How to make Rhubarb wine...

Rhubarb wine has become one of our yearly wines, it's simple to make and is usually ready quite quickly, and as we grow our own rhubarb it's also a good way of using it up if you have loads, anyway here's a short video on how to make rhubarb wine, or at least how we do it, it's a simple recipe and works well, the resulting wine is very nice and has a good flavour.

Here's the video -

Thanks for visiting.

Simple bottle drying rack...

At present we have numerous tubs around the house, tubs with wine at various stages, we also have a load of demi johns full of wine as well, and today I decided that some of that wine was ready for bottling, the problem is it was about 20 litres of wine or more, which is a lot of bottles that needed to be sterilised and dried.

Usually I put the bottles into some of the empty brewing tubs we have, but as they were all full I decided on a different method, that being filling the bath (after a good clean) with hot water and sterilising powder and chucking the bottles in.

This works well, but drying the bottles can be a pain as you need to let them drain and it's not always practical to stand them upside down on a draining board or other surface as they have a tendency to fall over so I made a very simple drying rack.

Here it is -

Not a lot to it really.

At this point you might be thinking it looks like a sheet of plywood with some holes drilled in it, and you'd be right because that's exactly what it is.

Basically what I've done is take a sheet of plywood and drilled holes in it, holes big enough to fit the neck of a wine bottle in so you can stand it upside down over a bath.

To make it I first measured the width of the bath, which as it turns out is about 660mm (about 26 inches in old money) so using that measurement I made it 660mm wide and the same in length, so I ended up with a square 660mm wide by 660mm long.

I measured in 50mm (about 2 inches) on two sides to allow for the sides of the bath.

Then I marked out a grid so that I knew where to drill the holes for the bottle necks, to mark up the grid I took two measurements from the wine bottles we have, the diameter of the neck and the diameter of the base, this as it turned out was about 32mm for the neck and about 80mm for the base.

Measuring in from the marks I'd made to allow for the bath sides I made a mark at 80mm intervals until I reached the end of the wood, then I did the same the other way which gave me a grid of 80mm squares.

Grid marked out - 

Now to work out where to drill.

To mark the drill holes I put marks at 40mm on each line, this gave me a total of 49 holes to drill.

Then using a 35mm forstner bit I set about drilling 49 holes, these holes are where each bottle will sit while the rack sits on the bath, think of it as being like one of those over the bath racks everyone used to have, the wire things that had soap and sponges and all manner of other stuff, I bet your nan had one.

Drilling points marked out - 

On to drilling.

And with it all marked out I then drilled a lot of holes - 

Drilling holes is boring.

And that was about it, I gave the hole thing a sand and it was done, and I have to say it works well, and it saves me having to take up loads of space in the kitchen and the bottles are much more secure now, I may give it a coat of something to protect the wood a bit, and I may add some extra support at some stage, but all in all it was a cheap solution to a problem.

Here it is in use - 

Bottles drip drying.

Works like a charm, and as it's flat it will be easy to store away, shortly after this picture was taken these 26 bottles were filled with wine made from grapes we grew on our allotment plot last year.

Thanks for reading.

Magpie Monday - Homemade wines & drinks ...

I thought I'd add my two pence to this weeks Magpie Monday (well 50p actually)

We've been making our own wines for a couple of years now, and generally we have had some good drinkable wines, some more alcoholic than others, so far we've made blackberry,apple,plum, with shop bought plums, and with foraged plums and I've also made ginger wine.

Although making wine is easy enough it never hurts to have a book or two, and I figured that the recipe book for wines and drinks I noticed in one of our charity shops was worth it's 50p price tag, it's and old-ish book, but it has some very interesting recipes in it.

The book -

Originally published in 1963 (I think)

It has some very good stuff in it, including a Mead recipe, which I'm eager to try, it also has some what might be considered odd recipes, like Beetroot wine, along with other types of veg, like celery and spiced carrot, not sure if I want to try them to be honest.

Beetroot wine (I wasn't making it up) - 

I'm not a fan of Beetroot.

It's a good book if you enjoy a bit of foraging as well, these a good and easy to make recipe for Rosehip syrup which is very good for staving of colds in winter as Rosehips have a very high vitamin c content.

