Fruit wines

Fruit wines are delicious at any time of year. In the summer they are perfect for spritzing with soda water, lemonade, or prosecco, so are a great tipple to grace your wine racks. There is a fantastic variety of fruit wines you can make from the bounties of the season, whether you grow them yourself, relieve your gardener friends of their gluts or buy from a shop. Freezing berries and soft fruit aids in breaking down the cell walls, which helps extract more juice and flavour, making it ideal if you get your hands on a mountain of berries, cherries or soft fruit - just throw them in the freezer until you have time to make your wine. 

Here are some summer fruits that make a tasty wine: strawberry; plum; cherry; raspberry and redcurrant; peach; gooseberry (delicious as a sparkling wine); elderberry; blackcurrant or redcurrant; blueberry; grape; plum; damson. Or try a mixture! You can find recipes for these online or in wine making books. 

Fruit Beers

Blueberries, apricots, cherries, peaches, raspberries, strawberries, plums (great for porter) are all suitable for making beer. (Not to mention imported fruit like mango and passion fruit.) We published a fruit and sours issue (#13) in 2022 so dig out your back issue, or order one from darkfarm.co.uk. Or a quick search online can furnish you with recipes.

“One of the first fruit beers I made was a strawberry beer that would end up incredibly dry”, says homebrew YouTuber Nikita Voronstov. “Around the 1.004 mark, just by virtue of adding a vast quantity of liquid that ends up with no residual sugar. So if you want to leave an element of sweetness you want to either use some Potassium Sorbate and Potassium Metabisulphite to completely kill off the yeast and inhibit it from fermenting any more sugars, or just add some maltodextrin or some lactose to give a little bit of body.” Again, check out issue 13 of MASHED for Nikita’s blueberry sour recipe and take a look at his YouTube channel for more homebrew inspiration:

www.youtube.com/@NikitaVorontsov. 

Cherry Beer (Lambic-ish)

By Keith Dacey

This was my first attempt at an intentionally sour beer. I’m lucky to have a Morello cherry tree in the garden, and a few years’ worth of fruit in the freezer, so cherry seemed an obvious choice. I wasn’t sure of how to add the fruit so I decided to juice it first and add it as liquid. I still wonder if adding the skins may have made a difference to the sourness. 

PROFILE

ABV: Around 5%

Mash Water: 10 L

Mash Temp: 65°C

Mash Time: 120 mins

Sparge Temp: 78°C

Sparge Volume: 16 L

Volume Before Boil: 23 L

S.G. Before Boil: 1.045

Boil Time: 60 mins

GRAIN 

3 kg Dark Munich Malt 

1 kg Carabelge

FRUIT 

6 L Morello Cherry Juice 

ADJUNCTS

500 g White Candi Sugar 

YEASTS 

Mangrove Jack Belgian Tripel M31 

Wyeast 5112 Brettanomyces

HOPS 

25 g Bramling Cross, boil, 5 mins 

BREW METHOD

I basically made a standard mash (albeit with a very long mash time!), with no additions, adding 25 g of hops five minutes before the end of the boil. I didn’t want an overly hoppy beer, so was very light on the hops.

Once the wort had cooled, I pitched the M31 yeast as standard, whilst starting the Brett in the cherry juice. Once both had got away (a day or so later), I combined the two and added the candi sugar. The beer quickly fermented out and I racked it into a plastic barrel with an airlock, as I have had some bad experiences with slowly fermenting candi sugar. 

After five months in this barrel set up, I reprimed the mix with a starter of M41 yeast, and bottled. So: started in September, bottled in February, and drinkable in April.

BREW NOTES

Hint of red colour and not over sour. Good cherry flavour. Still not sure if it is sour enough for my taste, but certainly not a failure.