Carrot Wine!!!
Monday, July 13th, 2009After our recent wine adventures I got a little more inspired to create my own batch of wine. I have been reading up on the process for several years now, but have kept it on the back burner. Here in Seatte, there are a lot of home brew supply stores so it’s easy to obtain the obscure ingredients necessary for the project. I quickly settled on carrot wine as my first attempt since carrots are cheap and you need a lot of whatever fruit or vegetable you are using for your base. I have also I have tasted carrot wine once before and it was delicious! I have no idea of my recipe is similar or it will even turn out at all, but here’s my attempt!
Step 1: Get 10lbs of carrots, wash, scrub and chop them!
Step 2: Boil the carrots till soft and drain the water into the primary fermenter.
Step 3: Add all the other stuff and let it sit loosely covered over night
Step 4: Check the specific gravity of the mix so that we know the sugar content and can later estimate if the fermentation is complete.
Step 5: Add the yeast!
Now we let it sit in the bucket for 3-5 days while the yeast have a party with the sugar. When the fermentation slows we will test the specific gravity again and put it in a glass container with an airtight plug to continue fermenting. In the secondary fermentation in the glass container it should ferment much more slowly and the wine will become clear as sediments precipitate out of solution. Every 3-4 weeks, we shift the wine from one container to a second, to separate the wine from the sediment. This process of shifting the wine is done for about 6-12 months then we bottle it and enjoy! There isn’t a definitive answer as to how long the process should take some websites say just 3 months others say nothing less than a year! I figure I’ll play it by ear. I’m quite excited about my experiment, I hope it turns out well 