A KIND OF MOTHERHOOD
I have purposefully put off having my own children until I am at least thirty. I don't need the worry, the financial stresses and strains, and I want to go on holiday regularly. Okay, I have Stanley, who is sort of my baby, but at the end of the day is a pussy cat. Yet, this past fortnight I have been fretting like an anxious mother hen over my newest experiments with wine homebrew. I am constantly checking it, prodding it and texting my friend Elaine for advice. Its her fault, naturally, after I was inspired by her own awesome wine making skills when I visited her in Bath. Read on for our adventures, some pictures of Elaine's wine and mead collection and some advice on how to brew wine at home for a tenner.
BATH - DAY ONE
Elaine, of Auntie Nell fame, has been one of my best friends since university. She has spent this last year studying interpreting and translation at the University of Bath, which has been brilliant because it is the first time in about four years we've both been based in the same neck of the woods. When she moved down last summer, we made all kinds of vows to one another about how we were going to see each other at least once a half term etc. but as you all know, life gets in the way and though Elaine has made a visit to Exeter in the Autumn, I had yet got over to Bath. It was an easy hour and half train ride through Somerset, changing at Bristol and I was very excited. It was a beautiful hot day and I arrived an hour or so early (Elaine was at work) and had a very nice pint in the Bath Brew House on James Street West and read my book. If you are ever in Bath and are fond of real ale, this seems to be the place to go, with around eight hand pumps with locally brewed beer from Bristol and surrounding towns, and a BBQ in the beer garden (http://thebathbrewhouse.com/).
Bath is very beautiful, with its yellow stone and neo-palladian architecture which I am very fond of living near Marble Hill House and Chiswick House growing up and I had a good wander about the city centre before meeting Elaine. After a good natter over half a bottle of fine brandy cider from The Somerset Cider Brandy Company (http://www.ciderbrandy.co.uk/shop.html) and some dinner we headed out to explore the public houses of Weston, the village which Elaine lives, just outside of Bath.
Our first stop was the Old Crown (http://www.bathchronicle.co.uk/pubs-and-bars/pubs/old-crown/business-8053544-detail/business.html) which although quiet had some well enough kept Old Speckled Hen and Green King IPA. What really made this pub was the bouncy castle in the lovely beer garden out the back, which Elaine got very excited about, and rightly so, it was pretty cool.
Our next stop was the Kings Head (http://www.pubtrail.co.uk/somerset/kings-head-bath.htm) where we met some elderly ex army Scottish blokes with whom we had some very interesting chats with about life in the army, the Vietnam War and bagpipes whilst supping a very decent pint of Eagle.
Then when we got home, we celebrated the Solstice with a candle, kept everyone up with our giggling and went to bed. I was anxious to see more of this beautiful city.
BATH - DAY TWO
After a much needed breakfast of cheesey beans on toast, we hit the town, where I got to see the famous Royal Crescent and the Circus which was pretty amazing. We also came across some kind of fete/ food festival outside Royal Crescent with cider and falafel, but we ignored those and went for the gin and caipirinha lollies produced by a local Bath company called Cocktail Natives (http://www.cocktailnatives.co.uk/) which were absolutely divine. Elaine and I are now anxious to make our own but I'm sure they will not be quite as amazing.
For dinner we went to one of Elaine's favourite pubs, 'The Raven' which not only has an awesome real ale selection (I had their own Raven Beer) but is famous for its pies (http://www.theravenofbath.co.uk/). I had chorizo, olive and beef with red wine gravy, whilst Elaine had sweet potato and goat's cheese. I will be eating here again without a doubt.
That evening we went to The Velo Lounge with some of Elaine's university friends for a pub quiz where we enjoyed ice cream floats, and exhausted by our Solstice efforts the night before called it an early night.