Rosehip syrup - 

Will be trying this.

And it's not all alcoholic drinks either, it has some stuff that kids will love, mainly involving chocolate, things like the chocolate marshmallow float and loads of others, the book also offers some simple tips for decorating glasses and of course good glass keeping practices.

The Marshmallow float - 

I'm not a fan of chocolate, but I'm liking the sound of this.

So all in all for 50p there's a lot in this book to keep me busy for a while.

Thanks for reading.

Simple wine recipes ... ...

Just a couple of simple wine recipes.

They are for plum wine and blackberry wine, both of which are really good, and easy to do, the only annoying thing is they take time, although this is the case for most wines.

Blackberry wine.

This is easy to do, and the fruit can be found growing in more or less every hedgerow in the country ;-)

Ingredients :

• Blackberries, I use about 1kg of foraged blackberries.
• Sugar, for our latest batch I've used 1.5kg of sugar, more sugar will mean a sweeter wine, less sugar and it'll be dryer.
• Water, this depends on how much you plan to make, and whether you have a container for it, but about 4 to 8 litres of water (boiled) for this batch I've used 8 litres, which will fill 2 demijohns.
• Yeast, now this is up to you, but I get my yeasts and other wine making stuff from the same chap, there are a lot of yeasts about and each will yield slightly different results, but a good general purpose yeast will do, they can be bought for about a pound.

Equipment :

• Tub, bucket with a lid is best.
• Spoon for stirring.
• Demijohns or you could use large plastic bottles, but you'd need to cut holes in the lids to fit the airlocks.
• Airlocks and rubber bungs (you can get these when you get your yeast)
• Bottles for bottling up when it's stopped fermenting.
• Steriliser, this can also be bought from the place you get your yeast, you should be able to pick everything up at the same time.
• Straining bag (jelly bag will do) or muslin.

The yeast I use -

I used the red packet for the blackberry wine.

Method :

• First make sure your tub is clean and has been sterilised for a few hours, or leave it over night.
• Make sure you give it a good rinse out with cold water before starting.
• Add the sugar to the tub.
• Then you can either boil up the water in a saucepan or use the kettle (I use the kettle it's quicker)
• Add the hot water to the sugar, and give it a good stir until all the sugar has dissolved.
• Next add the fruit and give it a good stir, this will help get some of the flavour out of the fruit.
• Now you need to let it cool down until it's luke warm, any hotter and the yeast won't work as well, and if you add the yeast while it's still near to boiling you'll kill it.
• Once it's all cooled down get a small jug or a cup and add some boiled luke warm water and add about a teaspoon of sugar and give it a stir, next add your yeast (it will most likely have instructions on the packet) give it a good stir until all the yeast has dissolved and then leave it for about 15 - 20 minutes.
• Once your yeast is ready you can add it to the mixture, and once again give it a good stir.

And now comes the first lot of waiting, the yeast will start to do it's thing and eat all the sugar, the by product is the alcohol you want.
Leave it in the tub in a warm place for a week, give it a stir from time to time (once a day should be fine) you'll notice it starts to smell a little alcoholic after a day or two.

Once the week is up you need to get it all out of the tub, hence the straining bag, make sure the demijohns have been sterilised and rinsed out with cold water before using them.

Strain all of it through the bag, muslin etc and place it in the demijohns, then fit the airlocks, I tend to add a little bit of the water from sterilising to the airlocks.

And now comes the next lot of waiting, basically you need to wait until the bubbles stop going through the airlock, this can take a few months. If I remember it took about two 3 months for our first lot of blackberry wine to stop fermenting (we started it in June or was it July) it was ready for Christmas :-) I remember that much.

Once it's finished fermenting you can go ahead and bottle it up, again make sure it's all been sterilised and given a good rinse before use.

We use old glass wine bottles and corks for our wine, I have a little gizmo that puts the corks into the bottles, if you do use corks you'll need to let them soak in steriliser for at least 24 hours prior to using them, you could also use screw tops bottles, or even plastic bottles at a push.

