The Plum-Project. Part 3 - Wine

This will be a write-up covering my first experience in the fascinating craft of brewing. It is by no means intended as a tutorial. It will simply cover what I have done, why I did it, and eventually how it turned out.

First I weighed out 3 kilograms of plums, and washed them under hot water. Then I transferred them to a food-grade bucket. I got my buckets from a snackbar franchise in the Netherlands. They get their sauces delivered in them and afterwards have no need for them. The good thing about these buckets, besides the lid, is that they are made of polypropyl, as opposed to the PVC that household buckets are made from. The PVC has a tendency to release chloride into your product. The bucket should be well sterilized before use. I do this by soaking them in a bleach-solution for a bit, and then rinse them very well. 

After I had a sterile bucket I put four liters of water on the stove to let it boil. While that was going on I began the noble task of crushing the plums with a potato-masher. This turned out to be no easy task, and I found out it is better to wait with this untill you poured some boiling water on them.

While crushing the fruit you have to be careful to not crush the stones as this will affect the flavour later. Once this mix is cooled down I added about 8 grams of pectinase, a pectin degrading enzyme, and let is stand around at room temperature for 24 hours. The pectinase degrades the cell-walls in the plums and this increases the amount of juice and therefore flavour you can get from them. 

After 24 hours (well, it might have been about 32) it was time to strain the liquid. I had my sister here to help, and that was very nice because holding stuff in place while pouring liquids through isn`t so easy while alone. We strained the fruit out of the liquid (that would at be called 'most') and pressed as much out as we could. A nice dirty job. 

 The most we boiled up, and once it was boiling we dissolved 1700 grams of sugar in it. This whole mix went back into a sterile bucket to cool down.

Once the most has cooled down, which takes quite some time, it is time to start the yeast. I mixed a good teaspoon full of yeast in about 2 dL of organge juice. If it goes frothy this proves that the yeast-cells are active. Leave this for 10 minutes or so. 

 The cooled down most still had quite some particles and stuff in it, so before I put it in the demijohn I strained it through a clean tea towel, yet again into a sterie bucket. After that I poured it into the sterilized demijohn using a funnel, and then added the yeast. In hindsight I could better have done this in the opposite order, as that would have mixed the yeast through the most better.

 In this picture, taken just after I put the airlock on the bottle, you can see that the yeast floats through the most in little clumps. Now, after a few days of bubbling the colour of the wine changed a lot, and all the clumps have disappeared. One day after the plum-wine was in its flask bubbling away I also started a batch of elderberry-port. I followed this recipe for that: http://www.bushcraftuk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=60997&highlight=. It is a very clear tutorial made by a man who knows his buisness very well. Here are my projects side by side. I left some head-space in the port-bottle, because the man who made the tutorial says it will have a violent first fermentation. When things calm down a bit I`ll add the last bit of most that I am now keeping in the fridge in a clean coke-bottle.

I have really enjoyed my first ventures into the brewing-world. It is very satisfying to just look at the bottles bubbling away every now and then. It is so alive in there! For now the bottles are standing isolated from the ground and in a bucket. If things decide to become violent in there this will avoid a great mess.