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.

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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.

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1. Bottling the plum wine
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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There are so many wild plums around our way at the moment that we’re having a go at plum wine. This is alongside our existing cider efforts, which are happily bubbling away as they ferment in the kitchen.

I love plums, and the smell of them in the fermenter is just wonderful. Altogether, we picked 5.5kg (12lbs) of fruit, which we have dumped in the fermenter and covered with two gallons of hot water. This started to cook them almost right away. It split the skins and let the pulpy fruit start oozing out, helped along by a bit of stirring and prodding from a wooden spoon.

The result, in about nine months’ time when we’ve added yeast and sugar and left it to mature, should be a lovely rose wine, and already we can see that colour coming out. For now, though, it’s got to spend ten days in the outhouse while the juice and sugar from the fruit seeps out.

It’s very tempting to pop in there every so often and lift the lid for a sniff.

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We’re trying something new this week: making cider. There is an apple tree a couple of minutes’ walk from home, down by the river in the nature reserve, which is heavy with apples right now; it seems a shame to let them all fall off and go to waste.

So we’ve been out picking them before they become windfall and start to rot. It’s easier said than done in some cases as there is a healthy crop of nettles surrounding the tree, but we’ve gathered enough to three-quarter fill a demijohn.

How many apples is that? A lot. This was about a quarter of the haul:

You don’t need to peel them, but you do need to slice and core them before putting them in the blender.

Ideally, after blending them, you’d put them into a proper press to extract the juice, but not having one of them we turned to the muslin jelly bag we use in jam making and relied on the weight of the apple pulp itself to squeeze out the juice. It worked surprisingly well. Particularly when we gave the dregs a bit of a manual squeeze.

This was the result:

Most of a demijohn full of apple juice. It makes you realise how much work goes into making a carton of juice.

As you can see from the picture above, it is already starting to ferment. This is because the apples are full of natural sugar, and their skins have natural yeast on them, which is why we only lightly wiped them clean with dry kitchen roll: we didn’t want to wash off the yeast.

We popped a bung and air lock in the top to keep out the flies and sat it in a warm part of the kitchen to brew.

Eventually, when the fermentation has calmed down (after, perhaps, the addition of a little more yeast) we’ll rack it up into bottles, and then the wait begins. For how long? Until about Easter. A long time.

In the meantime, there is one more job to do: dispose of the mashed up remains of the apples. When we tipped them out of the muslin bag they were quite dry (below), so we popped them into the chickens’ scraps tray, and they loved them, leaving us with no waste at all.

We’ll keep you updated with how our experimental cider progresses.

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We have opened the first bottle of Elderflower Champagne. It was a long time coming, but I thought that two years in the house, and having friends around for the weekend was good enough reason.

Unfortunately, despite being the first bottle opened, it was also the last complete bottle we have. We made 15 and a half in total, all of which except for this one and the other half bottle blew their corks and spewed their contents on the outhouse floor. Now we have only the half bottle left.

So was it worth the wait? It’s been corked up for eight months now, slowly maturing in the outhouse and gradually getting clearer as time went by.

We got five glasses out of that bottle, of which the first two were perfectly clear. Unfortunately its natural effervescence stirred up the sediment at the bottom of the wine, which clouded the other three glasses and may have contributed to their slightly rough flavour.

The result certainly wasn’t unpleasant, but I prefer our home brewed wine, which is smoother and more rounded. The elderflower champagne – the first I’ve tasted – was much sharper and a little bitter, and not quite the taste of summer I’d been hoping for.

But it was… interesting. Perhaps we’ll try again this year with a few subtle amendments.

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Old-fashioned lemonade is a far sweeter, thicker drink than you buy in the shops, and is altogether non-fizzy. This recipe comes from my great, great grandmother (like the toffee recipe), so it certainly qualifies as old. By my reckoning it could well be from around 1850.

We made it today and didn’t need much forward planning as it requires only four ingredients, the most unfamiliar being citric acid. You can buy this in brewing shops, at some chemists and, as we did, through eBay.

Skill level: Easy
Time required: About 90 minutes, plus cooling time

Wash the lemons then grate the rind into a large pan. Add the sugar, ensuring there are no lumps, and the water. Bring to simmering point, stirring all the time until the liquid has turned a clear yellow and you can no longer see the clouds made by the sugar.

Continue to simmer gently for an hour while juicing the lemons, then remove from the heat and stir in the citric acid and lemon juice.

Allow to cool, then strain through muslin or a thin sieve, into bottles. Serve cold, diluted with cold water to your taste.

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