Granny's Date Sherry

The Homebrew Forum

Help Support The Homebrew Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

aneray

Landlord.
Joined
Sep 22, 2009
Messages
831
Reaction score
9
Location
Camborne, Cornwall
This recipe was kindly given to me by Davie on another forum.

I used Morrison's compressed packs of dates, as they're so much cheaper.
Grannys Date Wine

1kg Stoned Dates
500g raisins
1.5kg sugar
High Alcohol yeast
Pectolase
Yeast Nutrient
This wine is a medium to sweet wine, a rather old fashioned sort of wine that your granny used to make!
It's closer to a sweet sherry than anything else!
Chop up the figs and raisins and put into a clean food grade bucket.
Pour 4 pints of boiling water(two kettles full is about right) over the fruit and add the sugar.
Leave overnight covered with a clean cloth
Next day add the rest of ingredients and 2 pints of cold water.
It should start bubbling within 24 hours.
Stir and mash about a couple of times a day
After 5 days strain off, use a coarse straining bag that you can buy off us. Or, improvise if you must with muslin
or the net curtains.
Put into a clean demi john and fill to the shoulders with cold water.Fit an airlock and leave to ferment out at room temperature.
This may take a few days or a couple of weeks depending on the temperature.
When the bubbles stop coming through the airlock, or slow down to about one every 2 minutes test the wine.
You can use a hydrometer or just taste it, if you like the taste go on to the next step. If you think it's too sweet, hard luck because we warned you before you started! If too dry you could add more sugar and go for even more alcohol. Just add 50grams of sugar at a time until it really stops fermenting. But you won'tusually get much more in!
Add 1 campden tablet and potassium sorbate.
Leave to clear.
When clear, syphon into a clean demi john or bottle.
If it's too dry you can sweeten with sugar but keep a check that it doesn't start fermenting again. Leave it a couple of
weeks then add a campden before bottling.
 
That is one helluva lot of sugar!

Have you actually tried making that aneray?

I calculate that to an OG of about 1.196 :shock:

If you reduced the sugar to 1kg it would come down to 1.156 which might just about be do-able with a good yeast.
 
Looking back at my very basic notes, I made it around Christmas time 09. It could have done with being in the bottle a lot longer but I remember that SWMBO's friend took a liking to it.

It was a little sweet for me, very warming, but very nice. If and when I make it again I think I will cut down on the last few sugar additions and try to feed it with very small amounts of white grape juice while keeping a better eye on the hydrometer.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top