Aside from the electricity of electroculture which has captured my imagination in recent days, I am also excited because this year I am making a more diverse range of home-made drinks than usual. In the above image you can see around 15L of cider on the left, then we have persimmons wine, kiwi wine, apple cider vinegar and finally a bottle and a bit of hazelnut honey liqueur.
I keep this lot in my office where I can hear the bubbles gently popping at night, letting me know all is well. Once the bubbles stop, the fermentation process is done and I have other jobs to do but this won't be for some weeks yet.
Normally I don't like to do recipe posts but in this case I feel like it is different because all of these beverages have been made in a way which did not involve me going to the shops. In other words, they are 100% locally sourced & home made, meaning they have medicinal properties, the same as naturally fermented food. Even better, if every shop in the world were to close tomorrow I will still be able to make my booze :)
I believe it is therefore a useful to skill to know and for this reason I will share for you now how to make wine & cider with nothing but fruit & sugar (and a home-made raisin yeast).
Cider
Yeast is the stumbling block for most people when it comes to making fruit wines without going to the shops, but for apples it turns out they don't need it. In fact, there is enough wild yeast retained on the skins of the apples for the fermentation process to begin on its own.
These apples came from a field around 300m away.
If you have a juicer the process is simple. If you don't have a juicer you can blend them or squish them in other creative ways.
- Sterilise everything (this stage must be applied to all recipes)
- Juice apples (add sugar if they are not sweet)
- Place in vessel with airlock till fermentation is done (approx 6 weeks)
- Remove sediment and let if ferment a few weeks more
- Bottle as a hard cider without bubbles or add sugar alternative (plus priming sugar) and bottle as sweet cider which will have bubbles when opened
- Leave bottles to sit for 3 months before drinking for best flavour.
Here I am at the 6 week point, moving the cider from one vessel to another, leaving the sediment behind.
Just to be clear about the sweet cider, if you add a load of regular sugar at the final stage to reach desired sweetness and then bottle your cider, you are basically creating little rockets which will either explode in your cupboard or empty their contents on your guests leaving nothing at all to drink when you open them. Had to learn this the hard way last year!
And so, the solution is to use a sugar alternative. I went for this one.
The fermentation process doesn't begin again because it isn't real sugar.
The way we get those desired bubbles into our now sweetened cider is the 'priming sugar', a small amount of real sugar which will re-activate the fermentation process again, but just a little. Not enough to create an explosion, but enough to make the cork pop out when you open it, leaving your drink full of lively bubbles.
I am using the priming sugar calculator provided here in order to avoid making rockets this year.
If you don't have a classic airlock for your fermentation vessel can can use white tack, plastic tube & glass of water.
You can also simply use a plastic glove like this one. When the glove is inflated the fermentation is working. When it deflates, the fermentation is done.
Persimmons wine
Also known as kaki or sharon fruit, ours came from this tree, around 200m from home.
Love the way this fruit looks! The taste is kinda weird though. These ones were a bit astringent but I believe they will still make good wine.
The process for the persimmons is much the same as it is for the cider because like the apples they will retain the wild yeast on their skin so no need to buy yeast. They are not so sweet as apples however so you will have to add a lot more sugar. Ah yes, you will also need to add lemon juice to this one, to stabilze the fermentation.
Once they are all blended up (skins included) just add sugar and leave for three days. Then squeeze the juice through a bag or cloth and put the pulp in the compost. The juice goes into a fermentation vessel with airlock and that's it.
The main difference here is the time involved. So, with persimmons they ferment for longer and need to sit in bottles for longer. I won't be drinking these till May. Whereas the cider will be more like March.
Also, I don't think it is necessary to add a sugar alternative to sweeten at the end. Not sure why that is but it seems harder to make rockets out of wine than it is with cider, so you can just go ahead and add regular sugar to reach desired sweetness.
I will put a link at the end to a much more detailed explanation of these exact recipes. Am just giving you the basics here.
Kiwi wine
The kiwis are located just beyond the apples around 400m from home.
Unlike the previous two we must peel kiwis so there is no wild yeast left for the fermentation. So what do we do? Well, we look for grapes.
I picked these seedless ones around 50m from home.
Ah yes, something I forgot to say is that all these fruits should ideally not be treated in any way. This little trick I am about to show you won't work on treated grapes. Only 100% natural ones.
Raisin yeast
The first thing you should do is make raisins in order that you may always have your natural yeast ready to go when you need it. Raisins store for a long time.
We did this by cutting them all in half and sticking them in the dehydrator overnight.
Three days before you are ready to make your kiwi wine pull out your raisins and add a handful to a glass with pure water. Add sugar (around 3 teaspoons) and give it a good stir. Leave it undisturbed in a dark place (not too cold) and you should see little bubbles starting to appear. This means you are good to go.
