This is the best possible timing for this video. Yesterday I picked four pounds of wild red and black raspberries to make wine, they’re in the fridge and tonight will be my first attempt.
My little brother will enjoy seeing this, he's been home brewing for years now. He's usually stuck by various types of mead and beer for most of his projects, but he has done some wines in the past.
I'm doing home brewing as well. My standard recepie is pretty much undestilled rum. So I take brown sugar (white doesn't work at all, because there are no minerals in it), add my yeast (I use standard baking yeast so it doesn't get too strong) and then let it ferment. I like to add some lemon juice right before serving so it tastes like an alcoholic lemonade. The price is also a reason why I do it. About 75 cents per gallon isn't much.
@@etuanno here in Australia, you can do beer, mead, wine. Once distilling equipment comes into play we risk jail. Oh and I’m pretty sure the licensing structure for home distilling is super flawed, like clear spirits only, gotta buy and use tags..... and I’m also pretty sure we get in the crap if we decide to use it as biofuel
@@DH-xw6jp I bet you don’t go to jail for distilling water for your beer mash though. Here you can distill water, or make non distilled alcohol but not both, having equipment for both is a big fine. Screw em’ though... if I want to mash and distill wood chips to run my generator I will 😂
@@dylanzrim3635 right right. The act of "Distilling" (evaporating liquid with heat) isn't illegal. Home brewing isn't illegal. But if they catch you with both you can get caught up in "conspiracy to commit" crimes, and if they catch you with mash actually _in the still,_ (or the resulting product) you are screwed. Remember, the agency that enforces federal gun laws in America is the same one that enforces alcohol laws (tabacco and explosives laws as well). And the BATFE are buttheads.
I love the fact that Jon's hands and the utensils are stained that lovely shade of purple. How would someone in the 18th century deal with removing the stain?
Purple??? I thought it looked deep pomegranate red like blood, which is why Jon told us not to worry, it’s just wine. He didn’t in fact kill someone in the name of nutmeg 😆
My grandparents had an abundance of black raspberry bushes on their property. I remember helping myself to them every summer, along with the other grandchildren. Black raspberries will always have a special place in my heart.
Later in the season, apples make an excellent German type wine. Elderberry makes a really good red providing you don't use too many and ferment with grape juice.
I'm from the Appalachian mountains and my grandma used to make something like this every year. She would use white shine instead of wine but my favorite was the pulp. She would sit it aside, dry it out, and we would sprinkle it over our oats in the morning.
9:20 - we ferment blackberries over a picking season by putting a layer of bruised berries down in a carboy - when there's an inch or so, put in a layer of brown sugar, and so on. It stops bubbling after a while, so gently decant in November-ish into another carboy and rest a few days, decant again into bottles, and start drinking it.
@@judgeworks3687 when you, uuuh... type it into google it comes up as large glass or plastic container for fluids, go figure... it's used in fermentation.
Your videos are a moment of peace for me. This atmosphere of calm and friendly storytelling is what we all lack these days I think. Thank you for what you are doing! Greetings from Ukraine.
This takes me back to the early days of the pandemic. An old friend and I tried making wine. It was undrinkable 😂 I’ll have to try your way! Update: you are all very kind but this wasn’t bad like “cheap wine” this was bad like “unfit for human consumption” bad. This was “an abomination unto Bacchus” bad 😂
Undrinkable wine was traditionally made into Mulled Wine. We do it at Christmas with the cheapest nastiest boxed wine I can find, tastes just like the holiday.
Of all the wine I’ve made, Fig beats them all . Choke cherry the biggest disappointment, until forgotten about for a year it when it became intensely smooth and rich .
Lynne Dunlap Never seen a recipe . Was preparing for preserves but ran out of time, I split them , sugared them and the next day the sugared juice spoke to me . Just pour off the sugar juice ( keep pulp out so it doesn’t have to be clarified ), add a hand full of raisins ( for tannin ) , and yeast ( unless you want the natural yeast) and let it work. I don’t monitor the alcohol content, just work it till the yeast can’t live in it anymore. Around 15% LET IT SIT , at least 3 months. Golden nectar The pulp just needs sugar replaced to finish it into preserves, the water reduction keeps the preserves thicker.
As a side note, Fig wine can be distilled into 'mahia' which is a traditional spirit made by Morrocan Jews. I have been meaning to learn to make both as I am, myself, a Morrocan Jew. Alas, not a whole lot of figs In Texas it seems.
