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It was in the late 80s. Once, on the May holidays, we gathered at Azim, our mutual friend. He put bottles of homemade wine on the festive table.
“Is this the wine your hens tasted?” I asked with a touch of irony.
“Yes, the same,” he replied.
Laughter arose, the guys began to make fun of the owner of the house, but it turned out that there were those in the company who did not know about this story. I had to tell them everything that happened last fall, when Azim decided to make homemade wine.
I will share this story with you, dear friends.
This story was sent by Sergey, a subscriber from Turkmenistan, where making homemade wine is considered a national tradition.
How prohibition pushed my friend to make homemade alcohol
The shortage of alcoholic products that the Soviet people faced after the adoption of the Gorbachev Decree on the fight against drunkenness forced many to remember the moonshine still. Fans of low-alcohol drinks began to prepare homemade wines according to a variety of recipes and from various raw materials.
My friend Azim also decided to make table wine, especially since he had grapes of a suitable wine variety in his garden.
This was his first experience, and therefore he often consulted with me. And I have been making wine for more than a year and suggested to him the simplest recipe that I once read in a book.
He did not have to look for ingredients for making wine, since the main raw material – grapes – grew in his garden. It was a dark blue wine variety called gara uzum.
The wine from it turns out a dark red saturated shade with a special taste and aroma. Other than grapes, he didn’t use any other ingredients. There is a lot of sun in the south, so the grapes ripen to such an extent that they no longer need sugar or additional yeast for fermentation.
It was early autumn, and the sunny berry was already ripe and perfectly suited for wine.
The cooking process and how chickens intervened in it
Azim first prepared the leaven a few days before the harvest. To do this, he chose the most ripe berries, squeezed out their juice (the berries cannot be washed), poured it into a three-quarters bottle and corked the neck with a cotton plug.
He put this leaven in a warm place. The juice in the bottle began to ferment after 2-3 days, and after 6-7 days the sourdough was already ready.
Then he harvested the entire crop, separated the berries from the ridges, removing the rotten and damaged ones. He set a large colander over an enameled bucket and, putting grapes in small portions, began to squeeze the juice, kneading the berries with the back of his fist.
Having poured the resulting juice and the remaining pulp into an enameled bucket, Azim immediately added the leaven there at the rate of 2% wine yeast starter for the amount of must. That is, if the total amount of wort is 10 liters, then you need to add 200 grams of sourdough.
He put all this in the basement, where the temperature was no more than 18-24 degrees. This is the ideal temperature for fermentation. After 2-3 days, the wort began to ferment intensively and rise with a hat.
In this phase of fermentation, the must must be stirred 3-4 times a day so that the raised hat falls down, otherwise the wine may turn into vinegar.
After the end of active fermentation (after about 4-5 days), my friend separated the wine from the pulp, pouring it into a colander, and squeezed the pulp through cheesecloth. He poured the wine into a 10-liter bottle and took it to the basement to ferment. Now he had only to drain it from the sediment.
He did all this early in the morning. And leaving for work, he asked his wife Nigora to throw away the grape pressings.
This is where the fun begins.
Lyrical digression about chickens
The wife thought, “why the good should disappear” and took everything to the chicken coop to feed the poultry. At noon, she came to the chicken coop and saw that all the chickens were lying on the ground, showing no signs of life.
She cried a little, and again, guided by the principle “so that the good is not lost,” she plucked several hens. She took the “dead” and plucked chickens into the summer kitchen. She cried again, grieved a little – it’s a pity for living creatures after all.
It was in the morning, and in the evening a neighbor came running, who was watching the “carcasses being taken out”, and from the threshold she began to shout:
– Nigora-ah, your chickens have come to life and run naked down the street!
The poor woman ran out into the street in horror and saw a strange, hitherto unknown spectacle – plucked and not very clucking chickens ran along a narrow street! Naturally, she took her head, thinking, what happened?
And here’s what happened. Fermented grape pulp contains a certain amount of grape alcohol. The hens pecked at all the pulp, got tipsy, and all as one fell senseless to the ground, forgetting themselves in a heroic dream.
The hostess, thinking that they were all dead, plucked them, and then something happened that should have happened. After a while, the chickens sobered up and started running around naked! No feathers!
What is the result of my friend
Of course, after arriving home, Azim read to his wife a spatial notation on the topic that the principle of “what good to waste” does not always work, as it turns out.
Fortunately, this incident did not affect his decision to finish the wine to the end. Apart from a few plucked individuals, the rest of the chickens survived and, with a “severe hangover and a sore head,” lined up and moved home to the chicken coop.
But the neighbors and just bystanders for a long time still remembered the “drunk chickens”. It is understandable, because it is not every day you see such a spectacle.
Also, his friends, after tasting the wine (which, by the way, turned out to be excellent), suggested: “Maybe we can treat the chickens to this wine again?”
Have you ever witnessed such incidents?