The Home Brew Site

I was in Tescos a little while ago I walked past the reduced item shelves and there was a whole trolley full of reduced plums. They were reduced to something like 30p a punnet. Excellent I thought, so I filled my basket. I took me a little while to wash and sterilise the fruit and remove the stones. I ran them through the blender to reduce them to a pulp, and put them in the 2 gallon bucket I have. I added about 2 gallons of water and a bag of sugar, as you can see I didn’t carefully measure anything. I think in total there was 7 punnets of plums. I used some basic wine yeast that is widely available in supermarkets.

I actually didn’t rush, once it was sealed in the fermenter I left it for probably a month or 6 weeks. I transferred it to a couple of demi john the other day. Leaving behind all the pulp. The resulting wine is a lovely rose wine. I’ll leaving it for a while in the demi johns to clear, before I transfer it into the final bottles.

All in all for about £1.50 I have 2 gallons of superb rose wine, by Christmas the wine should have matured nicely. This is the real advantage with fruit wines, they get better with time. Definately worth keeping an eye on the supermarket shelves for some bargain fruit.

I mentioned a while ago about making some pear wine using a fruit juicer to well that was about 3 weeks ago and well the pear wine is still ferementing. Last night I filtered out some on the pear pulp that had built up. I tasted the wine and phew it was strong. Far too strong to be a wine so. I’m renaming it a pear Liquer. As a liquer it is really tastey, there is a strong pear flavour but it is pretty tastey.

Here is the recipe should you want some a gallon of pear liquer yourself.

4lb Pears.

2.2lbs sugar

2 lemons

Country wine yeast

Sterilise the fruit by washing it in sterilising fluid, then run it through a juicer empty the juice into the demi john, add a couple of pints of hot water then dissolve in the sugar. Top up to a gallon with cold water and add the yeast.

It may take about 3 weeks to ferment, you may need to rack the wine a couple of times to leave the pulp behind. You should get about 4 bottle of liquer. Should you wish to make it into a wine then add some water to reduce the alcohol level.

[tags]winemaking, home made wine, homebrew[/tags]

I am getting into making different types of wine, made from real fruit as opposed to wine kits. Each fruit gives a very different flavour, from the very dry white wine made from rhubarb to the port like wine that is produced from blackcurrent.

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