Blackcurrant Blog

[British Red]

I was asked on another forum to do a step by step guide to "wild wines". Its not really Bushcraft but I remember some previous interest in wines and meads so, for what its worth, I thought I would reproduce the highlights here (its not finished yet so I'll add more as time progresses if its interesting)

Introduction

Well, I was about to start making some blackcurrant wine and he thought that it might be interesting to others. So rather than one of those "heres one I did earlier" How to guides, you can see this one happen - you will have to stay with it for all the steps though

Day 1

A workmate gave me a large bucket of blackcurrants today - heres what I got

They are fantastically ripe and plump - great for wine, but they won't last too long, so first job tonight will be to sort them out and get them going

More in the evening

Red

 

[British Red]

Day 1

In wine making terms the "must" is the mushed up grapes or whatever we are going to make wine out of. Its the first stage in our process.

To prepare the must, I will need a couple of large buckets. Everything I use is either food grade white plastic of glass. Don't be tempted to use dustbins etc. - the colour and other nasties can leach out and spoil the wine.

I weighed the bucket of blackcurrants and found I have about seven pounds in weight. I need about 3lbs of fruit for each gallon of wine so i'll make two gallons (12 bottles). I'll need for the first part a brewing container at least twice that volume. I have some 5 gallon beer brewing containers, so I'll use one of those.

First thing is to sterilise everything I use - one bit of nasty will ruin the whole batch. There are proprietary sterilisers, or you can use baby bottle sterilising fluid. I use a cup of plain unscented bleach in 5 gallons of water. I'll leave that in the brewing container for half an hour and wash it out well (twice) before using it

Next stage is to pick over the black currants and remove any bad ones, stalks, leaves etc. - I ended up with a bit over 6lbs of fruit so I weigh out 6 lbs and eat the rest. They should look like this

I put all those berries into a large, sterilised fine mesh straining bag that looked like this

We tie up the top of the bag with plain white cooking string

Now if we were dealing with grapes, that would be our main ingredients sorted. But we aren't. Grapes are high in tannin (that gives the wine bite), various natural products that yeast lives on and sugar. Grapes are also high in acid.

For each fruit you need to adjust the recipe for whats needed. In this case, we will add 6lbs of sugar. Blackcurrants are high in tannin so none is neded (if it was we could add grape tannin from a home brew shop or a cup of strong tea or a couple of oak leaves). Blackcurrants are also high in acid (which the mix needs to be for the yeast to work). If we needed to increase acidity, we could add brewers acid blend or orange juice. We do need to add some nutrients for the yeast to live on - thats a matter for brewers yeast nutrient or chopped apple.

Now we crush up the berries using our hands or a sterilised potato masher (inside the bag).

Next we add 6 pints of boiling water and make sure the sugar all dissolves

Now another 10 pints of cold water to bring the temperature down

Finally we are going to kill off any wild yeast present (which can ferment oddly and leave a funny taste). To do this we will add a crushed Campden tablet (available from brew shops). We'll then leave it for 24 hours. You can skip this stage if you want - it just minimises the risk of a bad brew.

More after 24 hours

Red

 

[British Red]

Day 2

Righto, 24 hours have now passed.

The liquid is really changing colour now and all the wild yeasts have been killed out. There is one more optional step to do before we start this stuff fermenting and that is to remove pectin. Pectin is a natural ingredient of many fruits - its the stuff that makes jam set. It also makes your wine cloudy and a bit of a pain to clear.

To get rid of it we'll add a teaspoon of a natural enzyme call pectolase. We'll give that 24 hours to remove all the pectin and then we'll start a yeast culture and get fermenting!

Heres how our wine is looking today

It smells quite a bit stronger today and quite "woody" - that will change over time though - going a nice colour though huh?

Red

 

[British Red]

Day 3

Well, we’ve prepared a must, removed any wild yeast and pectin that may make our wine cloudy. Time to get fermenting. Now we could slug about 5g (a teaspoon full) of any old yeast into the must and hope for the best. But we’re going to do this properly.

So to do get fermenting we need a “starter culture”. That in effect is some living yeast that is already converting sugar to alcohol and CO2. We’ll make that by adding some dried wine yeast to an organic sugar bearing liquid. That’s easy – we’ll put a cup of orange juice in a large glass. Its important to let it come up to room temperature before adding the yeast (cold is the enemy of yeast).

Once that’s happened we’ll take a sachet of fresh wine yeast and add it to the OJ.

In an emergency you can use any yeast but proper wine yeast is best. It imparts a better flavour (there are a variety of types that work slightly differently) and it sinks. Bread yeast floats. Your yeast will not only consume sugar and produce as outputs alcohol and CO2, it will also reproduce. A lot. This in effect makes a sludge. A sludge at the bottom of your barrel is easy – just siphon off the nice clear liquid from on top. Floating sludge (or worse yet suspended sludge) is the brewers enemy. So proper wine yeast it is. We empty the wine yeast in and mix well to produce a cloudy liquid. Now we leave it for anything up to a couple of hours. You will see why in a bit.

We could go and get a brew on now (for our colonial cousins, getting a brew on is nothing to do with wine or beer – its what we really call making a cup of tea). However we are going to be really fancy with this wine, so I’m going to show you a few useful bits of kit.