Now don't leave it a for a day or 2 then go drink it, leave it for a couple of weeks if you can, longer is better to be honest, and if you do drink some after a couple of weeks you'll notice the difference between that and the ones left for a few months, it's true that wine gets better with age.

The plum wine is done is much the same way, so you can just use the blackberry recipe but using about 1 - 2 kg of plums, shop bought are okay, but we try to use foraged plums as well, keeps it cheap.

The method for the plum wine is again the same, apart from a little extra ingredient, plums contain a lot of pectin and this can cause a wine to be cloudy, and although it would be drinkable no one wants cloudy wine, so get some pectolase (pectic enzyme) all you do is add this to the mixture (preferably when it's cooled and before the yeast) and it will help you get a nice clear wine.

Pectolase -

It's worth buying for a better end result.

And there you have it, it's easy enough to do, but it does take time and patients will give you better results, I tend to do everything in the same way when it comes to wine, chuck it in a tub and see what happens ;-) I've only had one failure and that was due to the airlock being knocked of the demijohn.

Thanks for reading.

Making wine - A rough guide ... ...

I figured I'd write a post about making wine, seems a lot of people are thinking about having a go at it, I say why not :-)

It's not really that difficult to make a halfway drinkable wine, I've managed to do it twice so far, although I did follow a recipe the first time, well I more or less followed it ;-)

 Here's a picture of the plum wine we made last year (still in demijohns)

Not much of it left now ;-)

So on to making wine, you will need some equipment, a tub for starting things of,demijohns for fermenting and empty bottles to put it in once it's done, but you don't have to get everything in one go, you could get to the demijohn stage and then get the empty bottles as it'll take a few months for fermentation to slow down and stop.

Charity shops and free cycling are good places to find equipment, we got pretty much all our equipment from free cycle and charity shops, maybe you have a relative that used to make wine, they may have some spare or unused demijohns and other stuff, although you don't actually need them, you can used large plastic bottles, the 5 litre kind that you get water in, it's easy to fit an airlock to a bottle like this.

You will need airlocks, these help the gas escape during fermentation, they are cheap enough to buy, or you can find them in charity shops and such like, and it's also possible to make them using a piece of tube.

Here's a list of the basic stuff you'll need, it's what we use to make wine. 

Steriliser,this is very important, some people don't use it, but I wouldn't try it, it's best to have everything nice and clean to prevent build up of unwanted bacteria, a tub of steriliser is about £4 (you want vwp steriliser) this will last a while, we also use it to clean out our jars when we make jams.

Large plastic tub for starting things off, these can be bought for about £10 or you could use any large tub, even an old 10 litre paint tub will do, even more so as you can seal it, obviously it will need to be clean and paint free.

Demijohns, these can also be bought for about £10 each, which is a little expensive, so look in charity shops. Or you could use a large water bottle, but you'll need to make a hole to fit an airlock and rubber bung, this is easy enough to do.

Airlocks, these are cheap enough, you can usually get a pack of 2 complete with rubber bungs for as little as £2.50, but again you might find some in charity shops.

One of our airlocks -

This one is my favourite :-)

This airlock is an old one, it's made of glass, sounds great as the bubbles go through it, most are plastic these days, like the ones in the picture below.

Plastic airlocks -

I prefer the ones on the left, they sound better ;-)

Some other things you might want to get are a straining bag, or you can use muslin, a funnel makes bottling up loads easier and a long bottle brush, you can also buy these from good wine making shops, or you could buy a cheap pack of brushes from somewhere like poundland and attach one to a bit of garden cane, it's what I did to get the tough stuff from the bottom of the demijohns, you can also use a little dry rice in some warm water, just shake it about for a while, it works quite well.

Here's a picture of our blackberry wine, along with the brewing tub we use -

Oddly enough there isn't much blackberry wine left either ;-)

Here's a link to the local shop we use, the bloke that runs it is very helpful, you can also order online ---> Good life home brew (opens in new window) you should be able to find everything you need for making wine,beer and other stuff, they also sell some good wine making yeasts, it will also give you an idea of where to start with it all.

Okay I thought I'd leave you with a recipe for making plum or blackberry wine, although it's easy enough to adapt for them for making different wines, like elderberry for example.

