Birch sap champagne: 5 recipes

In recent years and even decades, truly high-quality alcoholic beverages can hardly be found on sale. It is especially easy to run into a fake when it comes to champagne. For this reason, home winemaking in Our Country is literally experiencing a rebirth. There is a special demand for drinks made from natural products. Champagne from birch sap at home is not difficult to prepare. And the taste of the resulting drink will delight both the female and male half of humanity.

How to make champagne from birch sap

The main ingredient for the preparation of this amazing, refreshing drink in any weather is birch sap. This natural elixir of health can be obtained for only 2-3 weeks a year. But this does not mean at all that champagne can only be made from it in early spring in a very short time. Birch juice canned in jars is also suitable for making champagne. Moreover, for light varieties of the drink, it is better to use juice collected and then saved with your own hands. But if it was decided to make stronger champagne with the addition of vodka, then there is not much difference what juice will be used to make champagne. You can also use the store option.

For the preparation of champagne from birch sap, sweeteners are necessarily used, most often ordinary granulated sugar. To increase the usefulness of the resulting drink, you can use honey. It usually also serves to give a deeper, richer hue to champagne. Especially if dark varieties of honey are used, such as chestnut, mountain or buckwheat.

As a starter for champagne, you can use both industrial wine yeast and home-made raisins.

As a rule, homemade sourdough is prepared a few days before the start of the champagne brewing process. This is necessary not only so that the leaven has time to ripen. Recently, almost any raisin found on sale has been treated with sulfur for better preservation. Such raisins are already completely unsuitable for making wine sourdough. Therefore, raisin sourdough is made in advance in order to experiment with different varieties of dried fruit. And as a result, determine which of them is really suitable for fermentation.

The process of making wine sourdough at home is as follows:

1. In a clean glass jar, mix 100 g of necessarily unwashed raisins (to keep “wild” yeast on the surface of the berries), 180 ml of warm water (or birch sap) and 25 g of sugar.
2. Mix well, cover with a piece of cloth (clean towel) and leave in a warm place without light for several days.
3. When foam appears on the surface, accompanied by a slight hiss and a sour smell, the starter can be considered ready.

In a tightly closed jar, it can be stored in the refrigerator for 1 to 2 weeks.

Even for making champagne from birch sap at home, fresh lemons or citric acid are often used. For recipes without the use of wine yeast or, moreover, other alcoholic beverages, such an additive is mandatory. Since birch sap contains practically no acids, and they are needed to stabilize the acidity of the must. Without this normal fermentation process will not occur.

Birch sap champagne recipe with raisins

To obtain a light and at the same time rich and very tasty sparkling wine (champagne) from birch sap, you will need:

• 12 liters of juice, preferably fresh;
• about 2100 g of granulated sugar;
• 1 large lemon (or 5 g of citric acid);
• pre-cooked homemade wine sourdough from 100 g of raisins;
• 50 g dark honey.

The very process of making champagne from birch sap with raisins according to this recipe consists of two stages: preparing the wine itself and saturating it with carbon dioxide by adding sugar and ensuring secondary fermentation in sealed conditions.

Manufacture:

1. Birch sap, 2000 g of sugar and citric acid are mixed in a large enameled container. Juice is simply squeezed out of a fresh lemon, carefully separating the seeds.
2. They heat everything until it boils and boil it over low-moderate heat until only 9 liters of liquid remain in the pan.

   

   Comment! This process makes the taste of the drink more intense and interesting.
3. Cool the liquid to room temperature (+ 25 ° C) and add raisin starter and honey to it, melted if necessary in a water bath to a liquid state.
4. Mix thoroughly, pour into a fermentation tank and install a water seal on it (or a latex glove with a small hole in one of the fingers).
5. Leave in a place without light with a stable warm temperature (+ 19-24 ° C) for 25-40 days.
6. After the end of the fermentation process (the disappearance of bubbles in the water seal or the fall of the glove), the birch sap wine is ready to be saturated with carbon dioxide.
7. Through a straw, the wine is carefully drained from the sediment and poured into prepared clean and dry bottles with tightly screw caps, leaving about 6-8 cm of free space in the upper part.
8. For 1 liter of each bottle add 10 g of sugar.
9. The bottles are tightly screwed with caps and placed again in the same place for 7-8 days.
10. After a few days, the bottles with future champagne must be checked and slightly vented, slightly opening the hole.
11. Or take them out for storage in a cold place, otherwise they can simply break from the accumulated pressure.