From the top there are the following –
1) a hydrometer,
2) a measuring jar
3)a “wine thief”.

All complicated stuff right? Wrong! Lets re-play what’s here

1) a weight on a stick
2) a jar
3) a big old turkey baster

A hydrometer sinks a different amount into different “thicknesses” of liquid. It has a scale on. Water reads 1000 on that scale. As you dissolve sugar in the water it becomes “thicker” and the hydrometer sinks less and reads a higher number. Using this you can measure the amount of sugar. What is great is that alcohol is not as “thick” as water. So as your must ferments, you can tell how much sugar has fermented into alcohol. By measuring the specific gravity (thickness) at the start and end, you can work out how much alcohol is in your wine and when fermentation has finished. Clever huh? So we use our wine thief to suck up some must. This prevents grubby hands and gunk contaminating our must. When we move into narrow necked fermenting vessels later its just plain easier too.

We squirt that liquid into the measuring jar, lower the hydrometer in and read off the specific gravity. In this case its 1101. We’ll write that down cos we’ll need it in a few weeks. What we have now done is measured exactly how much sugar is in the mix – the total of the fruit sugars already present and the sugar we added.

We pour the must back in the fermenting vessel.

Now we get a brew on. It’s a warm day so we’ll check our starter culture in half an hour….

Look at it now

The froth is carbon dioxide bubbles caused by the yeast fermenting the sugar. See how much there is? Our wine will do that too. If we did the first stage of fermenting in a demi-john, the wine would froth up all over the place! So we do the initial (primary) fermentation in a large vessel (bucket) with a big gap in the top (headspace). When its all calmed down, we will use galss containers with small headspace and an airlock. More of that later, but if you remember when we sized the primary fermenting vessel, we went for one at least twice as big as the volume of liquid – now you know why.

So, we have measured our original gravity and we have a starter culture – lets pour the starter culture in and give it a mix.

Now, you can skip all that stuff and just bung your yeast in – its up to you – leave out the fancy stuff if you want

Finally, we need a lid. Partly to keep our must clean, but also to keep out vinegar flies. These nasty little brutes are attracted to fermenting liquids and they fall into it. Vinegar flies carry bacteria that will turn your wine into vinegar (hence the name). Now we could put a hard lid on. Trouble is as the gas (CO2) builds up, it will blow the lid off. In secondary fermentation, we will use an airlock, but in primary fermentation too much gas is sometimes produced for the airlock to cope with. So we fit a close fitting lide that has tiny holes melted in with a red hot needle (too fine for a vinegar fly to pass through). That’ll keep the little so and sos out

More when it starts fermenting in a day or two (maybe less right now given how warm it is)

Red

 

[British Red]

Day 7

This batch never got to the "frothing up" stage (good!). It did fizz like a mad can of coke though!

Well, the first violent fizzing is slowing down so its time to pop our must into the large bottles we’ll finish off the fermentation in (demijohns). So, we put sterilising solution into 2 demijohns and leave them to sterlise. Then we rinse them twice. If you haven’t seen the icon of home brew – this is a demijohn

The first think is to get rid of the fruit in the straining bag. Warning – blackcurrant stains to all get out. So, we carry the whole primary fermenter out to the compost heap. We remove the lid, lift out the bag and let it drip. Don’t squeeze (squeezing forces the mush through the mesh of the straining bag and its hard to get rid of).

This is what the must now looks like. You’ll see some little clumps of material – this is a combination of yeast and tiny blackcurrant particles – we’ll get rid of them in a bit. The little ripples are CO2 rising up

So, lid back on and we carry the primary fermenter back in and set it up on the kitchen counter. Now we’ll see a good reason for using a beer brewing vessel – it has a tap on the bottom. We fit a bit of plastic pipe on the tap (run in under the hot tap first to soften it). This rig mates getting the must into the demijohns much easier.

Now, to strain out any large bits, we’ll put a nylon tea strainer into a funnel. We then fill the demijohns through this set up

Now, I’ll introduce you to a few more bits of High tech kit J. On the left we have an air lock, on the right a rubber bung sized to fit the neck of the demijohn. It has a whole through it the size of the stem of the airlock. You can make an airlock out of a bit of plastic tube bent into an “S” shape if you don’t have one. In fact the whole demijohn, cork, airlock arrangement can be lashed up out of an old 5 litre water carrier and 6” of plastic tube.

We put enough water into 1/3 fill the airlock – it should look like this

We firmly press the bung into the neck of the demijohn. It should look like this

Fairly quickly the CO2 will force its way up the stem of the airlock. As it passes the bottom of the curve (see photo) a bubble of CO2 will rise through the water and, with the pressure relieved, the water drops back to the bottom. The pressure builds again and so on. When the bubbling stops – fermentation is complete.

Finally I rig a light proof jacket up for both demijohns out of brown paper. They are going to sit on my windowsill for a few weeks now and I don’t want the light to bleach that lovely dark colour out.

This secondary fermentation takes about a month. Can be more or less dependant on temperature. As it slows down, we will siphon the wine into a fresh demijohn leaving any sludge behind (racking off). Once the fermentation stops, we will clear the wine, stablise it (to stop any further fermentation) and sweeten if we want to. We’ll then put it through a wine filter for a final polish, cork it into sterilised bottles, label and seal it.


Red