Black berry & Plum wine (which are rather good, even if I do say so myself)

You will need about 2kg of blackberries or plums, which you can pick from your local hedgerows (it's what we did)

2kg of sugar (normal granulated is fine) Obviously the more sugar the sweeter the wine, but 2kg is a good starting point, you can always add more buy boiling some water and adding the extra sugar, but make sure it's cooled right down before adding it to the wine, or you'll kill the yeast.

Boiled water, about 4.5litres (roughly a gallon, enough for a demijohn)

And a good yeast, which you can get from shops like the one I mentioned, they do some good ones for about £1 a packet, enough for a batch of wine, or you can get larger packets of wine yeast.

I'm not going to go into working out the gravity and all the rest of it, but there are many guides online on how to work this out, but this will require a hydrometer, or you could buy a vinometer (about £3) which will give you a rough idea of alcohol content, once it's bottled up.

To start the wine of, make sure your tub is clean, use some steriliser and leave it for a few hours or over night (same for bottles and demijohns) when you want to use them make sure you rinse them well.

Fill your clean tub with the boiled water, then add the sugar and blackberries or plums, use a potato masher or big wooden spoon to mix it all up, try and break the fruit up as you go.

Leave the mixture to cool, make sure it's cooled down before adding the yeast or you'll kill it and it won't ferment.

Once you've added the yeast give it a stir, cover the tub and leave it some where warm for about 5 to 7 days, give  it a stir now and then, you should start to notice when it starts fermenting.

After 5 to 7 days you need to strain the wine through a bag of muslin and pour the liquid into your demijohn, then put an airlock on, you need to put a little water in the airlock, this stops anything getting into the wine, I normally use a little bit of the steriliser water in my airlocks.

The wine will be ready for bottling when no more bubbles go through the airlock, this can take a few months, once the bubbles stop this means fermentation has stopped, the sugar and yeast have turned into alcohol, and you can now bottle it up, you can use screw top bottles, we got a load of glass bottles and corks with our freecycled stuff, it's worth doing it this way.

To get the wine out of the demijohns use a length of plastic pipe (you can get this from wine making shops as well) and siphon the wine into your bottles, you can also buy filters that will help make the wine clearer.

Guess what ? we got a filter as well -

Even came with filter papers :-)

Leave your wine for a week or 2 before drinking, it will however get better the longer you leave it, we noticed a distinct difference between our wine from the bottles we drunk after a few weeks and the ones we drunk after a few months, so again it's worth leaving it that little extra.

The above recipe is how I made both wines, plum and blackberry (both made from foraged fruit) this method would work for elderberries and other fruits, we have a batch of elderflower wine on the go, but that requires a slightly different method.

You don't have to forage for fruits either, although buying a few kilos of blackberries will be quite expensive, but things like plums might be cheaper, we ended up with about 13 bottles (8 blackberry & 5 plum) of wine for Christmas last year, and each bottle cost about 50p not bad and we still have our eye sight ;-)

It's worth looking online for guides on making wine, there's a wealth of information and it's easy to do,saves money and the end results are pretty good, it's not just wine either, you can make your own cider and beers to.

Thanks for reading and happy brewing :-)

Woo hoo wine, and an ode to free-cycling ... ...

As part of our ongoing effort in being more self sufficient we have ventured into wine making, and so far we have made 2 batches of wine, with things we foraged for, we have one lot of blackberry wine and one lot of wild plum wine.
Last night I filtered the plum wine to get rid of the sediment using a filter we got as part of a load of wine making equipment from a very nice chap on free-cycle, in fact we got pretty much everything you need, apart from the ingredients (yeasts,fruit and stuff) we had bought a couple of demi johns from our local charity shop, but that's about it, we were looking in to what to do with the piles of fruit we had form our trips, and that's when the free-cycle e-mail came through offering all the wine making equipment.

The filter (even came with filter papers) -

Filtering the wine.

We did have to buy some sterilizer and some nutrients and we got some campden tablets in case we need them for future wines, which we will be making if the ones we have turn out okay, and so far they seem pretty good.

