Hawthorns?

[hypnoticmonkey]

So, today I found out what hawthorns are, and that there's a HUGE amount of them in the nearby park.

I already have quite a bit of wine on the go, but intrigued by hawthorns. Is hawthorn wine any good, or should I just give it a miss?

 

[Tim_Crowhurst]

I've no idea if the wine is any good, but hawthorn jelly is absolutely delicious. It's a strange thing to make - the bright red berries turn brown when you boil them, and produce purple juice (and therefore purple jelly).

Collect as many haws as you can, put them in a pan with water to cover, and boil for 60-90 minutes, strain overnight and then add 1Lb sugar per pint of juice. Boil on the highest possible heat until you reach setting point, then bottle as normal.

The only down side to hawthorn jelly is that you'll use a lot of fruit for relatively little jelly. For most non-citrus fruits you'll typically get about 1.5Lb jam/jelly for every 1Lb. For haws the proportions are very roughly reversed. I collected about 5Lb of haws last year, which made about 3Lbs of jelly. The flavour is quite distinctive though, and well worth the effort.

 

[Brewtrog]

If you can make a jelly out of them then there's no reason you can't make a wine

 

[Pjam]

Terrible place to watch football (WBA) :grin: Sorry for 'Off Topic'

 

[Tim_Crowhurst]

If you can make a jelly out of them then there's no reason you can't make a wine

...which reminds me. Haws are one of those fruits that are very high in pectin, so much so that they can be used as the pectin source for other fruit jams and jellies in the same way as apples, usually pectin-deficient hedgerow fruits like sloes or rosehips. So if you do make wine you'll need to be generous with the pectolase.