Tea Sherry. Or, at least, "sherry" is what I call it.
Ingredients/equipment (for 1 demijohn:
20 teabags
2 lemons (sliced)
300 grams of sultanas (chopped)
yeast (around 12-14% abv tolerance)
yeast nutrient
sugar (sufficient to bring potential ABV to around 12%)
1 camden tablet
1 demijohn
1 airlock
a hydrometer to measure potential ABV
a couple of empty 2 litre PET bottles (cheap lemonade bottles at 18p per bottle can be had from Aldi)
a couple of empty 1 litre bottles
Method:
Bring two or three litres of water to a boil in a stainless steel pan. Once boiled, turn off the heat and throw in the teabags, lemon slices and chopped sultanas and leave overnight in the pan to soak.
The next morning, get a bucket and line the inside with a pillow case. Pour all of the concoction from the pan into it. Then, lift the pillow out of the bucket and twist it and squeeze all of the liqueur out of it into the bucket. Once done, discard the contents of the pillow.
Clean the stainless steel pan out and then pour the contents of the bucket into it. Add enough water to bring it to an amount equivalent to the capacity of your demijohn. Put the heat on underneath the pan open a low setting and add sufficient sugar to bring the potential ABV to 12%. Pour the liquid into the demijohn, add one dissolved camden tablet and leave for twenty four hours to sterilize.
After 24 hours, add the yeast and yeast nutrient and leave to ferment out to dry .
Once fully fermented, siphon off the tea wine into the couple of two litre pet bottles (leaving an inch or two of head space in the PET bottles. Discard what's left in the demijohn. Most of it will be the lees anyway.
Put the PET bottles in the freezer for around 3 days.
After 3 days, take the now frozen bottles out of the freezer, take the lids of them and place them, upside down in an empty large pan. It is a good idea to have the (upside down) bottles supported up off the bottom of the pan by a few inches. Use an upturned old plastic carton or something.
Leave the bottles until 1 litre has melted out of each bottle, meaning 2 litres in total now in the pan.
For those who don;t know what I have just described, it is "freeze fractionation". Due to the fact that alcohol has a lower freezing point than water (around -16c), it is the first thing to melt out of the Bottles. Though, it also takes some of the water and all of the flavour of the original volume of wine with it.
So, in the pan, you will find, you have a very highly fortified tea wine of around 20% (assuming an original tea wine ABV of around 12%). The reason you do not precisely double the ABV of the wine when you half it's volume in this way is due to inefficiencies in the process..
Discard the ice left in the Pet bottles. Bottle up the 2 litres of what I am now calling "tea sherry". That's it. You are done.
Apart from the lovely taste, one major advantage of this method is the extreme stability and resistance to spoilage of the tea sherry due the its high ABV.
I like this drink as it is, neat. My wife, however, dilutes it with lemonade to make a kind of spritzer.
