A Tiger Barn Cattery Wine Recipe
I made this hawberry wine recipe up because a friend recommended the flavour while eating them. Actually making a hawberry wine came about simply because I had a hedge full so it was a fast picking session. I think it was an hour or so to collect just over 3 Lbs.
3 Lbs of Hawberry (Hawthorn Berries)
7 pints of boiling water
1 crushed campden tablet
1 tsp pectic enzyme
1 Red Aldi Rio D'Oro grape juice
1 tsp citric acid or 1 lemon's juice
2-3 Lbs of sugar
2 tsp of yeast nutrients
Harvest VR21 wine yeast.
There's nothing unusual about making this wine, it's completely straightforward. The only thing that surprised me was the amount of sludge I removed on the first rack.
Careful when you add sugar - My rule is of thumb is as always: Only add as much sugar as you need to reach an SG of say 1.080 - 1.085 and that will almost guarantee a dry ferment at 12%. I added some local honey from Lamyatt to bring the SG up.
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Thursday October 20th 2011
After a visit from a friend, Karen, who liked the taste of raw sloes and said hawthorn berries were safe to eat I picked 4 pint glasses of Hawberries from our hedge. Washed them and popped them in the freezer to help remove the stalks the way I've done with red currants and left them for a while deciding what to try with them. In the end I just put a bog standard wine together. It's light, a pink scarlet red and I'll find out whether it tastes nice next year.
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Friday 16th December
4 PM
Poured over 7 pints of boiling water
Added 3/4 litre of Aldi Rio D'Oro Red grape juice
Added campden tablet
10 PM
1 tsp Pectic Enzyme
Add 1 tsp citric acid
Saturday 17th December
2 tsp TronOzymol
Yeast: Harvest VR21
2 Lbs sugar
SG: 1.090
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Friday 23rd December 2011
Drip strained into demijohn
SG: 1.010
Added 170 gms of Lamyatt Honey dissolved in warm water.
SG: 1.018
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Tuesday 10th Jan
SG: 1.000
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Thursday 19th January
SG: 0.999 (Drop of 19 points)
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4th February 2012
1st Rack SG: 0.999
Topped up with port wine reserves
80 + 19 /7.4 = 13.4%
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March 1st 2012
Final SG:
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Clearing & Maturing: 1st March 2012
Bottled: 1st May 2012 - 6 x bottles
Drinkable: November 2012 ... better in May 2013
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