Hey Again, Steemitizens!
It's Blackberry season on my land in the western North Carolina Blue Ridge Mountains!
My 17 acre mountainside homestead is absolutely covered in acres of blackberry bushes. For about 8 months a year I can't stand them. It makes it impossible to cross many pieces of my land without wearing battle armor against the thorns of the densely packed and long free ranging blackberry plants that cover my hillsides and roadsides across the various parts of my acreage.
But for two months a year or so, from about now until late July when the people, birds, bears and other berry loving critters have finally cleaned off the plants of all viable and edible berries, life is a blackberry dream here on the SirCorkstead.
So what do you do when life hands you hundreds of gallons of blackberries?
Obviously quite a few options come to mind. Some of the alternatives for this abundant annual crop include:
Letting friends and family come fill 5 gallon buckets until their hands are purple with juice, their arms are torn up from the berry bush briers and they are sunburned and mosquito bitten and picking ticks off their jeans all the way home. I always have a few folks bring their families up for this kind of "fun" with such sweet delicious rewards for the effort and pains that come with them.
Sell those suckers! My neighbor has the exact same kind of land of course, so he will work tirelessly around his regular job hours to pick and pack hundreds of gallons of berries from his farm, and with my permission, mine as well. I have far more than one man could ever imagine gathering himself. Then he lists them on places like Facebook and Craigslist and other local advertising sources and sells them for $15 USD a gallon. Last year, he built a new barn with the blackberry money. But he's a hard working guy much younger than me, and he enjoys the labor after a day "at the office." And his family enjoys the harvest of extra money as well! But they work harder at this enterprise than I care to join them in.
Make a LOT of pies and baked berry pastries and things like that. Well, if I could I would, but other than making some slice and bake cookies or a pan of brownies (yes, I like the secret ingredient variety, myself!) I am not much of a chef, and my off-grid cooking equipment doesn't exactly make things easy for elaborate cooking operations. I have no oven, unless I make a temporary one out of stacked bricks over an open fire outdoors, which I sometimes do for pizzas or those wonderful slice and bake cookies! :D
Make LOTS of wine. OK, this isn't hard and while I'm not a big "drinker" and in fact I almost never DO drink, I am not against it either, and when I can enjoy a home made product made on my own land with my own resources (mostly) than I definitely become more in favor of drinking alcohol under those circumstances, for sure!
I pursue a couple of these options myself, with my favorite being a big batch of blackberry wine that I make every summer. I make about 5 gallons at a time, limited in amount only due to my small set of fermentation equipment which will only support making 5 gallons without me purchasing more fermenting containers.
I follow an amazingly simple recipe which many who brew or ferment will sneer at, and call "jail house hooch" and I'm totally okay with that, because I am NOT a wine snob at all and I laugh right back at those types anyway. This stuff tastes great and gets you drunk. In my drinking world, as meager as my drinking amount is, that's a win! Why pay $100 for some bottle of fancy wine and then pee it away, when you can make 5 gallons of free homemade, fruit wine and .... pee it away for free!
Here are some pictures of my process. Not a complete pictorial how-to, just some of the steps I took the time to photograph during the making my last batch.
I will include a copy of my recipe at the end of the photo sequence and then you can try this yourself. You can scale the amounts up and down in proportionate ratios and make any amount. You can even apparently use frozen berries from the store, and certainly fresh ones from the produce department or farmer's market, if you do not have a local source growing plentiful berries that you can easily pick from nearby your location.
Some of the steps in making Blackberry wine look like this:
First you have to wait till they get ripe. This photo of a North American Wild Blackberry bush is mostly covered in not-yet-ripe red berries, but you can see few black ones getting ready for a picking! I love sampling these all day as I wander around my land doing chores and enjoying the place. You don't always have to have a drink with you on a hot day, when you can just grab some juicy berries to munch on while you work outdoors right next to them everywhere.
If you are impatient and the berries are not getting ripe fast enough for you, then you can always pick up a bottle of lovely Blackberry infused Whiskey and whet your appetite for the berry wine with a little shot or two. Finish the whole bottle alone and it will be easy to sleep until the rest of the fresh berries get ripe too! But don't drink and pick blackberries! You need to be awake and watching for copperhead snakes, timber rattle snakes and other bad news when you are out in my rough country berry patch!
Eventually though, they WILL get ripe and you can get to picking them! In this next shot, taken much later after the last shot, I have found another brand of Blackberry Infused Whiskey to try and I'm about to enjoy some with a sampling of this year's berry batch first picking. I will be able to continue to pick berries for about a month, before the picking by my friends and I plus the birds and bears and things finish them all off for the season.
I am missing a few pics in the process from here on out, but here are some more of some of the more fun parts.
You'll need about 20-25 pounds of fresh berries in a 10 gallon bucket. The you need to boil some sugar and water, and then you need to combine ALL of that and crush the crap out of the berries. Here you will see me using none other than a store bought blackberry wine bottle and a plastic mop bucket (purchased new and basically field sterilized with scalding water in my front yard) as a mortar and pestle type of crushing setup. Once you have finally crushed the berries to a pulp and cant really crush them any further, you can strain the sugar, water, berry juice mix through a colander lined with coffee filters and into another bucket. Then strain one more time and into your sterilized glass or plastic fermentation container of choice.