BATH - DAY THREE
Elaine, like me, enjoys foraging and making cakes, cordials and jams out of the things she finds. However, she is experienced in something I have never done, i.e. fruit and flower wines and I was eager to get her advice. She has been brewing herself for a couple of years having helped her lovely mummy Lorna brew at home as a child back in Northern Ireland. I have read about wine brewing in books, talked to my uncle and colleague, Simon, at work and even been to a talk on it, but nothing really matches any of these things, than seeing it being done in front of you and helping to do it. Elaine was an excellent source of knowledge and fabulous teacher (thought of doing this as a career, Lemon?) and despite not having taken any notes, I have been successful in replicating her efforts at home.
The first thing Elaine stressed was the need for sterilised equipment. Using cheap baby sterilising fluid she sterilised her glass demi johns (originally full of cider from Waitrose) and siphoning tube. You must keep the bugs and bacteria out or your wine will turn to vinegar.
She had been primarily fermenting her elder flowers in a covered bowl and now put the mixture into a pan with sugar and boiled it up for about a quarter of an hour before straining it into a demi john. She left it to cool and after she dropped me at the station she added her other ingredients. I have a better more detailed description of how to make this in the below section on homebrew on a shoes string, including how to use raisins to feed the yeast instead of expensive yeast feed from the shops (alternatively, Elaine says you can use dried apricot, as she did with her dandelion wine).
Elaine already had two wines on the go, a dandelion wine on the left and a mead (made from honey from the supermarket) on the right. The strange things on the top are bubble locks designed to allow carbon dioxide to leave and to keep nasty things out. They only cost about three quid each, but I'm still saving for them and for my budget wine have used another suggestion made by Elaine. These wines needed racking to remove the dead yeast at the bottom and to encourage them to clear and further mature. This was skillfully achieved by using a sterilised siphoning tube which uses gravity to transfer the wine from one demi john to another, being careful not to transfer the yeast at the bottom. The remaining space was filled with distilled water and the bubble locks replaced.
What was refreshing about my short wine making course with Elaine is her relaxed attitude to her art. When I asked how much sugar should go in or how many raisins should be used, she smiled and was like "some sugar, maybe half a packet, and say, a handful of raisins..." And when asked about a hydrometer to tell me what the alcohol content is and when it's ready, "well, you have eyes, and guessing the alcohol content is part of the fun..." This kind of attitude frankly makes homebrew seem more doable to mere mortals who are put off by all the equipment you seemingly need, and all the measuring etc. I know some people take it incredibly seriously and you know, good on them, I'm sure their wine is superb, but for someone like myself, who just wants to experiment and play around, you can genuinely do this on a budget.
HOMEBREW ON A SHOE STRING BUDGET
Okey doke, then, welcome to 'Homebrew on a budget'. Eager to emulate Elaine's fabulous collection of homebrew wine, and with a host of good advice and tips from her on how to do it, I looked at my bank account and wept. There was no way in hell I was affording all the glass demi john's, bungs, bubble locks etc on my salary this month. Luckily for me, Elaine was full of ideas about how to do it on the cheap which I share with you now, because its worked really well and shows that for a tenner you can make your own wine home brew on the cheap. I got all the things I needed from Wilkinsons (for foreign readers, this is a British Household wares shop) and the supermarket.
- Lemonade bottles, 17p each (started with two and have since bought two more)
- sugar, just over a quid
- raisins, also just over a quid and they'll last me for months
- a lemon, forty pence or so
-balloons, a quid
- wine yeast, a quid a packet, makes up to five gallons
- a syphoning tube, two fifty, used for racking
- and of course a couple of cups of whatever you have foraged that you're going to be making your wine out of (as Elaine says, you should be making stuff out of things you've found for free and not spending lots of money in the supermarket on fresh fruit, though many people do).
On Monday evening after work I went out and bought the above things and then hunted around the river near my house for things to make into wine. First I came across a big rose bush in my path (practically scratching my face off) so I picked some sprigs off that (and don't stress their still enough there to take your face off) and wandered about the path on the little island near my house looking for elder flowers so I could make some elder flower wine because Elaine's smelt so delicious. Its like everything you want, you see it everywhere for ages, and then as soon as you want some its nowhere to be found. I saw some trees where it had blossomed only days before, but the flowers were gone which made me want to cry. Weeping into my sushi on the river bank (yes, I know, first world problems) I saw out the corner of my eye, a flash of white in the trees, and there in a shady bit of the copse of wood were a few trees which still had the aromatic blooms that I had been searching for. I picked a few sprigs and rushing home I started my work.
