Crypto Shakeout Dandelion Wine

What do you do when you see an abundance of all this gold? You get greedy. You grab as much as you can and bottle it up! xD Simples.

I already did the dandelion honey a few years back, but it has always been at the back of my head that I had to eventually make a dandelion wine too. Because reasons, and Bradbury!

The dormant thought resurfaced this Sunday seeing dandelions in peak bloom - it was obvious - this is it - this is the time!

So I grabbed a huge bucket and got down to it. I'm kind of joking about the greed, but I'm also kind of not.. you see I did allow that feeling of greediness to bubble up as I was picking up the flowerheads. What an odd thing to do, you might think. But I found it therapeutic. I found my greed being met with the kind of abundance that fed it without a flinch and then some. Nature had more for me than I could ever take or need.

Two birds with one stone if you ask me. I got to feed my greed monster inside and the process of picking up the dandelions was far from boring or monotonous.

It says so in the recipe - you got to document everything you're doing in case something goes wrong.. ..or right for that matter. So this is me - trying my hand at making dandelion wine for the first time ever.

_{My supervisor.}

Once the greed is satiated then the FUN part starts!

Because you actually want the wine to be drinkable, you only need the flower petals for this. Otherwise, it would get insufferably bitter, and that's not what we're going for here.

So.. some coffee and a good audiobook to a rescue - "Maps of Meaning" by Jordan B. Peterson, if you must ask - and voila! Easy peasy lemon squeezy! Talking about lemons.. no, wait, they come into the picture much later.. we're not there just yet.

So for 20L you need 5kg of sugar. Boil the sugar water and let it cool. Mix in the petals and leave for 3 days. Several recipes had contradicting info in them, but that is what I went for.

Come the crypto shakeout day and it's time to remove petals. Well, as much as possible of them at least.

Add lemons (sources differ on how many .. from 2 to 8!! I had 2 before I read about 8 so, I had to make do with what I had) and pack 1 (yeast) and pack 5 (citric acid). Apparently, if it is not acidy enough it can go into vinegar.. and we'd like to avoid that scenario.

Fingers crossed mine ended up acidy enough. No promises though. This can go south at any stage of the process so if I fail miserably I'll have at least some basis of info for the next time I dare to venture into this madness. The packages 2-4 will come into play later on after roughly 5-10 days..

So all of this goes into the 20L bottle and under the bubble..