Making Strawberry Wine - Its Incredible!

in the last two days we picked 28 pounds of strawberries I like strawberries and cream as much as the next person we loved Ryan we loved making strawberry jam but there's still a lot left so let's make some strawberry wine [Music] hello welcome during this country life welcome to the kitchen welcome to strawberry wine making we recently did a series of videos on country wines and we covered as an example elderflower wine and in Episode one of them we talked about gathering the flowers we talked about making a must which is the basis the liquid that we're gonna ferment and episode 2 we talked about getting a yeast starter culture going to brewing vessels and airlocks and starting fermentation and in episode 3 we talked about clearing the wine racking it off bottling wine etc so we've covered the basics in that series of videos and if you've never done any country winemaking I'd recommend have a look at them but fruit winemaking is a little bit different so today we're gonna make some strawberry wine let's get going the recipe we give you to make strawberry wine is enough for 12 bottles to demijohns 9 liters or 2 gallons depending on your measurement of choice let's say it's enough for 12 standard wine bottles first thing we're gonna need is a lot of strawberries specifically 4 kilos we pour those into clean disinfected brewing vessel i disinfected by using 8 cup full of bleach filling the vessel with water leaving it for 30 minutes and then rinsing twice so in there 4 kilos of strawberries first thing we have to do to get the juice out of our strawberries to make the wine is break them up the whole berries quite hard to extract these from so break them up the easiest tool to use for that is a potato masher having thoroughly mashed your strawberries get yourself a big wooden spoon and pad 3 kilos of sugar to your 4 kilos of strawberries mix it up well and this sugar will serve to grow the liquid out of the smashed strawberry pop and we will leave that to do its work for a couple of hours after a couple of hours when the sugars drawn a lot of juice out of the strawberries pour on 8 liters of boiling water and then give the whole lot a really good stir make sure all the sugar is dissolved put a lid on it leave it for 24 hours before we get into straining off our fruit and carrying on with the wine make now just like to show you this device this is a big over sink what's called a convertible colander made by a firm called ox a good grips these little legs stand it up so you can stand it in the base you sink for straining stuff and you can just pull your strawberries in keep running and wash them off you can also extend those legs so that it spans over the top of the sink and actually the legs hold it up that's very useful again for cleaning all our produce washing off carrots and anything that might want to be like that outside it also means it can span a 5-gallon bucket so terribly useful for straining or fruit it's such a or Midian country wines if you ever see one like it I would grab it I'm going to be honest here I've left this a couple of days longer than I normally would life got in the way this is given rise there to something quite interesting if you have a look around the edge of the strawberries you can see there's some bubbles forming and that's because wild yeasts naturally present on the strawberries have started the fermentation process that's not problem we will add proper general purpose wine yeast anyway because some of the wild yeasts ferment at a very low alcohol level so I'd like this to meant out to about seven twelve thirteen percent alcohol so either one yeast but it does show you if you don't have one yeast with a lot of fruits you can still get a very good country wine the next step of the process that is to string off the fruit pulp from the liquid must all the strawberry flavors now in the liquid we need to get rid of the fruit pulp in order to start fermenting properly I cannot suggest this strongly enough use a two-stage straining process a bit coarse colander to get rid of the bulk of the fruit pulp then a fine muslin to get rid of any small particles and if you go straight to the fine straining the coarse stuff just clogs the muslin if you don't do the fine straining you'll end up with a cloudy one so let's look at that two-stage process first part then of the straining process is to use a coarse colander and just use a jug to bail the fruit from our enthusing vessel into a clean sterilized secondary vessel [Music] [Applause] once you've strained through the colander you've got rid of all the big freak lumps but you can see from this muster that there are still smaller fruit fibers suspended in the liquid they're released when we crush the fruit to release the juice it's an inevitable part of the process but we need to restrain with a finer mesh in order to get rid of them the final filter I use is the same colander with a couple of layers of muzzling put over the top and what I've done before starting this is to wash out the original bucket wash very well the colander and then line it with a couple of layers of muslin held in place