Blackberry wine is the perfect way to make use of a huge crop of summer blackberries. This one-gallon blackberry wine recipe can easily be increased to make a full 5-gallon batch if you have plenty on hand.
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Fermenting
How to Make Apple Scrap Vinegar
Cooking with apples often means a lot of apple peels find their way into the compost pile. Apple scrap vinegar is a way to get one more use out of something that would otherwise go to waste. Make no mistake, homemade apple scrap vinegar isn’t real apple cider vinegar by any stretch of the imagination, but it is still tasty.
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Homemade Cranberry Wine
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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Homemade Pomegranate Wine
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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How to Make Pear Cider (Hard or Sweet)
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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How to Make Small Batch Wine
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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Homemade Peach Wine
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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Rhubarb Mead (Honey Wine)
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 Capers
Capers are a staple of our home cooking, and we eat them enough that I decided to learn how to grow them myself. I was disappointed to learn that they need a long growing season and lots of heat to thrive, so no luck in Vermont.
Traditional capers are the pickled flower buds of a heat-loving Mediterranean shrub, but there are a number of other pickled flower buds that taste remarkably similar.
Dandelions produce a small, caper sized flower bud early in spring before the stem shoots skyward and opens into a flower. If picked small enough, dandelion buds can be made into convincing dandelion capers. That’s a homemade caper that just about anyone can grow!
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Dandelion Wine Recipe
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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