Blagger » Brewing and winemaking

Our nettle wine has finished fermenting

Nik — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 21:27:04 +0000

The nettle wine has been quiet for a few days now. It’s spent three weeks in the fermenter and for most of that time it’s been bubbling away like a little geyser, but since the weekend it’s been suspiciously quiet.

So, time to test it. I dug out the hydrometer, poured some of the wine mixture into a measuring tube and dropped it in. As I suspected, the specific gravity reading was below 1.000, so it was ready for the next stage.

You can only know this for sure with a hydrometer, which is an essential piece of brewing kit, whether you’re making wine or beer. The idea is very simple: you float it in a tall, narrow tube of brew and read off the scale where the liquid reaches when it comes to rest.

Using the hydrometer to test the nettle wine

At this stage we could start bottling it, but after some of our plum wine got contaminated with sediment I’ve decided to rack it off twice before bottling, leaving it to settle for a couple of weeks between each one. That meant getting out the syphon and a second fermenter into which it could drain and setting them up on the outhouse steps to get a good differential between them. I don’t know why I didn’t think of doing that before – it’s much less hassle than balancing them on boxes or chairs like I always have in the past.

Anyhow, after running it through the syphon we ended up with three and a half gallons in the second fermenter and a lot of smelly sludge in the first. It was clearly a good thing to have done.

Now it just needs to sit for a few more weeks while it settles, although as we don’t want it to keep on fermenting I’ve dropped in three and a half crushed campden tablets – one per gallon – and stirred them in.

Campden tablets

Nettle wine is a bit of an experiment for us, but so far it seems to be going well. Fingers crossed it continues.

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Making our first batch of nettle wine

Nik — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 07:32:08 +0000

After the success of last year’s plum wine, which we’re having to ration ourselves on, we’ve decided this year to turn our hand to the king of country wines: nettle. We should have got around to it sooner on two accounts. First, it’s a bit of a must-do for self-sufficiency, really, as it’s so widely known-about. And second, nettles are so plentiful it’s good to see them being put to some use.

As an added bonus it feels good to get out there and hack some down. So often then spoil our fun when we’re out geocaching that I’m happy to be getting some slight revenge on them.

So at the weekend I headed out with gloves and scissors and a plastic bag to start collecting. This isn’t as simple as it sounds as you have to be quite picky. You want young nettles, ideally, which haven’t yet gone to seed. You don’t want to harvest them from too close to paths where dogs may have relieved themselves onto them and you don’t want to pick them from right under trees where birds could have done the same.

It took a while but eventually I’d picked myself a full bag, which when I got it home and weighed it came to a measly 450g. Not great. Nonetheless, after washing off the bugs and shaking dry the leaves there was still too much for the stock pot and almost too much for the jam pan, too.

Washed nettles in the jam pan

A successful nettle wine can’t be made from nettles alone: all the online forums insist that you need to add some rind and fruit to give it some decent flavour, so to this we added a generous handful of raisins, the rind of two lemons and two oranges, and an 18g piece of ginger root, which I bashed fairly comprehensively with a rolling pin beforehand to break it up and release the flavour.

To this I added 6 litres of water and then I set it boiling.

Slowly.

Jam pans aren’t great at insulating their contents. With a wide open rim you’ve got no chance of putting a lid on top so all the heat goes straight up and out. It took 45 minutes to get it up to boiling point, after which it had to simmer for a further 50. It felt like ages.

With frequent stirring, though, the contents soon bedded down and we were left with a rather unappetising-looking green soup. It didn’t smell so great, filling the kitchen with something close to a very mild smoked fish aroma.

After an hour of cooking the nettles start to bed down

A couple of hours after we’d started washing, chopping bashing and boiling, our nettle mix was ready for the next stage. We sterilised our largest fermenter and put 5kg of sugar in the bottom. To this we added a couple of kettles-worth of boiling water and stirred it until it had dissolved.

5kg is a lot of sugar, admittedly, but you have to give your yeast something to live off, and the sugar is what eventually turns into alcohol, so it is crucial to the whole brewing process.

Winemaking requires a lot of sugar

When the sugar was all dissolved we took out as much of the solids as we could from the nettle pan and then strained the remaining liquid through a cheese cloth and sieve into the sugar mixture in the fermenter. It was a pretty ugly colour by now. A bit like tea and not at all like wine.