TheodoricFriede Never heard of mahia, and I just happen to have a small still. Figs should be all over Texas. Another side note , the Atlas of Morocco , Appalachian and Northern Highlands of Scotland are supposed to be the same mountains separated by Pangea’s breakup.
Thank you for a different approach. Every year I try to make 5 gallons of black raspberry wine by fermenting them with a little added sugar. It is always a very good wine. I’m currently down to 4 bottles but I have 15lbs for another 5 gallons.
Speaking as a homebrewer of wines and meads, I hope to God your stage wine is a contemporary made wine (with sulfites). If it was made and bottled without a preservative to stop yeast development, you'll either have a popped cork at best or a bottle bomb at worst. Using that recipe, you have effectively changed the volume of the wine and provided additional sugars. Depending on the yeast tolerance, an active fermentation could take place and last for up to 21 days. The putting juice and sugar in brandy is safer because you're likely to only double your volume...meaning a ~20% ABV. Most yeasts cap out at 20%, so your chances of making a bottle bomb will be next to nothing. However, the brandy will taste of berries rather than berry wine. Starting in the 1600s, country wines were common. That was just juice, water, and sugar. Country wines are still the most popular type of wines produced by American homebrewers.
@@Solais1019 you can absolutely make wines without sulfites! Exceptional wines are available without sulfites. They are not cheap! There is a lot of confusion over this subject. Most people are not allergic to sulfites. Many people are allergic to sulfa drugs and incorrectly think that they're allergic to sulfur compounds. Still,
@@Solais1019 Sulfite addition started some time in the 1800's and has become idustry standard. It's there to stop yeast and bacteria breeding. You can make wine without it *if* ends up with zero sugar in it (either residual or added. You risk fermenting the sugar in the sealed bottle and creating a glass bomb if there's sugar and no sulfites/sorbate), but it'll have a slightly shorter shelf life, so it's really hard to find commercially. Home-brewing is a great hobby and you can make stuff to your own personal tastes that can rival shop-bought wine. I've only been doing it a couple of years and I've made pear wines that came out like a sauvignon blanc and blackberry wines like a pinot noir.
I will say if you can get like a high strength hard cider it will go good with berries too. Needs to be like 15% abv to start with to last any amount of time. And to those who don't do alcohol. Sweetened and flavored vinegars are good to and make a really good syrup to flavor water.
I've been fermenting, gallon and a half batches of fruit juices, for about a year. Experimenting with different kinds and mixes. Seems like white grape, concord grape, apple and cranberry are ones you can never go wrong with. I've been using SafCider AB-1 yeast for it all. I bottle it in 1 liter Grolsch bottles, they're reusable and don't need to mess with bottle caps.
This reminds me of making cordials. Very similar techniques. Main difference is not straining off the fruit solids until after it's sat with the alcohol for a few weeks.
I can see why there's a difference of 3 days versus 4 or 5. With the sugar added right away, the yeast will be more active right away. Without any extra sugar, the yeast will have to rely upon the natural sugars from the berry juices alone, and will be slower-starting, requiring more time to achieve the same level of fermentation. For both, I'd definitely give them a week, loosely capped, for further fermentation, before corking tightly.
I love the way nature gives us gifts every season , we are blessed , thank you for these wonderful posts. My grandmother used to put cranberries, ( we are in NJ) In vinegar after a few months we had a cranberries vinegar , great on chicken , fish and vegetables.
This spring I played around with the Raspberry Wine recipe from The Housekeepers Instructor (Schnebbelie 1805) but I wanted to use strawberries. I did what you wanted to do and fermented the strawberries with the sugar (since strawberries are a bit more difficult to juice I think than raspberries and I got more out of macerating them). I let that wine sit for over a month and it is fantastic. It basically tastes a bit like a slightly alcoholic strawberry jam. It really did capture the essence of those early spring berries. But I do want to try it with raspberries as well.
Great video... but I wonder.... The wine back in the day would not have been chemically stabilized so adding more fruit and sugar would have meant that the yeast still in the wine would have begun to referment the added juice and sugar. Even if you had not allowed the juice to stand for 3 days in the bottle, I would think, the fruit WOULD ferment and so making this wine today would not as likely produce quite the same flavor or the same amount of alcohol...
