Hawthorn contains a lot of vitamin C and other beneficial substances. From these berries they prepare compote, jam or simply press on the juice. I propose to do something a little different – to make homemade wine from hawthorn. The drink recipe is simple and does not require expensive, hard-to-find ingredients.
The best wine is obtained from slightly frozen berries, harvested in late autumn or early winter. Another option is to pick fresh berries earlier, and then place them in the freezer for 12 hours.
At any time of the year, you can make wine from dried hawthorn berries. It will turn out a drink of dark brown color with an original rich taste. The optimal proportion is 1:10, that is, 10 kg of dried fruit is required for 1 liters of water.
Ingredients:
- hawthorn berries – 5 kg;
- water – 10 liters;
- sugar – 4 kg;
- raisins – 150-200 grams (or wine yeast).
Hawthorn Wine Recipe
1. If there is no special wine yeast, then 3-4 days before working with berries, prepare a starter. To do this, put unwashed raisins in a jar, add 50-100 grams of sugar and pour 300-400 ml of water. Cover the jar with gauze, put in a warm place. When foam, hiss and a slight smell of fermentation appear, the starter is ready.
2. Place the sorted berries in a glass container.
3. Dissolve 10 kg of sugar in 1 liters of boiling water and pour hawthorn with this mixture. The container must have at least 25% free space.
4. Add a starter made in advance (pour along with raisins) or wine yeast.
5. Put a water seal on the container (can be replaced with a medical glove with a hole in the finger), put it in a warm place (3-18 ° C) for 24 days for fermentation. It is advisable to stir or at least shake off the wort once a day.
6. After 3 days, remove the water seal, drain 1 liter of wort separately, dilute 2 kg of sugar in it, pour the resulting syrup back into the fermentation tank and reinstall the water seal.
7. After 7 days, strain the hawthorn wine through cheesecloth, squeeze the berries well, they are no longer needed. Add another 1 kg of sugar according to the technology described in the previous paragraph.
8. Close the container with a water seal, leave for 30-45 days until the end of fermentation.
Attention! If more than 55 days have passed since the installation of the water seal, and the wine continues to ferment, you need to carefully drain it through a tube into another container, without touching the sediment at the bottom. Otherwise, bitterness may appear.
9. When the water seal stops bubbling, the wine brightens, and sediment appears at the bottom, drain the young hawthorn wine from the sediment through a thin tube, trying not to shake it.
Taste and add sugar for sweetness if desired. Separately, you can fix with alcohol or vodka in an amount of 2-15% of the volume. Fortified wine is better stored, but it is not as aromatic and tougher in taste.
Pour the drink into a holding container, it is advisable to fill the vessel to the top so that there is no contact with oxygen. Close hermetically. If sugar was added, it is better to keep the first 7-10 days under a water seal.
10. Keep the wine for at least 3 months (preferably 6) in a cool dark place (6-16°C). It could be a refrigerator or a basement. At least once a month (as it appears) remove from the sediment by transfusion.
When the sediment no longer appears, the finished drink can be bottled and corked tightly. The result is 8-10 liters of homemade hawthorn wine with a strength of 10-12 degrees. Shelf life when stored in the cellar – up to 3 years.
