critty
Regular.
After procrastinating for a while about doing a wine I figured what the hell and gave it a shot. This is a Rhubarb and Cherry wine based of a recipe on this forum.http://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=3364&start=0 I started this wine 3 days ago. I just never got round to doing a post.
Basically all I did was go to Leeds market and buy 450g (1lb) of dark cherries, I don't know the name, and add them to the diced rhubarb and sugar. These cherries only cost £1 and were incredibly sweet. I didn't go for more cherries because I didn't want to over power the rhubarb with too much of a cherry taste.
Here is the recipe for people who have never seen this.
Here comes some piccies so enjoy.
After spending a good 15 min cutting rhubarb and cherries I finally got some raw fruit ready to make the juice.
I froze these for 24hr and them whacked them back in my brewing pot, I don't have anything else big enough to hold that much fruit. I then threw the 1.5kg of sugar. I modified the amount of sugar to account for the cherries in the mix. I then left the mix for 24hr and this is what I was left with.
After tasting the juice you could tell there was rhubarb and cherries in it. The cherries were not over powering and were more noticeable at the back of the mouth like a vapour. The rhubarb taste stood out boldly at the front of the tongue and got smoother in taste towards the back of the throat. Very nice indeed! However I decided to leave it another 24hr as I didn't have a demijohn for it to go into and I needed a trip to my local home brew store to pick up a glass one. After the 24hr the taste was still the same but it had got much darker and had a much more syrup like consistency.
After getting a demijohn and some supplies I made a start on the wine proper. Luckily in my last batch of beer I had bought a funnel with a little filter in it. This was because I knew I would be messing with hops and came in real handy. As it did with this wine as I will show in the next couple of pics.
As you can see in the last pic the filter had managed to catch most of the bits that had tried to escape. I was left with a much neater looking juice in the bottom of the demijohn. I then added some water to the fruit, just enough to cover it, and I gently teased the remaining juice from the fruit. Making sure to squish any cherries along the way and put that in the demijohn. And yes that is a potato masher....
I then topped the water up in the demijohn and then started to shake the hell out of it (a very technical term).
Starting gravity came out at 1095. You cant see it properly in the pic though. The juice from the cherries plus the 100g extra sugar helped bump it up. I worked out I would be looking at probably a 11%-12.5% ABV for this one.
I then put the pectolase and yeast nutrient in and gave it a good old shake again. Really making sure to oxygenate it. I then pitched the yeats I had started 30min earlier.
Now this morning when I got in from work my wife said it had been rigorously bubbling away at 2 bubbles per second. That had settled to 1 a second though when I got back from work. A nice foam had formed and what I can only describe as the lava lamp effect was in full swing.
The link is to a video of fermentation 24hr after pitching yeast I did this afternoon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q72D43yz ... e=youtu.be
Basically all I did was go to Leeds market and buy 450g (1lb) of dark cherries, I don't know the name, and add them to the diced rhubarb and sugar. These cherries only cost £1 and were incredibly sweet. I didn't go for more cherries because I didn't want to over power the rhubarb with too much of a cherry taste.
Here is the recipe for people who have never seen this.
Here comes some piccies so enjoy.
After spending a good 15 min cutting rhubarb and cherries I finally got some raw fruit ready to make the juice.
I froze these for 24hr and them whacked them back in my brewing pot, I don't have anything else big enough to hold that much fruit. I then threw the 1.5kg of sugar. I modified the amount of sugar to account for the cherries in the mix. I then left the mix for 24hr and this is what I was left with.
After tasting the juice you could tell there was rhubarb and cherries in it. The cherries were not over powering and were more noticeable at the back of the mouth like a vapour. The rhubarb taste stood out boldly at the front of the tongue and got smoother in taste towards the back of the throat. Very nice indeed! However I decided to leave it another 24hr as I didn't have a demijohn for it to go into and I needed a trip to my local home brew store to pick up a glass one. After the 24hr the taste was still the same but it had got much darker and had a much more syrup like consistency.
After getting a demijohn and some supplies I made a start on the wine proper. Luckily in my last batch of beer I had bought a funnel with a little filter in it. This was because I knew I would be messing with hops and came in real handy. As it did with this wine as I will show in the next couple of pics.
As you can see in the last pic the filter had managed to catch most of the bits that had tried to escape. I was left with a much neater looking juice in the bottom of the demijohn. I then added some water to the fruit, just enough to cover it, and I gently teased the remaining juice from the fruit. Making sure to squish any cherries along the way and put that in the demijohn. And yes that is a potato masher....
I then topped the water up in the demijohn and then started to shake the hell out of it (a very technical term).
Starting gravity came out at 1095. You cant see it properly in the pic though. The juice from the cherries plus the 100g extra sugar helped bump it up. I worked out I would be looking at probably a 11%-12.5% ABV for this one.
I then put the pectolase and yeast nutrient in and gave it a good old shake again. Really making sure to oxygenate it. I then pitched the yeats I had started 30min earlier.
Now this morning when I got in from work my wife said it had been rigorously bubbling away at 2 bubbles per second. That had settled to 1 a second though when I got back from work. A nice foam had formed and what I can only describe as the lava lamp effect was in full swing.
The link is to a video of fermentation 24hr after pitching yeast I did this afternoon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q72D43yz ... e=youtu.be