Here's a picture of the wine after I'd filtered it, it's in 2 demi johns because there's just a little too much to get it all in one, it doesn't seem to be affecting it.

The wine (this ones wild plum) -

I took the picture at night, under the kitchen lights, which doesn't do justice to the colour.

It tastes great, and luckily in amongst the wine making stuff was a hydrometer as well, so we can work out what percentage it is and other things, pretty handy really.

As it turns out there was an interesting looking air lock in with some of the equipment, on closer inspection it turns out it was a glass one, it's cool and makes a really nice sound as the gas goes through it.

Here it is - 

Glass airlock.

Here's a picture of the blackberry wine, which should be ready for bottling up soon.

Blackberry wine - 

This was taken before the plum wine (in the tub) was put into demi johns.

I can't really describe the colour of the wines, the plum wine is like a redish colour, and the blackberry wine is really dark red, almost purple, I will have to add a couple more pictures of the wines in glasses so you can see the colour, it has been a good experience and from what I've learned so far it isn't that difficult to make your own wine, there are plenty of good articles on the web about wine making,recipes and the like, google is your friend.

And now for free cycle, see with out getting the wine making stuff from free cycle we would have had to find other uses for our foraged goods as we probably wouldn't have been able to afford buying what we got in one big buy, so that's why I think free cycle is great, we have been lucky with the things we've found, for example the glass drying cabinet I turned into a dehydrator was from free cycle.

There are some other things we got, and perhaps the most unexpected was this - 

yes we really did get it for free.

As you can see it's a Newtonian telescope, and it has all the bits you need to start star gazing (we put it together to see if it was all there) I have since used it to look at the moon, it shows a very clear image, and I'm now working on a camera mount for it, so we can use dslr to take pictures.

The main reason we asked about the telescope when it came up on free-cycle was for our son, he has started to express an interest in planets and the moon and such like, so we figured if we were lucky enough to be offered the telescope it would be a bonus, we had no idea what sort of telescope it was as the lady who offered it didn't say, so I was quite surprised when she showed it to me, and I had to ask if she was sure she wanted to give it away, and to my surprise again she said she had been trying to give it to schools in the area, but can you believe none would take it ? I can't think why.

She also gave use some other things, like knitting needles and other knitting/sewing equipment and an un-opened chemistry kit, which again she had tried to give away to schools, but none would take it, so we will be using both the telescope and chemistry set for my sons education, and just for fun really.

I would like to say though that we only e-mail about things we can make use of, I actually managed to get enough parts to build a file server as well, but as I said unless we need it we don't ask, which seems fair to me ? I have heard stories of people who use free cycling to make money (one chap managed to make £700 from doing it) I think this is not in the spirit of it though, but I guess it's not illegal ? it just seems a little mean to take things under the pretence your going to use them and then sell them on, I can see why people do it, but I don't think they should.

Anyway enough of that, here's a link (opens in new window) to free cycles site - freecycle you should be able to find a group near to you, so why not join ? you might find something useful or you can use it to free cycle some of your un-wanted items.

Thanks for reading.

A productive few weeks ... ...

I've been meaning to update this blog for a while, finally got round to it, so I thought I'd ramble on about how we have been getting on with things.
You may have read about our exploits foraging for things, and the comments we've had from people, we haven't received any more thankfully, and I still feel quite sad about it, mainly because the children of these people will miss out on a wealth of knowledge and experience, but not only that there's the heritage, will they ever learn that foraging for food in this country has been going on for many many years ? for example when Julius Caesar landed in Britain he and his troops had to forage for food, so if they hadn't known what to look for they might have not survived, but enough about that.

As the title suggests it's been a productive few weeks, and to be honest this has been our most productive year in terms of actually putting the things we wanted to into practice, of course we have had to get set up for various things, but we have been lucky and found a lot of the things we needed on free cycle, or for a low price, we like being thrifty, makes things more fun.

So where to start ? well for the second year we have had a bumper crop of black currants, this resulted in making a couple of batches of fantastic ice cream.

We do have white and red currants, but haven't had anything from them this year, hopefully next year we will have 3 different types of currant, all home grown.

Our blackcurrants.

