Your Practical Guide To Self Reliant Living
After sampling cranberry wine at a local vineyard, I was determined to make my own. It’s warm, fruity and well balanced with just enough tart astringency to give it character. Instead of topping my meal with cranberry sauce, once this wine has aged properly I’ll be drinking my cranberries in as homemade cranberry wine.
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Pomegranate wine is easy to make at home with fresh pomegranates or pomegranate juice. It’s a traditional drink in eastern Europe and the middle east, and it’s still made today. Commercial bottles of pomegranate wine generally sell for more than $20 each and tend to be very dry and acidic. Making pomegranate wine at home costs about $2 per bottle, and you can adjust the sweetness to your own tastes.
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Autumn is cider season, but that means more than apple cider. Pear cider is a delicious way to enjoy the season and preserve pears at the same time. While the process of making pear cider is similar to making apple cider, the taste is as unique as a pear itself. Whether you enjoy pear cider fresh or ferment it into hard pear cider (known as perry), it’s well worth the effort.
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Home winemaking is both fun and tasty, but the bottles can add up quickly. A single 5-gallon bath produces around 20 bottles of wine, and when I started making homemade wine I wanted to ferment everything I could get my hands on. After a few years, I had more than 200 bottles of wine in my basement.
Even with a full basement, I was still excited about brewing, but I simply can’t drink as much as I’d like to make. Brewing a small batch allows you to experiment with new flavors without spending a fortune on ingredients or turning your liver into pulp.
Small Batch Black Raspberry Wine
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When the peaches come in, our preservation kitchen goes into overdrive. Peaches are high sugar and high acid, which makes them perfect for canning, but that also makes them ideal for homemade peach wine. Once the canned peaches are put up, it’s time to break out the fermenter.
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Mead is a staple in our homebrew routine, and we’ve been making honey wines for over a decade. When it was time to brew another batch with rhubarb, I of course reached for the honey and started a bubbly honey based batch of homemade rhubarb mead. But wait…what if I want to taste the rhubarb, just the subtle delicious tangy notes of rhubarb, without the distraction and complexity of honey? Thus, why not. It’s time to make a rhubarb wine.
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Go looking for birch beer these days and you’ll find sugary sweet soda with just a few drops of birch oil added. That wasn’t always the case, and real birch beer, alcoholic birch beer, has been brewed for 100’s of years. Birch beer, birch wine and birch mead were made just about anywhere in the world birch trees grow.
Birch sap runs later in the spring than maple, when the temperatures are consistently above freezing. With all that warmth, it’s hard to keep birch sap from fermenting, so if you’re tapping birch trees, you might as well go with it.
The English make a birch beer with birch sap and sugar, and the Russians make a type of quick mead, called medovukha, from birch sap and honey. But why add other sugars? Birch syrup is sweet and tasty, and birch sap is plentiful. Why not make a pure birch beer, more like a birch wine almost, with just concentrated birch sap?
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Rhubarb has a sweet-tart flavor that comes through beautifully in homemade rhubarb mead. Though it’s technically a vegetable, the stalks contain both sugar and acid, which gives them a fruit-like flavor. That acidic sweetness makes them a good candidate for brewing.
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Dandelion wine captures the essence of summer. Sweet, floral and with subtle notes of honey, dandelion wine is tasty enough to bring out the forager in anyone. It takes quite a few dandelions to make wine, so it’s best to enlist the help of as many small children as possible.
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Mango wine has a reputation for capturing the very essence of mango in a light and sweet summer wine. I’ll ferment just about anything that’ll fit in a carboy, but somehow I’ve never gotten around to making it.
After 10 years of home brewing, adding yeast to anything with even a hint of promise, we always make our first batches small. I’ve made a few too many toxic 5-gallon batches to waste ingredients before I have a winning recipe. Single bottle quart batches are a great way to refine a recipe before investing a lot of money in homemade wine.
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