The Big Fresh World of Homebrew Wine and Beer…and more….
After we moved to the country and started gardening and making trails my mind naturally turned to just about everything that a person can do on their own in a better way than storebought. Booze came up. We’d been throwing an annual feast for St. Martha’s Day and cooking up a frenzy. I wanted to add my own special contribution to the mix, for the 40 or so people who showed up for the long weekend. I decided to learn how to make wine and beer.
Thanks to Jimmy Carter, we’ve been able to homebrew for awhile now. There was a very nice shop open just down the street with everything I needed, “All Things Beer.” I borrowed supplies and books from a friend who wasn’t using his and went and bought ingredients from Fred down at the store. I also got a batch of red wine going.
It all turned out great. I ended up wrecking the wine, but we did get that big party’s worth out of it first.
I went on to making beer straight from green fresh hops and by way of crushing my own malted barley. What a difference!
In the end, I’d have to say that my own beer just kicks butt on anything else I’ve ever had. When you make it from ALL FRESH ingredients, it just rules. It’s even tons better than my other fine homebrew beer. Freshness is the thing. I plan to grow my own hops asap.
The wine, too, is just better than anything you can buy at the store. All the storebought stuff is pretty darn good these days. If you pay over $4 or $5 a bottle, you can’t go too wrong. But I find that it’s all pretty much the same. Especially as regards white wine. It’s 95% Chardonnay nowadays. I’m going to look around more sometime for some weird white, but basically it’s all nice and dull in wineland at the store. In winemaking, I think the ticket is to use your own fruit. And it seems like a very wide variety of fruit makes supergreat wine. Our pal Ron bottles quite a bit using dandelion, elderberry, and who knows what else. It’s all very striking and refreshing. It has a life to it, just like the fresh beer does.
One neat aspect of Ron’s wine is that it has to BREATHE a lot. Like, for hours. A couple bottles of Rose started out quite vinegary. Oh oh! But I had faith and kept trying a little glass every night. All of a sudden the wine BLOOMED. It came into its own. It was suddenly nicer than any wine I’ve had in a long time. Different, special. I figure it happened after 3 hours of airing. So don’t give up on your wine! It might be working hard, for you. And be getting ready to give you a nice surprise.
I’ve also been lately getting pruning fever. It’s a lot like trailbuilding fever, I suppose. Improving the land and all. So I’ve read up in the Master Gardener notebook that Martha got from the MSU Extension Service (Go, last vestige of Land Grant College!) and pruned our fruit trees and berry brambles. I pruned my brother’s trees and our neighbors as well. And their grapevines. There’s a 100 ways to prune grape *cultivars*, don’t you know. It was so cool diving in and just doing it. So that the plants are happier, healthier and bear tons of fruit.
I also realized that it pays to go with the flow. That’s a big part of organic farming. What does your area like to produce? Well, around here the blackberries just come by themselves by the heaps. So I’m encouraging them. I think I see blackberry wine in our future. In past summers, it becomes a part of my every morning ritual to go out in the yard and pick a quart for breakfast from our wild berries. Once a week I pick an extra gallon for freezing. Maybe this year we’ll have an explosion of them, thanks to my pruning. Or maybe not…who knows if I did it right?!
I’ve also looked a bit into Distilling. I bought a book, for educational purposes only, as they say. My old Herter’s cookbooks also give a lot of info out about stills. It appears that one can make liquor that’s as good as any in your own home. Not too tricky. But ‘still’ illegal, sad to say. You can’t even own the materials for a still. Not even a freshwater still, for desalinating. A copper coil could spell trouble. I figure if you make it only for yourself and keep your mouth shut and don’t post about it on the Internet, you’ll be fine. : ) It’s all just a theory, right?!