We have grown our own veg for a couple of years, since we've had a larger garden really, but this year we have tried to grow more, extra pea plants for example, although this is more so that we can actually get some peas before the kids eat them all :-) and next year we are planning to grow even more.

Our kids enjoy being able to go into the garden and pick raspberries, or pull up a carrot or 2 (my son takes great delight in this) it's not all about the food though, kids can learn a great deal from growing your own veg, you don't even need a big garden, you can grow things in plastic tubs if you don't have much space, what's stopping you ?

My lovely wife has been busy too, she has made some great courgette relish, there was 2 medium jars of it, but it seems I may have eaten rather a lot, well it's very tasty, if you're interested in the recipe you can find it here - courgette relish (link opens in a new window)

The relish before I started to chow down on it.

This is something else we have started to experiment with, it's all well and good growing your own food, but what do you do with it ? well anything you want really, if you need a recipe for tomato sauce,or some kind of relish, or jam then you can find a wealth of information on line, google is your friend :-)

Jam is something else we have made this year, our first time, my granddad used to make jam all the time, and out of all sorts of odd things, we haven't been that adventurous, but we have a good stock of nice jam for over winter, blackberry jam is great, we also have apple and plum jam (the plums and apples were foraged for, as were the blackberries) we also made crab apple jelly (which is like jam without the bits) it's really good on toast :-)

Making your own jams and other foods is a great experience, and you know what goes into it, you don't need to grow your own stuff either, just go out and check the hedgerows for berries, you can make jams from all sorts of things, blackberries, rowan berries (these need to be cooked before you eat them) and other things, it maybe worth while investing in a good book that shows what plants are what, and how they can be used, this one is a good one to add to your collection, there are other books along this line as well.

Blackberry jam,plum and apple jam and crab apple jelly.

Left to right - Crab apple jelly,plum & apple jam, blackberry jam.

We did have our own plums this year, which was a nice surprise as we have only had the tree for a few months (about 6 months I think) we got it for a pound (yes just a quid) and it's only just over 2 feet tall, it was in a garden centre reject section (where they sell of the half dead plants) and it looked well, half dead, but it soon perked up after we gave it some tlc, this is a good tip by the way, just because a plant looks half dead doesn't always mean it is, so have a good look in the bargain plant section before shelling out a load on a plant that looks healthy (it may not be)

Our plums from our baby plum tree.

Home grown plums, should get more next year.

Our wine making facility.

Blackberry wine, we've since added wild plum wine as well.

You can make other stuff as well, for example one thing we have tried using our foraged produce is fruit leathers, which is basically a sweet hard fruit jelly kind of thing, they are great for kids, and as natural as you can get, they consist of fruit and a little sugar to taste, and that's it, then all you do is turn them into a purée and dry them out for a few hours, you can do this in a oven or a dehydrator.

Fruit leathers.

Left to right - Apple,blackberry.

I have to say that even though we have had derogatory remarks while blackberry picking, and even though I got scratched,stung and covered in mud getting apples it has been great fun, we have experimented and next year we will do things on a larger scale, and try and forage more and make more from what we have. We have found that there is a great deal of satisfaction to be had, knowing that you did everything from start to finish, you found the food, or grew it, you made the jam, or wine, and strangely it makes everything taste even better.

And not only that all through the various things we have done our kids have been by our sides, watching and helping, asking questions about things, looking at how we do things, they have had great fun helping to collect berries, and seen some interesting wildlife, the best being lizards, yes we do get lizards in England, and you might be surprised to know that not a lot of people know that you can find lizards in this country, which is a shame, and shows that kids and adults are loosing touch with nature.

My son was extremely pleased to have seen lizards while we were out on one of our foraging trips, and I even managed to carefully catch a baby one so he could see it close up, seeing the look of wonder on his face was priceless, my daughter was equally excited by it.

Here's the picture of a baby common lizard I caught for my son to look at, we let it go again, where we found it.

Isn't it fantastic !

Well enough of my rambling, but before I go I have to say get out there, look for berries, look for wildlife, teach your kids, and hey you might learn something as well, take books with you for identifying things (you can find reference books in most libraries) and may your travels be as productive as ours.

Thanks for reading.