn into alcohol okay now we will add our pectin enzyme all right and I'm going to put in I'm going to put in a tablespoon of pectin enzyme and again that's to break down the pectin in a juice and then we're going to put in two tablespoons of the yeast nutrient all right and then we're going to stir that up really really well and I am not going to throw in my yeast until I know that I've got the right amount of sugar so here we are um I actually did add that last two pounds of sugar into there just because the potential alcohol wasn't quite as high as I wanted if we come in nice and close and it's sitting about 15 percent you can kind of just see the 15 line there okay 15 potential alcohol and that's actually kind of not too bad because um when I strain this out I'm going to probably have to add a little bit more water into it to make up the right amount of um liquid so that it fills up the the carboy that we're going to wrap this into so it's okay if it's a little bit higher better that than too low so that that way you can add a little bit more water if you need to okay so now what we're going to do is we are going to sprinkle our wine yeast onto this we're just going to kind of taut open this around here okay like so all right perfect and then I'm going to and I'm putting in a whole package and then I'm going to lightly just stir it in just a little bit not too much because it does need the oxygen so it's good to kind of have it at the top but I found that by stirring it in just a smidge oh and by the way I've seen some rest recipes where you have to add sulfur to this um but you don't need to do that here because we've had these berries Frozen and so all kind of foreign yeast or bacteria would have been killed by that okay so now what we'll do is I'm going to cover this back up I'm going to put it in a warm location and then what we'll do is we'll come back in a couple of days so you can kind of see how it started to ferment and then we'll probably need to wait for about two weeks or so for that fermentation to be complete and we'll know when it's complete because that hydrometer hopefully will register zero percent alcohol at that point all right so we'll come back in a couple of days and see how we're doing all right we are now um two days after we started our batch of wine and what I have been doing is I've been taking that long-handled um spoon and sanitizing it every day and actually kind of um stirring this every day which is what you want to do so let's take a look at what we've got here if you can see all the seeds are right up on the top I don't know if you can hear that that's the sound of tons of bubbles because it is fermenting really really well I'm just going to give this a stir and again I'm doing that every day all right so we'll bring you back to do another video once all of that is done so thank you for joining me another episode of I demand Homestead if you enjoyed this video please feel free to press the Subscribe button and also the notification Bell so that that way you always know when I'm going to post another video as I said what I'll do in a couple of weeks time when the fermentation is done we'll bring you back and then we'll show you how we filter out the elderberries as well as racket into another container and then later on probably in about another five and a half weeks we'll show you how we bottle it alright so everybody have a great day and we'll see you again soon bye [Music] foreign

Channel: I Damanda Homestead

Views: 5,298

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Id: F12lbNEpZrk

Length: 12min 26sec (746 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 24 2023