Jonny69
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This is a recipe I made up based on my winemaking experience to date with fruit wines like blackberry and a few WOWs. It has recently cleared and I am so impressed with it I had to share the recipe! So here's how to make a mellow dry white using white grapes from the supermarket. I'll try to explain what each component does so hopefully you'll get similar results to me if you try it.
You need 2.5kg of white grapes, so it will work out quite expensive for a home brew if you buy the grapes full price. It's best if you're in the supermarket late and spot grapes in the reductions aisle. I spotted 0.5kg packs of seedless grapes reduced from £2 each to 50p at the end of the day, so my 'experiment' would have cost me about £4.50 if it had gone wrong. That said, a gallon using full price grapes is going to cost around £14, so it's expensive for a home brew but still considerably cheaper than bottles of white, and better in my opinion
Ingredients:
2.5kg seedless white grapes (or a mix of red and white)
Juice and zest of two lemons
1 litre of cheap economy apple juice from concentrate
750g sugar
Boiled/cooled water up to one gallon
Champagne yeast and nutrient
A couple of things to note:
1) I deliberately used cheap economy apple juice from concentrate because I wanted the extra acid and I wasn't too bothered about a mellow apple taste as you would in a turbo cider. Dessert grapes are a bit short on acid and cheap apple juice is perfect for boosting it up. If you want, you can boost the acidity further by adding a teaspoon of malic or citric acid, but do this later on, once it has brewed out the sugar and after you've had a taste.
2) The juice and zest of the lemons is there for fragrance and a dash of lemony flavour.
3) I used Young's champagne yeast. My experience is that champagne yeasts make better white wines because they leave less residual yeasty flavour than general purpose wine yeasts. It takes a bit longer to clear and generates quite a bit more fizz, but it's worth using, in my opinion.
4) I didn't use a hydrometer, but I estimated the sugar content to brew it up to about 11-12%. It's probably at the higher end of that scale.
Method:
Wash the grapes in a clean sink in a water and Campden solution. Pull them off the stalks but don't worry if a few short bits remain. Tip them into your brew bucket with about 1.7 litres of hot boiled water (= 1 kettle full for me). Roughly blitz the grapes with a stick blender or mash them up with a potato masher, add the lemon juice and zest, the sugar, a crushed Campden tablet and mix well to dissolve the sugar. Leave it to stand for 24-48 hours and pitch the yeast and nutrient. Allow it to ferment on the fruit for about a week and squeeze it through a muslin into a demijohn to separate the solids. Add the apple juice and top up to the neck with cooled boiled water. Leave it somewhere to ferment out and clear by itself, then rack it into a fresh container and give it a good shake to degas. Mine was ready to drink as soon as it had cleared.
You need 2.5kg of white grapes, so it will work out quite expensive for a home brew if you buy the grapes full price. It's best if you're in the supermarket late and spot grapes in the reductions aisle. I spotted 0.5kg packs of seedless grapes reduced from £2 each to 50p at the end of the day, so my 'experiment' would have cost me about £4.50 if it had gone wrong. That said, a gallon using full price grapes is going to cost around £14, so it's expensive for a home brew but still considerably cheaper than bottles of white, and better in my opinion
Ingredients:
2.5kg seedless white grapes (or a mix of red and white)
Juice and zest of two lemons
1 litre of cheap economy apple juice from concentrate
750g sugar
Boiled/cooled water up to one gallon
Champagne yeast and nutrient
A couple of things to note:
1) I deliberately used cheap economy apple juice from concentrate because I wanted the extra acid and I wasn't too bothered about a mellow apple taste as you would in a turbo cider. Dessert grapes are a bit short on acid and cheap apple juice is perfect for boosting it up. If you want, you can boost the acidity further by adding a teaspoon of malic or citric acid, but do this later on, once it has brewed out the sugar and after you've had a taste.
2) The juice and zest of the lemons is there for fragrance and a dash of lemony flavour.
3) I used Young's champagne yeast. My experience is that champagne yeasts make better white wines because they leave less residual yeasty flavour than general purpose wine yeasts. It takes a bit longer to clear and generates quite a bit more fizz, but it's worth using, in my opinion.
4) I didn't use a hydrometer, but I estimated the sugar content to brew it up to about 11-12%. It's probably at the higher end of that scale.
Method:
Wash the grapes in a clean sink in a water and Campden solution. Pull them off the stalks but don't worry if a few short bits remain. Tip them into your brew bucket with about 1.7 litres of hot boiled water (= 1 kettle full for me). Roughly blitz the grapes with a stick blender or mash them up with a potato masher, add the lemon juice and zest, the sugar, a crushed Campden tablet and mix well to dissolve the sugar. Leave it to stand for 24-48 hours and pitch the yeast and nutrient. Allow it to ferment on the fruit for about a week and squeeze it through a muslin into a demijohn to separate the solids. Add the apple juice and top up to the neck with cooled boiled water. Leave it somewhere to ferment out and clear by itself, then rack it into a fresh container and give it a good shake to degas. Mine was ready to drink as soon as it had cleared.
