Coffee wine at home – two proven recipes

What wine is not made from! And from acacia, and from rose petals, and from currant leaves, dandelions, even nettles. But… coffee?! Is there homemade coffee wine? If you apply imagination, then everything happens! In the full sense, this extravagant drink, of course, cannot be called wine, but still: natural fermentation, a wonderful unusual aroma, a bitter, slightly astringent taste and an interesting effect, both invigorating and intoxicating. In short, the experiment is fascinating and promising!

The combination of alcohol and coffee will not surprise anyone. A lot of coffee liqueurs are made, take at least the same Kahlua, there are also a lot of coffee tinctures, including an unusual tincture with dark beer, Porterovka – read about them in this article. But alcohol is rarely made directly FROM coffee. But still they do it! For example, there are commercial coffee wines from the Florida company Fun Wine – they produce several varieties at once: cabernet cappuccino, cabernet espresso and coffee sangria. Also industrially similar wine is produced in the Philippines. But most often such an unusual drink is produced by craft winemakers. How else to surprise tasters, if not with real homemade coffee wine?

Coffee wine – which coffee to choose?

They say that once the Arabs made wine from coffee berry pulp – until they learned how to brew the nucleoli themselves. We just need them. Moreover, caffeine in this case does not interest us at all – coffee does not have to be strong, but it is necessary that it has the maximum aroma. So – only Arabica! Well, in extreme cases – a mixture with a small addition of robusta. For the same reason, it is not recommended to use instant coffee for making wine – most of its types are made from Robusta.

For starters, it is better to choose a medium roast. Grinding – not into dust, as for Turkish coffee, but not as coarse as for a siphon or an aeropress, just right for espresso. But this is particular. In order to enhance and diversify the aroma and taste of the drink, you can use a number of natural additives. Suitable, for example, vanilla beans (but not vanillin from a bag – after fermentation it gives a completely chemical flavor!), Cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg, anise. You can also replace part of the coffee (maximum 1/4) with good cocoa – the wine will acquire chocolate notes, like a mocha.

Two coffee wine recipes, detailed preparation technology

Since coffee contains practically no acids needed for normal fermentation, they will have to be added to the wort, so to speak “manually”. Roam in our wine (or if you prefer, drinking brew) will, of course, not be coffee, but sugar – therefore it is better to choose exactly the variety that is indicated in the recipe. Yeast, of course, is only purchased wine yeast, in this case – for wines like Sauternes, but universal ones are also suitable. Tannin is contained in coffee, but in a relatively small amount, adding more or not is up to you. Everything else is optional.

You can use the second recipe – it is based on white grape juice, that is, the drink will be more wine than drinking mash. Instead of tannin, strong black tea without additives is used – sometimes winemakers prefer this method. For this volume, two teaspoons of tea are taken, which are brewed in a small amount of boiling water and completely cooled. In this case, the ingredients are designed for 7.5 liters of wort.

How to cook:

There is nothing revolutionary in preparing a drink according to both recipes. First, boil water, add all the sugar to it and cook until completely dissolved. Now pour in coffee (it is better to choose a larger container so that the coffee does not “run away”), bring to a boil, turn off the heat and cover with a lid. At the same stage, ground spices and cocoa are added, if you use them. When the syrup has cooled to 30 °, we filter it carefully through cheesecloth or muslin to get rid of tea leaves. Add the rest of the ingredients – juice and tea or acids and tannin. Mix everything thoroughly and add the yeast pre-fermented in warm water with sugar, mix again.

The wort is poured into a fermenter with a water seal and sent to a dark place with a temperature of 18-25 ° for primary fermentation. Depending on the temperature and type of yeast, the primary will last from five to ten days. After that, the water seal will stop gurgling, and the turbidity that was seething in the wort will settle at the bottom of the bottle in the form of a dense sediment. We drain the liquid from the sediment with a straw and transfer it to another fermenter, a smaller one – so that the wort takes up at least 90-95% of the volume, this is important. We put the water seal again and transfer the bottle to a cool place.

Secondary fermentation can last up to 3-4 months. At this time, young wine can be drained a couple of times from the sediment. When the wine is completely clarified (sometimes this happens for a very long time or does not happen at all, then the coffee suspension can be precipitated with bentonite), the sediment no longer falls, and there is no movement in the bottle, it’s time to start bottling.

Before this, the drink can be – optionally – sweetened and / or fixed (how, with what and why, read in this article). Bottled homemade coffee wine should rest for at least 6 months before tasting, preferably more. And after that, you can safely call your friends “for coffee”.