with some elastic bands and then that is ready to bail the juice the other way through the muslin to get rid of a lot of the finer particles you can already see just how much fine material that Muslims trapping give it a good amount of time to drip through you might need to wash off the muslin several times during this process when you can hear the filter just dripping rather than the liquid gushing through it's time to wash your filter you can see here at the bottom left I've scraped together a lot of the almost jelly like smaller fruit particles that this kind of filtration has trapped try to imagine how difficult it is to settle that amount and a damage on the Mac is a tiny fraction and what a demijohn would contain so this fine filtration really will improve the quality of your line the stage is optional fruit contains to a greater or lesser degree depending on the fruit pectin pectin is the setting agent in Jam and we talked about it in some detail in our Goodridge Nvidia I would recommend if you want to understand the science of pectin go and take a look at that video a so many different local pectin is that it makes wine cloudy and particularly is a problem with a high packing fruit and where we've used heat dissolve out fruit flavors as we did in this recipe we used hot water on our strawberries to help dissolve out the flame and now strawberries aren't overly high in pectin but it's still useful if we can to remove that pectin to prevent cloudiness later and the way we do that is the use of our natural enzyme called pectin azor Peck tic enzyme you can buy from homebrew shops for this recipe what we need to do is add four level teaspoons assuming we're making 12 bottles to half a cup a warm water dissolve it add it to our Waring must and leave it for 24 hours and enzyme then break down any pets in this naturally present in the fruit so in this glass of warm water there are four teaspoons or petkins on I just stir that until it's fully dissolved and this is the reason we do it in a glass so that you can tap in the glass when it's fully dissolved in a red liquid a large volume a liquid it's hard to tell that the peptic enzyme hasn't just settled to the bottom given the peptic enzone 24 hours to break down any pectin and now it's time to start fermentation on our strawberry one I'm gonna use the general purpose one nice and I'm going to add some yeast nutrient it's not that vehicles usually use nutrient with berry wines is usually enough nutrients in the berries themselves with flower wines it's vital but to be honest it does no harm and it's just as easy to add some to be sure for best results what I do is I put my yeast and yeast nutrient measures measuring spoons into a glass of just warm orange juice and I give the whole thing mr. Hoge bacillus is that one juices natural food sugars in it it won't hurt these cities here overflowing with one what it does is it allows the yeast to rehydrate begin fermenting and come up to temperature before we add it to the wine must so there's less of a shock when it's poured into a large volume of liquid you can also check the yeast is working we'll have a look at that shortly but we should be able to tell by seeing bubbles rising in the orange juice another thing we're going to add to our wine is some talent cannon is found in grape skins it gives that a stringent quality that you get with red wines that Sun almost coats your teeth but a little bit of it really improves the complexity of the one we're gonna add the quarter of a teaspoon of wine talent if you haven't gotten me through some strong black tea and I had one spoon for two demijohns 1/2 teaspoon per demijohn strong black tea TMX the last thing we can add to our strong must is two teaspoons of citric acid one per damage on we haven't got any use the juice of a lemon to replace one teaspoon of citric acid yeast requires a slightly acidic environment in which to work and what we're doing here is just raising the acidity because there's almost nervous sitting in strawberries in this class I've got one teaspoon of citric acid for each damage up there two teaspoons and 1/8 of a teaspoon of wine tanning so that's a quarter teaspoon for our two demijohns and all I'm doing is dissolving I have found in the past wine tanning can be a little bit hard to dissolve and if you just dump it in the wine must it can settle as a clump to the bottom and you don't even realize that it hasn't dissolved properly so I find dissolving at outside the morning last in a glass of warm water far more effective yes is that one must doesn't it look a fabulous camera and I just love the camera strawberry one so let's add in a yeast yeast nutrient the wine tannin and the citric acid here we go ants yeast culture and in goes the wine tannin and the citric acid so haven't mix the ingredients in well we're gonna let that ferment for a couple of days this is what's called primary fermentation and the Sun fruit wines it's quite violent and if you put it in a demijohn with no lock it'll foam through the airlock because it's fermenting so hard so just make sure it's settled down to a nice steady fermentation before we do any transfer