Blueberries!

It doesn’t really look like it, but there’s 5 gallons of blueberries in the freezer.  I’m looking forward to turning them into wine this fall.  We have an old 1850’s farmhouse with no air conditioning.  This leaves us no control over the temperature and we usually end up with a too vigorous fermentation due to a higher temperature.    If a wine ferments at fluctuating or inconsistent temperature it can change the chemical makeup of the wine.   I’ve finally learned to wait until the cooler months to start fermenting.  Three years ago I made a beautiful blueberry wine.  I made it like a red wine.   I adjusted the sugar to give it 14% alcohol content, added tannin and citric acid.  After the primary fermentation I ran it through the malolactic fermentation, chilled proofed and stuck it on oak chips for about three weeks; I bottled it up right away.  It turned out like a cabernet.  Really, it did.   It was way bigger than I thought you get out of blueberries.  The oak chips provided a nice vanilla note and mellowed the wine out, the added tannin and acid balanced out the sugar, and the flavor was not like blueberry at all.  If you blind tested me with this wine, I would have never have guessed.   Well this was in the middle of a hot VA summer and sometime around late August the wine started to re-ferment in the bottle and we had a couple of bottles shoot their corks off in the rack.  This did not bode well for the longevity of this wine.  Even after sticking a few bottles in the wine fridge, it was never really the same. 

There are a few mistakes that I made with this wine.  1) I did not add enough potassium sorbet before bottling.  I had a previous batch where I added a bit too much and it turned out with a rotten egg smell.  I was a little too cautious from the last burn.  2) I probably should have continued to bulk age it in the fridge.  Since then, I’ve been bulk aging my wines for at least 6 months.  3) Of course waiting until the fall when the air cools off.  We’re planning on building a garage with environmental controls where I can have a space to create wine.  Until then, I can’t wait to pull these berries out of the freezer in a couple of months!

GINGER BEER

Earlier this summer a friend introduced me to his homemade ginger beer from a recipe he got out of Imbibe magazine.  I’m not really a huge ginger beer fan but I really like this one and we do enjoy fermenting things so we thought we’d give it a shot. 

Ingredients

4 oz fresh ginger, roughly peeled and coarsely chopped

2 quarts water

1 cup demerara sugar

1 Tbsp. molasses

3/4 cup fresh lime juice

1/2 gram champagne yeast (about 1/4 tsp.)

Directions

1. In a blender, pulse the ginger with 1 quart of water until roughly pureed.
2. Combine the ginger-water, sugar, and molasses in a large pot over medium-high heat. Stir until the sugar dissolves. Remove from heat and let cool to just slightly warmer than room temperature.
3. Line a funnel with a flour-sack towel or a 4x layer of cheesecloth, and use it to strain the liquid in batches into a plastic 2-liter bottle, squeezing the towel or cloth to extract as much liquid as possible.
4. Add the lime juice and remaining water until the liquid level is about 3 inches from the top (this may not require the full quart). Sprinkle the yeast on top of the liquid in the bottle.
5. Carefully squeeze the bottle until the liquid comes right to the neck, then screw the cap on tightly. Let the bottle sit at room temperature for 12 hours, or until the bottle feels firm when squeezed.
6. Once the bottle is firm, transfer to the refrigerator. Keep the ginger beer refrigerated and drink within 1 week.

We made a few modifications:

• We doubled the recipe to make a gallon in a glass jug rather than filling a plastic liter.
• Used a half packet of Champaign yeast
• Created a yeast starter to kick if off.
• Used an airlock and sanitized equipment and jug per best practices.
• After it fermented for about 2 days I took a reading and tested the sugar and bottled.

The Result

A crisp, semi-sweet, gingerly, effervescent beverage that would go very well with some dark rum.  The alcohol content is about 3.4%.  It turned out quite dark due to the blackstrap molasses used.