I’ve recently decided to try my hand at homemade sourdough bread using starter from wild yeast. My starter so far is a couple days old and is very bubbly and happy. For all you need to know about starter, look here.
I’m also trying my hand at home made ginger ale and with any luck soon I’ll be able to feed my super-spicy ginger ale addiction without spending a fortune.
I am interested in knowing if anyone else has some good recipes requiring fermentation. The only caveat is I am looking to save money this way, so recipes that require special equipment or ingredients that cost more than just buying the stuff at the store are out. Wine recipes are great, but not if the final product costs more than just buying two-buck Chuck.
And as a note, before following any alcoholic recipes make sure to consult your local laws.
Thanks!
If you’ve got access to wild blackberries for free, you’ll need about 2.5 pounds of them and two pounds of sugar to make one US gallon of wine. Mash the berries (it does nothing but good to freeze then thaw them first) in your brewing bin and pour over a couple of quarts of boiling water. Make up a yeast starter with the usual spoonful of sugar and lukewarm water. When your blackberry mixture has cooled to blood heat, add the yeast starter and cover. Once or twice a day for three or four days, uncover briefly and stir - the berries will be forming a mat on the top of the ferment.
Now siphon off the juice, leaving as much pulp behind as possible, into your fermentation jar, and only now add your sugar, which you have dissolved in boiling water and allowed to cool to blood heat. Make up to one gallon with previously boiled water. Strongly consider reserving up to a quarter of the resulting must in a separate vessel (a big bottle stopped with cotton wool is fine) as the blackberry will ferment vigorously when the sugar is added, and you don’t especially want foam spewing out of your fermentation lock.
Ferment under lock until it stops working, remembering that slow and steady is all good, so don’t keep it too warm. Keep it out of the light as the colour can be bleached out by sunlight. When things are going really slowly, take the liquor off the sediment and see if it will ferment a little more, possibly adding a couple of ounces of sugar. When it finally stops, take the wine off the sediment and bottle. You may well want to make sure it’s dead with a sulphur dioxide tablet (Campden tablet over here) just to be sure you don’t get in-bottle fermentation, as popped corks are a nuisance and glass bombs are worse.
If you have elderberries, these can replace anything up to half of the blackberries - they add astringency. Blackberry alone is mighty fine, though, not unlike port for fruitiness.