Yeast can only live up to about 18% alcohol, so adding more fruit or sugar after that will only increase the fruit flavor and/or sweetness, but not cause any further fermentation. Granted, some yeast is more alcohol tolerant, but those are modern varieties. I suspect the yeast Jon is using the same yeast that he'd use to make bread or beer, so it's not bred to be highly alcohol tolerant. It seems counter-intuitive that alcohol kills yeast, but you have to remember that alcohol is the waste product of yeast consuming sugar to reproduce.
Anyone watching this be very very careful storing this for the weeks after. The amount of sugar added will not ferment in the 3 days. So as it sits lots more co2 will be created. Make sure the storage container can let out gas or you will paint your home with raspberries
I made mullberry jam this year! I left out a bird feeder and they graciously shared the mullberries with us this year (except the orioles, they ate the mullberries and the oranges I left for them) I think wine will be for next season!
In modern parlance, those recipes are more cordials than wine. I usually make several fruit cordials every year, using vodka as the infusing liquid. Black raspberries make what is essentially Chambord. All and all, an excellent way to preserve the fruity goodness.
This is the kind of wine-making process for terrible criminals; they'll always be caught red-handed. Seriously, though, this is fantastic. It blends two loves of mine, wine-making and history. Absolutely well made and definitely earned a sub and notification. ^.^
Doesn't sugar help draw out the juice from the fruit? If so, wouldn't adding the sugar after the berries are brused but before they're allowed to sit and squeezed result in a greater juice yield?
I live near a brandy distillery in Illinois. I've always wanted raspberry brandy! I know a few ditches by a creek that the black raspberries grow wild. Maybe I can take some plain brandy and do this.
Why did you put "don't worry" on the thumbnail? What did you think we would assume Jon is doing? Like, the thumbnail could have just said "wine making" and I think that would have stopped anyone from freaking out, thinking Jon was squeezing a human heart to appease the god of fermentation.
Could a start to finish wine making video be in the future? You know with the crushing of grapes, historic sterilizing processes, the fermenting ect? It would be so cool to see! Also thank you for this video!
any time you're using a cloth to filter juice from pulp, you can gather up the loose ends around a stick and use that to twist the bundle and squeeze out the juice. It increases your leverage greatly and really saves your hands if you're doing it a few times.
Thanks for this suggestion! While I don't **brew** per sey, I do make mead, cordials and vodka. Just seeing this started me thinking about maybe some Raspberry mead..My hives are pretty plush right now..
On my dad's farm in Alberta, Canada, I remember the wild berries we had. We had ditch strawberries, Saskatoon berries, and other fruit. There even was a hazelnut bush. They were so good. Nothing compares to wild berries. Cheers!
the 1670s method of using alcohol and berries infused is literally how you make a number of liqueurs at home using high grain alcohol and then the fruit and or spices/herbs you wish. Typically you freeze the berries (this replaces the hand bruising) and opens the berries, you then add them to a jar it can be as little as half a pound of berries and you only need to cover them with the high grain alcohol. You then leave it as this for a week shaking the contents in the jar (one with a clip top) so it's sealed. After the week you strain the liquid from the berries and then you just cut the liquid by adding water and sugar (best to use syrup which is boiled water and sugar) you do this by mixing them to get the abv you want. Instead of water and sugar you can also use fruit juice the abv wont be exact because of this but you can get it pretty close.
I can only speak to beer brewing but in that the bulk of the fermentation is generally done in three days, for ales at least, and the rest of the time before bottling or kegging is usually used to let any solids settle on the bottom of the fermenter. Seems like Hannah Glass knew how to get the most bang for her buck out of those berries!
I've got a great old passed down many times recipe for homemade wine but it is one of those that take 4-8 weeks. However It only takes a gallon of fruit for 2.5 gallons finished yield. But the best thing to do when working with Raspberries or something of the sort, is to mix them half and half with Rhubarb. It's alot easier to get a bucket of rhubarb than a bucket of raspberries. Balances all the flavors out really well and if you have a decent rhubarb patch of your own then you know that you have too much rhubarb than you know what to do with. Chokecherries would probably be the one fruit you don't want to mix with anything. But you could mix almost anything with Rhubarb. Apple, Pear, Peach, Plum, Strawberry, almost anything you can think of. If you give this comment a Like I will share it with everyone haha.
