brewing 2ne1

Damson Wine

20 September 2009 - Visited my fave Damson tree over the weekend and picked 10 lbs of beautiful, sweet, medium sized Damsons. It was a fabulous year for them, last year this tree had only a few but this year there were thousands.

BTW I saved some in the freezer for soaking in Gin and Vodka - for a future post.

I put all the damsons in a large straining bag and tied it shut. I poured a gallon of boiling water on top in a 5 gallon bucket, mashed with a potato masher and let it stew for an hour. When cool enough to touch (with gloved hands) I put the bag in a smaller bucket with some fresh water and smashed with my fingers to break up the skins as much as possible. Then dumped the extract into the primary and repeated this a few times, and then topped up to the 3 gallon mark. I added sugar (was probably about 6 lbs (three 1 kg bags) until SG was 1.10

The must (juice) tasted of sweet grapes and plums and was a deep dark purple red. There was little acid (my test is to take a small sample of must and sprinkle some precipitated chalk on it and watch for a fizz, which didn’t happen) so I added citric acid, a little yeast nutrient, pectolase, bentonite, and finally yeast. Fermentation started quickly overnight and formed a thick cap by the next morning which I stirred down.

Cheers, Jason

Update 1 October 2009 - Racked into two demijohns plus an extra half - not sure what to do with it might combine with some other dregs we’ll see. Massive amount of sediment left behind. It’s still fermenting steadily so we’ll wait another month or two and rack it again.

Update August 2011 - I found the this batch in the back of the cupboard under the stairs, it had been forgotten while we were building an extension. I racked it and it tasted very nice, so I bottled it. Sweet, with a pleasing light purple plummy flavour. Maybe I should forget all my wines for a year or more.