First I filled my apparatus with water with a squirt of baby sterilising fluid and left it for half an hour. Its vital to make everything sterile (as I found out with the crab apple and hawthorn schnapps last year). Next, I prepared my flowers and boiled them in water for around fifteen minutes extracting the essence into the water, before adding around 500g of sugar to each pan and letting them boil for a further fifteen minutes on a low heat. I read somewhere that lemon goes well with elder flower so I added half a lemon to that pan as well.
Afterwards, I strained the flowers out using my jam straining muslin (though you could use a clean pair of tights, tea towel or pillowcase instead) and left the admixture to cool (because its so hot, it will kill any yeast you put in). When it was down to room temperature roughly, I added a handful of raisins and packet of yeast to both bottles and fastened a balloon with a small holes pricked in it over the top. The balloon was completely Elaine's idea for a cheap airlock for me to use. The pin prick allows carbon dioxide to escape (so your homebrew doesn't explode like my cherry liqueur did) but also protects your homebrew from dust, dirt, bacteria and insects. Amazing. And it really does work. Over the next week I watched as the balloons inflated and deflated, and the mixture bubbled and sighed in the bottles and the raisins bobbed up and down. There a few anxious moments ("Elaine, will my raisins not go mouldy?""No, the alcohol should prevent that from happening!") until I had about a centimetre of white yeast sediment at the bottom. It was now time for its first racking, which though Elaine made it look easy, is quite a tricky business. For a start, getting a flow is a bit difficult. Other problems include: raisins getting stuck in your tube, avoiding sucking yeasty sediment into your new bottle and not tipping your bottle over as it empties. Though on the whole home brew on a tenner works well, this is where a glass demi john would be preferable if you have the money, because 17p lightweight plastic lemonade bottles don't like standing up on their own. If you do go down the budget route, get a friend to hold your bottle for you. Afterwards I filled the remainder of the bottle up with distilled water (boiled in the kettle) as recommended by Elaine and replaced the balloon stopper. There was a hairy moment when I stuck boiling water in my elder flower wine ("I've ruined it!" I wept on Facebook, "what, did you drink it?" said my cousin sardonically) but a quick reassuring chat with Elaine, combined with bunging it in the freezer for ten minutes seems to have saved some of the yeast and both bottles are now happily fermenting away again on my kitchen worktop. Taste wise so far, the elder flower is simply amazing, though I am not yet convinced by my rose wine. I'm going with Elaine's motto that "it will be fine with some ageing". I sure hope so. I will of course keep you updated over the next few weeks with how its going and with a bit of luck it will be of good enough quality to share with my in-laws in a few weeks when they visit from Canada.
In other news, last week I visited Plymouth for my friend Sophie from Uni's hen do. We had an excellent meal in B.E.D. restaurant near the Barbican (I had scallops and pork belly) which was excellent value and the BYOW policy with two quid corkage was very well received as well (http://dininginplymouth.co.uk/). It was an excellent evening, and I wish Sophie well in her last bit of wedding preparation in the coming month.
Sophie and her future sister in laws
I stayed over in Cornwall that night, in Torpoint. I have to say, the use of passenger ferry in this day and age to get over the Tamar absolutely fascinated me hence the photos below. It takes about ten or so minutes to get across back to Devon, but Sophie and Arran (her fiance) say that the ferry is capable of getting over in less than five if an ambulance needs to get across from Plymouth.
Anyhow, I am coming to the end of the school year and am busy planning the holidays. I leave you a picture that Elaine sent me last night of her beautiful mead. Hopefully, my home brew might start to look like this in the next few weeks!
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