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A Sip of Wild Wine© Leda Meredith This article is Backwash Approved! Click Here to Visit Backwash Once upon a time there were more herbs in beer than just hops and more fruits in wine than just grapes. Elderberry Wine, Dandelion Wine, May Wine with Sweet Woodruff, Lavender Mead, Ginger Beer, and many, many others accompanied our great-great-great grandparents' toasts.
I owe my fascination with homebrewing to beginner's luck and the abundance of fresh raspberries in our community gardens. Years ago I found a recipe for Bramble Berry Cordial in Billy Joe Tatum's book, Wild Foods Field Guide and Cookbook , that required nothing more than berries, sugar, water, and patience. Four months later I decanted a gorgeous clear red liqueur that tasted like summer in a bottle. Subsequent batches proved more challenging. Bottles blew up (may you never have to clean a sticky, half-fermented batch of raspberry cordial off your ceiling!), and one batch came out musty-tasting. Clearly I needed to learn more about the principles behind brewing at home. But that first bottle had been so wonderful that I didn't give up. I tried several of those almost fool-proof beer kits that come with everything pre-measured and figured out for you. The beer was good, but both my husband and I lost interest after a few batches. I like to know why I'm adding something to a recipe, and if possible to grow it myself or obtain it without any hassle. Waiting for the delivery of an additive I can't even pronounce makes me want to forget the whole thing and just pick up a bottle of red at the corner store. In the years since that first experiment I've made Dandelion Beer, Mead (honey wine), Metheglin (mead flavored with herbs), Raisin Wine, and many, many more batches of Raspberry Cordial. As a matter of fact, I'm sipping some tonight as I write this (seems fitting). At the end of this article I've included links to my recipes for Raspberry Cordial and Dandelion Beer as well as websites and reading suggestions that will help you track down more recipes, instructions, and supplies. But first I'd like to share some of the questions that I found myself asking while I learned to brew at home, and some of what I've learned so far: 1. Can I use regular baking yeast to brew wine and beer? Yes, but...I have made successful metheglin and beer using dry baking yeast. The down side is that a) you may have to wait much longer than the recipe suggests for the yeasty taste to go away, and b) if you are using one of the new improved "rapid rise" yeasts there is no way to know how much to use (did I mention exploding bottles?). One way around the latter problem would be to buy a gadget known as a hydrometer that will let you know when it is safe to bottle your brew. But a packet of wine or beer yeast costs less than a dollar, and this is one case in which I do recommend going to the trouble of ordering a special ingredient. |
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