Once kiwis have been skinned and mashed by hand (this is important as not to break open all the seeds with a juicer or blender which will make the wine bitter) you add the raisin yeast. Just tip it all in there.
With kiwis we also add some water. Not sure why you can do this with kiwis but apparently you can, so I basically added as much water as there were kiwis, doubling the size of my wine.
Add sugar, mix and leave for 3-5 days in open vessel covered with cloth after which you should see signs of fermentation.
Strain pulp.
Put in fermentation vessel with airlock and wait till bubbles stop.
Once bottled one needs to wait six months, so I won't be drinking this one till around June/July.
Apple Cider Vinegar
Last year we made it using apple cores which would normally end up on the compost. It is exactly the same process as cider except that the vessel is not fitted with an air lock, so the apple juice is exposed to the air. One other difference here is we didn't use a juicer. We just added water to a vessel with the cores & a little sugar before leaving it for two weeks, stirring occasionally. Then we squeezed out the juice from the pulp and left in a glass vessel with open top, just a cloth to keep insects out. After a few months your ACV will be ready.
When you finish using your ACV during the year you will notice a weird looking blob like a jelly fish floating around in there at the bottom. That's your mother and you want to keep her because next year when you make ACV all you have to do is juice apples (which you are likely doing already for the cider) and fill up your mother bottle with juice, covering with a cloth again. You still have to wait a few months at this stage, but it does make life a little easier working with a mother.
Hazelnut honey liqueur
We have a ton of hazelnuts from local trees and I just felt like trying out this recipe. I like that it has aloe vera which we have in the pots outside our home.
All you have to do is finely chop aloe.
Add a bit of vodka and leave for one day.
Strain the green vodka and add back into the bottle with the honey and crushed nuts. Don't forget to remove some of the vodka or it won't all fit back in the bottle.
And that's it! Now just wait for two weeks and you're good to go. The hazelnut/honey flavour should be fully infused with the vodka & aloe vera.
Will let you know in a week what it tastes like!
In place of vodka (which obviously one must buy) you would need a distiller and the motivation to make your own moonshine. I'm getting there, but not quite yet. Will need a distiller to produce my own methanol supply (using oak wood) once I build my methanol heater. Just waiting for the last bits to arrive by post before I get to that.
For those of you who are going to attempt any of the above recipes they can all be found in much more detail on this amazing website run by a man who evidently knows what he is doing. Just use the search engine there and you will find them easily.
Pumpkin wine
Haven't started making this so I don't yet know the process. We are literally forced to make wine with our pumpkins this year as there's no way we can eat all of these before we are producing more!
The green ones are winter melons and will be turned into marmalade at some point in the next few weeks, combining them with sugar & bergamot lemons.
Paracetamol tea
Unlike the above beverages, herbal teas must be made as fresh infusions and don't keep beyond a day or so. They will last longer if you add natural honey, but always best just to make them fresh.
This plant has many names: Cuban Oregano, Broad Leaf Thyme, Spanish Thyme, Mexican Mint, Indian Borage & Hung Chanh.
It is used for many things but we generally give it to the children, who as all parents know, will suffer from time to time with ear infections, headaches or fever.
Ours is kept directly outside the kitchen door so that a freshly picked tea can be made at 3am when Luna suddenly wakes up crying!
The tea is ready in 3mins and her pain is gone in 5mins. I would be willing to bet this is even faster and more effective than a paracetamol, which is certainly more detrimental to the body.
Ashwaganda tea
Also known as wild cherry this tea heals a bunch of different things but I am drinking it for the calming effect.
Here you can see it growing earlier this year in our garden, in a row at the bottom of the image.
I dug them up a few days ago.
Being careful to save a few seeds for next year.
They look like monsters sitting on the kitchen table and the smell is crazy intense. Earthy, musky, deep... almost like a feeling. So evidently a medicine.
You'll need to give them a good scrub to get all the mud off.
Chop them up as small as you can and leave to dry.
This is what we ended up with.
And here's me having a cup of ashwaganda tea as I write this post! Feeling very calm :)
Final thoughts
I'm not going to say that living this way is easy. On the contrary it is extremely time consuming and one can find themselves questioning "is it really worth it?" while they are still only half way through peeling kiwis and the back is aching, the fingers are stinging like crazy from that latest cut dipped in kiwi juice and the feet are cold due to lack of movement, but once you're sitting back in your chair (around May/June) drinking that glass of freshly chilled fruit wine at sunset with the warm wind on your face, you will smile knowing it was worth it.
Alcohol like this is a medicine! Sure, you still get drunk like any other booze (more effectively in fact) but none of the crap like sulphite or profit based intentions are mixed in there. There is an energy infused into your drinks when you make them yourself with love. It cannot be measured but you can be certain it is there. Anyone who already does this will know what I am talking about.
So that's it I think. As always, many more things to tell you about, but in the interest of keeping my posts as focused as possible, I will save the latest news for the next one.
Love & Light everyone 🌱