The nettle mixture is transferred to the fermenter

We gave it a good stir and then topped it up to the 16 litre mark with cold water and left the whole thing alone to cool down to room temperature before adding the yeast.

This is dedicated brewers’ yeast, not the kind you’d use when making bread, which we added at a ratio of 7g for every four litres of wine so, in total, 28 grams.

Brewers' yeast is added at 7g for every 4 litres

That was the last stage for the day, and to be honest we were glad. It was now half ten and we’d set out to find our nettles seven hours earlier. The kitchen was in need of a clean-up and we wanted to sit down.

We left the yeast floating on the top of the wine mixture without stirring, put the lid on the fermenter and fitted an airlock so that it could breathe, then pushed it under the kitchen worktop where it can stand next to a small oil-filled radiator. This is another key part of our brewing kit as you need to keep the yeast warm. Not too hot and not too cold – just warm.

The radiator has three strength settings – 1, 2 and 3 – and a heat scale on each of these than runs from 1 to 7. We chose strength 1 and heat 3, so just about warm, which we know from making several other wines previously is more or less perfect and doesn’t use too much electricity.

Now all we do is wait until the fermentation stops before we dig out our bottles. Keep an eye on the site – we’ll post updates as they happen.

We stand the fermenter close to a low-powered radiator to keep it warm

Celebrating summer solstice with the first of our homebrew cider

Nik — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 19:25:38 +0000

This cider has been staring at us from the back of a cupboard in the outhouse for almost 10 months since we bottled it on 1 September last year. We’d stuck April 2010 stickers on the bottles to stop us opening them too soon. So, was it worth the wait?

On the whole, yes. This was our first attempt at cidermaking and it was largely successful. A little tart, perhaps, but we got around that by adding some lemonade, which mellowed it somewhat. We even got away with using bakers’ yeast rather than brewers’ yeast, which I had thought might be a problem, but apparently not.

Certainly something to try again this year as those six and a half pints we managed to bottle won’t last long.

We’ve opened our first plum wine

Nik — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 19:54:25 +0000

Well, doesn’t time fly. It felt like today was an age away when we finally put the stoppers in our plum wine bottles last September. They looked so pretty and drinkable that the idea of waiting at least six months until we could pop the corks was almost unbearable.

Well, today we opened the first one, and it far exceeded our expectations. It was fruity, but not too sweet. Lighter than a red, but not as tart as a white, nor as saccharin as a rose. It had a very sight tingle to it, yet it wasn’t fizzy like a sparkling wine. We both agreed that it was perhaps the best wine we’d ever drunk – bar none.

And yet it was so simple to make. Nothing but plums picked from the local trees, growing wild in the nature reserve, some water, some sugar and a little yeast to help it ferment.

The only problem is, our stock runs to just 12 bottles (and it was so good we couldn’t stop ourselves drinking a whole bottle last night, leaving us with decidedly heavy heads this morning) so we’re going to have to be careful about rationing ourselves.

We’re also going to have to pick a lot more plums this summer to make enough wine for next spring.

Bottles of plum wine

Bottling the wine

Nik — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 17:15:34 +0000

At last the wine is ready. Not quite ready for drinking, admittedly, but ready to syphon from the fermenter and bottle up, as its specific gravity has passed the magic 1000 point.

We’ve decided to dump the corks this year. They served us well last year and the year before, and squeezing them into the top of the bottles using the corking gun is quite fun, but we don’t have room to store our bottles horizontally and I’m worried that they dry out. The last couple of bottles of last year’s batch went bad from, I think, air seeping in. Obviously we don’t want that happening this time around.

So, as you can see from the picture, we’ve switched to plastic stoppers, which are tight enough to need a little assistance from a hammer and some elbow grease to get them in. I don’t think they’re going to be letting in any air any time soon and, better still, they’re re-usable, so when we pop them out to drink this year’s brew we can wash them off and keep them in store for next year’s brew.

All we have to do now is wait a month or so as they mature in the bottles and we can open the first few for drinking. Just in time for Christmas.

Moving on with the wine

Nik — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:57:13 +0000

Our wine is coming on in leaps and bounds. Probably because we’ve kept it beside the oil-filled radiator that keeps the chill off the kitchen.

It’s behaving very well this time around. We did test it after twelve days with the hydrometer, but as the picture shows it was still well under the magical measure of 1000. You can bottle it before it gets there, of course, but it would be very unwise, as it’s the figure that indicates the end of fermentation.