CRUSH THOSE BERRIES BABY! This is the fun part! Until it gets tedious, that is, but it must be done!
This is where I am current dissolving the sugar into the water over in the silver pot over a camp stove, simmering the water to dissolve the multiple pounds of sugar into it quickly.
Yummy, extremely sugary water! The basis of candy, hummingbird food and delicious homemade wine!
Once you've beaten the berries to death, and melted all the sugar into the water while you were crushing berries, you can combine them and do a little bit more last minute crushing and mixing.
This is the glass carboy and airlock or vapor lock lid.
That's about all the pictures I have for now of ME making wine, but you can find hundreds of websites and videos online that provide much more detailed and elaborate instructions and information. I'd advise checking out several before you dig into this tasty project!
Here is a basic recipe that works for me. You can many variations online and also guidelines for other kinds of fruit, which all follow more or less the same basic process and ingredient ratios.
For a 5 gallon (19 liter) batch:
About 25 pounds of berries.
Pick them or buy them, it doesn't matter! But buying them might get kind of expensive!
9 to 10 lb cane or corn sugar
I use cheap grocery store white cane sugar, myself!
3 gallons of clean water
Mine comes straight from my mountain spring but if you live on tap water, I'd recommend picking up some bottled spring water for this. It's just "better" for no particular reason.
20 grams of dry yeast -
I actually SHOULD use fancy wine or champagne yeasts you can buy online, but I actually just buy the small packets at the grocery store of baking yeast, usually Fleischmanns Active Dry Yeast or Red Star, and again, wine snobs and brew snobs will LAUGH and scorn this, but it works, and it's cheap and I can get all my stuff in one trip to the market. I'm looking for a tasty, drinkable beverage that gets you drunk. Not something to bring to my daughter's wedding, after all!
DO the sugar water and crushing and mixing mentioned with the photos above.
Leave the mix in the bucket, cover with cheesecloth if you have it to keep bugs out, or I just use a clean cotton pillow case that I slide over the top of my bucket and it works fine. Set all this aside and go drink some of your blackberry whisky that is already ready to drink straight from the liquor store! When it cools to room temperature, toss in your yeast and give it a basic stir to mix it in. I usually wait till the next day to add my yeast. If the water is too hot from melting the sugar, it will kill the active yeast if added too soon, but waiting longer is just wasting fermentation days! So cook on day one, add yeast on day two and on day three it's time to put it into long-haul fermentation mode.
3 days later strain out the berries from your bucket with a colander which should be just about right before the bitter components will start to appear in the wine, which generally will happen after about 4-6 days. Don't worry about bit and pieces and pulp and sediment, we will fix that later.
The mix you have here is called a "must" by winemakers. it's not drinkable yet and would taste a lot like a gritty bread and jelly if you tasted it. Gritty from the floating yeast which gets removed later on, and jelly because of all that sugar and fruit, but it's not a pleasant mix yet and it definitely isn't alcohol yet.
Ferment your batch in a cool, dark space and don't stir it or mix it or anything.
Let the wine ferment for about 5-7 days. Then siphon the wine into the sanitized glass carboy. This separates the pulp from the wine. Throw the pulp away. The purpose of this racking (transferring the wine into a different container is called racking) and all other racking is to separate the sediment from the wine, since the sediment can cause some off flavors, and of course causes cloudiness.
Fermentation should start in 24 to 48 hours. You can tell that the fermentation is started by looking for foam production on top of the must, or gas bubbles coming out of the airlock (if the lid is tightly sealed) If your fermentation has not started within 48 hours, find a wine making guru. They MAY be able to save the batch with more yeast, or more sugar or other magic but it may also be too late and at that point, you have to just go pick some more berries and start over. But don't worry to much about messing up. I am a total idiot with food and drinks and I was able to make my first and subsequent batches without issues. It's not as hard as the wine snob sites make it sound!
Let the wine ferment for about another 10 - 15 days. The fermentation will slow down during this time to a near stop. When you have about ¾ of an inch of sediment settled into the bottom of your jug, it is time to rack again.
Now rack your wine a third time.
Your wine should be stopped fermenting or very near stopped. If your fermentation temperature was lower than 65 º , it may take longer but it's still all good! You should also see some clearing in your wine.
Try to rack your wine with a minimum of splashing from this point on. Remember that oxygen is your enemy from now until you drink your wine. Some (most) wine makers add Potassium Bisulfite at this time as an anti-oxidant which will minimize browning (like a cut apple does) , and will promote visual clarity and act as a preservative.
Also, pro wine makers, that are not hacks like me, will add Potassium Sorbate at this step to prevent any additional fermentation in the bottle that would cause carbonation or to push the cork out of the bottle.
It's best if the fermentation area is kept at 60-65F to ensure best fermentation action. The temperature affects the health of the living yeast doing all the work in your batch to eat the sugar and poop out the alcohol, which, quite frankly is what is going on when fermentation is happening!