There's a huge difference in fermenting. In order to produce alcohol, it has to be done below 52f, above 52 f it can ferment into vinegar. My dad, the plumber heating cooling guy, did and experiment with me, on fermenting. He stuck a fresh gallon of apple cider at the bottom of our fridge, and one on the pantry shelf. A month later we had apple cider wine and apple cider vinegar on the pantry shelf. Beer makers could not produce beer in the warm months because they needed a cooled place to make it. The first refrigerator cooling system was produced, all because Coors's Beer owned the first patent on refrigeration system. That patent lost out to a gas other then ammonia sulfide, I believe it was. Beer created refrigerators. Beer created the world as we know it, it even created algebra, farming, transportation $ trade, geometry, etc... all because someone collecting grains left a storage pot out in the rain, found a couple days latter, after the grain sprouted and it was carbonated, and they tasted it, and POOF, the first barley soda was founded. It just took off from there over the millennia. True Story, Nettflix: How Beer Saved the world!
You can absolutely ferment above 52F and not get vinegar. The acetobacter that make ethanol into acetic acid need oxygen to do that, so vinegar is impossible if you cut the fermenting liquid off from the air. I live in South Carolina and before I gave up drinking I would homebrew routinely during the summer when my thermostat was set for 80F. Never got vinegar unless I wanted it.
It seems to me that what Hannah Glasse's recipe is actually doing is basically creating a yeast starter because the wine you are adding the raspberries to would have probably been alcoholic enough to kill its own yeast off. By mixing this starter with the existing wine you would be bringing the ABV % down slightly allowing the raspberries to ferment slightly longer than just the 3 days on their own.
One year my friend tried making some homemade wine in a collapsible 5 gallon water cooler. It ended up in his closet and wouldn't you know it, that damned thing split right up the seam in his closet all over his clothes.
I have a Dutch recepe for rasberry wine from the second half of the 17th century, that dose not call for it to be added to wine. Basicly its 50/50 rasberry juice and sugar put it in a bottle and let it ferment for an unspecifide amount of time. From Kongijt & Keukenrecepten van het Huys te Warmont. It could be that the adding of wine was not mentioned because most cookbooks of the time wer written for cooks who wer expected to know these kind of things.
No it would be a way to make a real raspberry wine, as in brewed from raspberry instead of brewed from grapes and then flavoured with raspberries. Flavouring grapewine feels a bit like cheating to me, I would prefer your recipe.
I sailed the Pacific in the 1970's on a US Navy vessel. We made jungle juice on the boat. Things were different back then. Vietnam ammo ship.AE-26. we used pillow cases for straining. We stole the officers case of grapes. Then raisens. Used a big steel milk jug. Yeast and sugar. 30 days and perfect. We peeled potatoes and made wine for movie night on Thursday. Children of the Corn seemed to always run. As long as man lives we ferment berries. Love your shows.
Where I grew up in Ohio the black raspberry season was the week of the 4th or the week before. We'd go out in the woods and pick buckets of them. All scratched up bloody by the thorns (or jaggers as we called them).
Your ginger beer video got me into winemaking during coronoavirus. Now I have about 40 gallons working on the porch and around the house, and 400 bottles in the cellar.
Black raspberries precious as you said, Jon. Their season is short and they are very difficult to harvest in the wild. Their flavor is absolutely wonderful and totally different from mullberries, blackberries, and red raspberries. Their shelf life is really short too. They smell like perfume to me and they bring back so many memories of gathering and my sister making cobbler with them (to stretch them.) Their delicacy and difficulty of gathering is why I would bet that 99% of people have no idea of what they're missing by not ever having eaten them.
Not going to lie; I started watching this channel to learn about what food was like in past times so as to help immerse my D&D players in the game. While 18th century isn’t what you think of when you think Dungeons & Dragons, it’s a great place to start. And a lot of Dwarves would like the sort of information like in this video.
While the juice was fermenting, you should also put the pulp in the cheese cloth in a separate vessel and pour some white wine on it with a little sugar, to get out the max juice, color, flavor, etc from the berries.
Reminds me of my eighth-grade. In my science class, the class made wine as a group project. Also kind of curious what the people of that era would have done with the pope. Make a dessert with it? Dry it out into fruit leather?
Well, the "good" part (the juice and with it the sugar) is already gone and you had enough fresh berries for desserts, dried fruits and so on. So I think the pulp would have likely gone to the pigs.