Last night, though, sixteen days in, it got to 1000 and we added the finings to stop the process. All we need do now is syphon it off and rack it into bottles, which could be a problem. After brewing a dozen bottles of plum wine from the trees this summer, we’re running a little bit short.

Starting the Christmas wine

Nik — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:52:54 +0000

The plum wine we made at the end of summer won’t be ready for drinking for six months at least, and if we want it to be at its best we need to leave it a full ten to twelve months to mature in the bottles out in the outhouse. So we’re making some quicker-brewing wine alongside it that should be ready by Christmas.

It’s a bit of a cheat, really, as we’re using a kit, but it’s still a good money saver as it works out much cheaper to make your wine this way than to buy it from the supermarket. The particular kit we’re using cost £15.99 and makes 30 bottles within 21 days. That works out at 53p a bottle (or maybe closer to 56p as you have to add 3kg of sugar yourself).

We’re at stage one now. We’ve dissolved our first 2kg of sugar, added the fruit concentrate, the yeast and the nutrient and put it all in the fermenter to – well, ferment. You have to keep it between 21 and 25 degrees Celsius, so the old oil-filled radiator has come into play, making the kitchen nice and toasty warm as a happy by-product.

I’m surprised how quickly it’s set to work. We only started it off yesterday and already there is a good head of yeasty foam forming and the air lock is happily burbling to itself. Christmas wine, here we come.

Bottling the plum wine

Nik — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:48:14 +0000

Our plum wine finally finished fermenting over the weekend. After two weeks of gently bubbling away in the outhouse it breathed its last and fell silent. It was quite erie.

That meant it was time for the last stage – putting an absolute stop to any further activity in the liquid and then bottling it up. Obviously you want to make sure that there is no possibility that any further fermentation can take place once the cork is in, or things could get explosive, as we found out to our cost when we made elderflower champagne.

So this time around we added some campden tablets. These kill off any further bacteria in the wine and stop it picking up any contamination from the syphon during the bottling process. It’s toxic stuff when used in concentrated proportions, but in wine making you dilute it thoroughly, adding just one tablet for every gallon of wine. We had 10 litres, which is 2.6 gallons, so we crushed and dropped in two and a half tablets.

When all syphoned off, those 10 litres made a dozen good bottles of very pretty pink wine that we now have to leave for six to nine months before we start to drink. That’ll take us up to next summer. It feels an awful long way off.

Moving on the plum wine

Nik — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 07:54:29 +0000

After a couple of weeks in the first fermenter, the plum wine had reached the point where it needed moving on to the next stage. A few spots of mould were starting to grow on the top, and it was beginning to ferment of its own accord.

Now it needed a hand.

So we’ve syphoned it off into a second fermenter and added both sugar and brewers’ yeast. A lot of sugar, in fact: around 4kg.

Now obviously you can’t just dump that much sugar in and walk away; you have to introduce it in a form similar to the existing mixture. In short, you need to add it as a syrup. Cue boiling water on the stove and stirring in the sugar, slowly, until it’s all dissolved and the liquid is clear. In all it took about half an hour to liquify that much sugar and add it to the plum juice.

You then add the yeast at a ratio of one teaspoon for each gallon of wort (brew), which in our case meant we needed around three teaspoons.

We gave it a good stir, capped it off with a lid and inserted an air lock to release the pressure without letting in any of the outside air.

Now we must wait. We’ve put it in the outhouse where it’s been bubbling away for a few days now, and it shows no signs of quietening down. When it does, though, we’ll be ready for the final stage, and post an update.

Bottling the cider

Nik — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 06:56:53 +0000

We decided this weekend that after two weeks in the demijohn it was time to bottle the cider. Despite all the effort, it only stretched to six and a half pints.

We siphoned it out of the demijohn using the same siphon we use for the beer, with a silt trap on the end to avoid dragging up the yeasty mess at the bottom. The result (right) was a beautiful orange, surprisingly clear liquid that smelt pretty good. It certainly had the aroma of cider about it, with a slightly bready undertone on account of only having bakers’ yeast to hand when we wanted to give it a kick.

We’ve since bought some proper brewing yeast so that shouldn’t be a problem next time round.

Frustratingly, though, we now have to leave it until Easter before we pop the caps so it can mature in the bottles.