Hi all

[gillonstewart]

Hi everyone. New member from Perthshire here, although not new to home-brewing.

For quite a few years I had a conveyor belt of elderflower "house white" brewing... 5 gallons fermenting for a week, while 5 gallons "aged" for the week and another 5 gallons was drunk in the week. This was using a proprietary white wine kit (usually Solomon Grundy I think) with dried elderflowers added.

I also always had ten gallons or so of various beers and ciders and anything up to ten separate gallons of country wines.

I got out of the habit for getting on for ten years but have just started buying up the kit for home-brewing that inevitably got given away or used for other stuff over the years. I've just bottled 5 gallons of pear wine I made from a bag of frozen pears from the orchard from last year. I also have 5 gallons of blueberry wine from a kit which is ready to bottle and I'm planning on making a barrel of pear cider from the last of the pears.

I'm itching to make some gorse flower wine and dandelion wine... The fields are yellow with flowers and the sheep are still up the glen so I need to do that this weekend before the sheep get moved down the hill! I'm waiting on some more supplies, not least tannin but I'm hoping it will arrive tomorrow.

Anyway, that's me and what I'm up to. Sorry for the long post... You'll get to find they're all like that I'm afraid!

 

[The Baron]

Welcome to the forum

 

[Chippy_Tea]

Welcome to the forum.

 

[An Ankoù]

Welcome gillonstewart. From what I understand, you can get the bit of tannin you need from really strong, stewed, tea (not Earl Grey or lapsang souchong) or add the powdered grape tannin to the fermenting wine when it arrives.
Gorse and dandelion sounds interesting. Are the flowers used to flavour a neutral white wine? What base do you use?

 

[StJayJay]

Welcome to the forum!

 

[gillonstewart]

Thanks for the welcome everyone.

@An Ankoù I did think about using tea, I've used it before with fair to middling results on stronger flavoured wines but the gorse is such a delicately flavoured and coloured wine that I think tea would affect the flavour and colour too much, perhaps not but...... You need to pick a gallon of gorse flowers, lightly pressed, to make a gallon of wine. Picking gorse flowers is painful at best and utterly tortuous at worst. Viscious thorns cover the things and your fingers end up with more holes than a ten year old transit van by the time you've picked your first cup full. I've never made more than one gallon in a year!

Anyway, the pain is all worthwhile, it's a really delicious wine. I don't know if you've ever had the chance to walk past a load of gorse bushes in full flower on a warm evening but the smell is just beautiful, almost like a sweet coconut smell. I use the good old CJJ Berry recipe, a gallon of flowers, 2 oranges and 2 lemons plus grape tannin and sugar. Very simple, although I used to tweak it a little depending on the citrus. The finished wine is very light and delicate. A pleasant lemon curd kind of flavour base that hits your tongue first and with the floral, sweet coconut floating round your mouth and lingering after you swallow.

There's an almost identical primrose recipe as well that's might try but there aren't as many primrose flowers around this year. There's an old saying, you only get one strong yellow a year, either millions of daffodils, millions of dandelions or millions of primrose. Definitely seems to be the turn of the dandelions this year. The place is carpeted with them. I've never actually tried this dandelion recipe so it will be interesting to taste when it'll bexready around Christmas time.