Let your wine set in a 60-65F, dark or dim place to clarify out of sunlight. This may take a few weeks, to a few months and its about flavor and strength at this stage. Rule is that more time makes better wine. Just keep the wine out of direct sunlight, and keep oxygen contact to a minimum. Some people will “top off” their wine at this time with additional boiled and cooled water with or without sugar in it to taste. This is up to you, as it is a compromise. Too much water added will dilute the wine flavors; too much oxygen contact can cause loss of flavor. A quick taste should alert you to bitterness or sweetness that you can adjust with plain or sugar water to increase sweetness or dilute a too-sweet "must" accordingly.
Once your wine is properly sweetened and clarified, you should bottle it. Transfer your wine quietly, with a minimum of aeration. Fill to about ½ inch below where the cork will go in or lid will go on. So, get too it! Bottle that wine! and then hurry up and wait some more.
Your wine fermentation bottle or "carboy" as they are called, will have a water based "air lock" or "vapor lock" lid that allows expanding gases caused by fermentation to escape the bottle without letting any air back in through the water filled vapor lock. Again, I suggest you search online to select your preferred fermentation bottle and vapor lock and other supplies, but you CAN do this in a plastic bottle that has been sterilized in scalding water, that has a screw lid which you just partially screw back on during fermentation. Too tight and your bottle will explode into a mess of waste. Too much air and too lose, will ruin your batch too, but if you know what you are doing and how to "burp the bottles" you can use this cheap method. Online sources will show you how to do ALL of this without any equipment you can't already probably find in a typical kitchen.
"Rack" your batch 2-3 times to clarify after fermentation is complete. This means siphoning it out of the fermentation jug and filtering it. I use coffee filters for this, to remove sediment and berry pieces and the yeast waste. When you have racked it enough it will have also taken in some oxygen and you'll have a clear wine free of sediment and particles to bottle up.
You can keep the entire batch in one sealed container or bottle it and cork it. Personally, as you saw in my photos, I use canning mason jars which seal well and make nice gift size samples to give to friends. Bonus, if you have a friend over, just hand them a mason jar of their own, grab yours, unscrew the tops and you have two glasses full of wine ready to go, that travel well and go down easy!
You can buy empty wine bottles online, or at brew stores, save your own old wine bottles and corks or do as I do and use canner's mason jars with a good rubber sealing screw on lid.
You must wait at MINIMUM two weeks to drink this wine after bottling, and I usually wait at least a month or more. The longer you wait, the smoother and more "wine-like" the taste is, and also, best of all the longer you wait, the stronger your "proof" or alcohol content will be. Based on totally unscientific comparisons by my alcohol familiar friends, we estimate that this homemade recipe will me about a 6% alcohol also called 12 proof. Wait too long though without using preservatives and you will end up making blackberry vinegar instead of wine. So it's all about practice, tasting and trial and error till you perfect your personal process and recipe execution yourself.
The wine I make this way is similar to a typical American canned beer in it's alcohol level. Age your wine as you wish and drink when you want! It’s your wine, after all! Most wine will improve with age, but many factors are involved here. In general, higher alcohol levels, higher acid levels, and higher tannin levels require more aging, and most fruit wines will indeed taste better older. But they will "work" and get you drunk much sooner! It's all a matter of personal taste from here on out.
I'll crack my first taste jar at about a month, and just keep the rest in a cool cabinet in my kitchen. Then each one I open thereafter is always stronger, smoother and better than the last and not just because I'm already drunk after the first one!
I just mean drinking them days and weeks apart means the longer you wait, the better it gets!
This wine will drink okay after a month or so, and really well after 6 months and age will continue to improve it for 1-3 years depending on the use of oak/tannin additions which I do not apply. You can find out more about making wine online and you'll see most recipes call for tannin and pectin to be added. I do not use these ingredients because I cannot get them locally and I'm too impatient, lazy and cheap to order them on the net, so my wine will be less "classy" and will also turn into vinegar sooner and not be a wine you want to keep around and store for years. This is wine you make, ferment, and drink when it's ready. Nothing more, nothing less. As I said earlier, my wine without preservatives in it, might be best used in less than a year without the added preservatives.
I typed all this out from the top of my mind so it may ramble and repeat itself some like i am prone to. Confirm my nonsense by looking online and you'll find all sort of tips, tricks and recipes that might work better for you! Check them out and don't be scared ,its really just boiling sugary water, and crushing fruit. mixing them and waiting a while. You can DO IT, I know you can!
Ok folks, it's time to get "berry drunk" now!
Here is a shot of some of my last batch of finished product from last summer, lined up on the front porch for a fun photo while waiting on friends to come over to a late summer cook out and berry wine drinkin' party!
And below is a photo of a "serving suggestion" I found this picture via google image search at a website source I can't even read because it's all in Russian!
Which just goes to show you that, this is an international delight!
If you need wine making supplies, I certainly suggest you begin your quest at this Amazon.com Wine Making Search Link, where Amazon has it all from the fancy french wine yeasts to the equipment in all price levels including complete starter kits, all the way up to professional grade stuff and of course, they also have how-to books and recipe books.
Enjoy your own homemade wine!
And just like that, this post is over.
Full steem ahead, steemitizens!