The strength of the resulting champagne is about 8-10%.

Champagne from birch sap without boiling

If you want to keep all the beneficial properties of birch sap in champagne, then you can use the following simple recipe.

You need:

• 3 liters of juice;
• 900 grams of sugar;
• 300 g unwashed raisins;
• 2 orange;
• 1 lemon.

Manufacture:

1. Oranges and lemons are thoroughly washed with a brush, dried and the zest is cut off from them. From the remaining fruits, juice is squeezed through a strainer to separate the seeds.
2. Birch sap is slightly heated to a temperature of + 40-45 ° C and all the sugar is dissolved in it.
3. In a fermentation tank, birch sap is mixed with sugar, citrus juice and zest, and raisins are added.
   Comment! It is necessary to be completely sure of the fermentation properties of the raisins used, using the methods described above, otherwise you can spoil the entire workpiece.
4. A water seal or glove is installed and placed for 30-45 days in a warm, dark place.

   

5. Then they act in the standard way already described in the previous recipe. Only 2-3 raisins are added to each bottle instead of sugar and also hermetically sealed.

Champagne is even lighter and more unsaturated in taste. But there is still a degree in it, and it is perfectly drunk, especially in hot weather.

Birch sap champagne with wine yeast

Wine yeast is used when there is no suitable raisin for sourdough, but you want to get a guaranteed tasty and sparkling wine.

The entire manufacturing technology is absolutely identical to that described in the above recipes.

The ingredients are used in the following ratios:

• 10 liters of birch sap;
• 1600 grams of sugar;
• 10 g wine yeast.

Homemade birch sap champagne with dry wine

The technology for making champagne according to this recipe also resembles the traditional one described above. Grape wine adds useful properties of grapes, its taste and color shade to the finished drink.

You need:

• 12 L of birch sap;
• 3,2 kg of granulated sugar;
• 600 ml of white wine;
• 4 lemon;
• 4 tbsp. l. wine yeast diluted in water according to the instructions attached to them.

Manufacture:

1. Birch sap, as usual, is evaporated with sugar to 9 liters.
2. Cool, add all the remaining ingredients and keep in a warm place until the end of fermentation.

   

3. Then filtered, bottled with tight lids and kept for about 4 weeks in a cool place.

How to make champagne from birch sap with vodka

You need:

• 10 L of birch sap;
• 3 kg of sugar;
• Xnum l vodka;
• 4 tsp yeast;
• Xnumx lemon.

Manufacture:

1. The first stage, traditional, is the boiling of birch sap with sugar until its volume is reduced by 25%.
2. Then boiled and cooled to room temperature, the juice is poured into a wooden barrel of a suitable volume so that there is room in the upper part for fermentation.
3. Yeast, chopped pieces of pitted lemons and vodka are added.
4. They interfere, cover with a lid and leave in a warm place for a day, in order to then transfer the container to a cool room (cellar, basement) for 2 months.
5. After this period, champagne is bottled and tightly corked.

How to store homemade birch sap champagne

Homemade champagne must be stored in the cold, at temperatures from + 3 ° C to + 10 ° C and without access to light. There may be some sediment at the bottom of the bottles. Shelf life in such conditions is 7-8 months. However, a drink with the addition of vodka can be stored in such conditions for several years.

Conclusion

Birch sap champagne at home can be prepared in several ways. And in any case, you get a tasty and moderately strong sparkling wine with an incomparable taste, which is not a shame to present to any festive feast.