into a damage on this device is a hydrometer when you're making fruit wines particularly but in reality all wines it can be useful to measure what's called the gravity of the line before and after fermentation there's then a calculation you can do which will tell you how much alcohol is in the wine given that fruit sugars very it's very useful to know and it can allow you with more experience to adjust the amount of sugar that you add to a wine to get the strength of one you want it's very simple it's a way to the bottom and a scale on the neck and what happens is it will sink to a different level depending on the level of material that's dissolved in the liquid that you're floating it in and you can take a reading from this scale and that determines what's called the specific gravity and the difference between the original gravity final gravity allows you to work out how much sugar has been converted let's never go there you can see the hydrometer floating in the glass and you can see that it's possible if you sort of get a high level that you can read off from the scale a specific gravity of your must miles is currently reading 1.09 five water is 11.00 whoa whoa whoa and what we're reading there is the amount of dissolved material in the water and the difference once we have the alcohol shows how much sugars converted it's quite a simple process although people are often scared of it so 1.09 five will measure it again when fermentation finishes and this is why we do a primary fermentation in a bucket you can see the froth forming is this violently ferments out the initial free sugar that we'll just phone through the air nor can i damage them so we give it a day or two in the bucket till that calms down and then we'll transfer to a damaged young in our elderflower wine series we explain the process of racking off why using a siphon to leave the sediment behind is helpful and how particular type of siphon avoid sucking out disturbed sediment same rules apply here we may not be siphoning off or racking off to use the correct term from one demijohn to another but we want to leave as much sediment behind in the primary fermenting vessel as we can after racking it off into the damaged ends and go wrap each demijohn in brown paper people ask a lot why I do that well this is going to be a delicate pink wine and if I leave that in bright sunshine but over a month most of that pinkness will get bleached out and it will just look like water so the brown paper just protects the color of the wine now this stage of the fermentation process I'm going to leave a large amount of headspace they go new technically to the amount of room at the top of the demijohn and leave a decent amount of head space in case it foams during secondary fermentation that means I'm going to have to use three Demi Jones as soon as I'm sure it's calm I will top that demijohn up more towards the net well now here we go a few days in for menteng away beautifully so our strawberry wine is well on the way and from this point on the process of racking and fining and filtering and bottling and all that good stuff is very much the same as our elder flower wine recipe so I'll put a link to that above and if you want to jump ahead to know how that's done just have a look at that other than the color process is the same one point I did one mate let's take a look for this one this obviously as you can see fermenting still quite violently that's wrong spree and black debris wine why girls brewing blackberry because I didn't have quite enough blackberries to do twelve bottles so we added some of our raspberries and that's the point Ron gets a fruit binds the process of fruit lines is almost identical doesn't know what you use if it's a good jamming fruit like a black currant really really do consider using peptic enzyme because it will make the wine cloudy that amount of pectin but general principles the way it's done is very much the same whether you're making blackberry wine or dams and it doesn't matter at all so feel free to take this process and experiment you can also experiment with different sugars I think if it's a pure blackberry wine the darker sugar like a Demerara is really nice gives it a richness and a body that it wouldn't otherwise have we will do a quick update at some point so that we can measure the specific gravity at the end of fermentation process and we can calculate the amount of alcohol in the wine and we can take it quick like a bottling and clearing again if you like if you're enjoying this kind of process can you take two seconds just down there give us a thumbs up if you want to see the second part of this series or indeed all the other videos that we produce click the subscribe and icon and the bell next to it and you'll hear when we post anything at all but whatever you do come back soo soon take care you you [Music]

Channel: English Country Life

Views: 84,767

Keywords: Good Life, Homestead, Wine, Country Wine, Hedgerow wine, Brewing, Fermentation, Home Brew, Home Made Wine, Strawberry Wine, Berry Wine, Fruit Wine

Id: tdqRrdihr3c

Length: 19min 16sec (1156 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 23 2019