How To Make Wine From Any Fruit! Homemade Black Berry Country Wine

Hey guys, so today on our Thrifty Cottage, we're going to be making blackberry wine. I've probably picked about five gallons of blackberry so far this year, and I've frozen some in large bags because the plan was to make wine with them. And when I freeze them, and the reason why is because it breaks down the cellular walls of the blackberry, thus making them a little bit sweeter. I mean, of course, we want a little bit of sweetness in that wine, so it's kind of a good plan to plan ahead like that by freezing those blackberries or whatever berries that you're working with. So I'm going to start with 32 cups of blackberries in my big clean pail here. I'm going to just smoosh them up a little bit with this handy little mixer, and to just to break them down to get the juices out of them. Just a bit to start breaking down that flesh of those berries. There we go. Wonderful. Look at that. Now I'm not going to smush them, like totally liquefy them, but as you can see right now, they've, you know, they've taken more of a smooshy form than what they were originally. I'm going to grab my big wooden spoon here. There we go. My big wooden spoon. I always want to use wooden spoons for when I'm making a wine and such, just because there can be a reaction to the metal. Otherwise, with, when you're making like a fermentation like this, put a little emulsifier up there. And you can see here, kind of get a better idea for how far I've smooshed them up. Now to these 32 cups of blackberries, I'm going to add eight cups of water. Now this is non-chlorinated water I'm using. Give that a little bit of a stir. And I'm going to add eight cups of sugar. That's two, four, six, and eight. And that sugar is going to start that fermentation process happening as well. And as the wine starts to get older and the fermentation happens, it's going to eat those little sugars up. And it's going to cause some awesome reactions in there. I'm going to give this a good mix. Now I'm going to continue mixing for a while here because I want to dissolve that sugar. But my next step is I'm going to cover it with a tea towel and set it in a warm-ish, cool-ish place for three days. I will be checking it continually and I will be stirring it four times a day because we want to make sure the mixture stays stirred and we can get this activated. And after three or four days, we should notice some kind of happy little bubbles happening and those bubbles will mean the fermentation of those blackberries are starting to happen. So I've finished mixing my great little home brew here. I've taken the pail and I'll give you guys a little peek at it actually. Just pull back my towel here. See, it's all mixed up. I've covered it with a clean tea towel because I want to make sure that I don't get any bugs or any critters in there at all. And to keep down dust and all that stuff. Now the room I've put it in, it's a storage room so it's dry. It's warm-ish. It's not cool and it's not warm. It's kind of middle temperature. So it's going to sit there for three days. I'm going to take a peek at it every day though and give it a stir four times a day. That's it for three days and let's see if we can get some bubbly action in there. Do do do do. Look at how beautiful. Look how thick that is on top. That's why he's going to give it a stir. Like it just thickened up so much. But as he stirs it, you're going to see that it's going to start bubbling and we have an active ferment. Isn't that cool? Now to this ferment, we actually added a bit of a starter that we have from other beverages we have made. It's a little yeast starter that just came from one of our previous made champagnes. I guess we added it to it. Usually they recommend using an apple cider vinegar or raw honey to get it going, which will work just as well. So here we go. We are bubbly bubbling. Isn't that cool? And tomorrow we will strain it and we will put it into our big jugs so it can sit and ferment a little bit longer. You can hear it crackling. Pretty wicked. So it's day five today and we are going to strain our blackberry wine. Tony's going to dump it through the colander first of all, so we can get the big bits out. We don't want a whole bunch of chunks of course, as our wine is sitting in the jug. Oh my gosh, it smells good. Ooh, it's fruity. I'm going to pour it out with a splash. A little splash. Oh my gosh, it smells so much like wine. It's a funny thing. I know, but it's incredible at this stage already how it's smelling like wine. So once this is strained through, we will dump all those beautiful blackberry bits into our compost, because it's amazing with compost of course. And then next phase is next. Now the first strain through has happened already. You can see some sediments in that beautiful blackberry wine. My next step is I'm going to strain it again through a cheesecloth in my colander. I have dampened my cheesecloth so it's going to lay in my colander. It's not going to, when I pour it, it's not going to collapse. So I'm going to pour our beautiful first time strained blackberry wine through my colander, through my cheesecloth. And I might have to do it a couple of times to make sure I can get all that sediment out. And the next job is to get it into our wonderful jugs. Now you can see the sediment starting to settle in that cheesecloth. It'll probably take, I'm going to guess, probably a couple hours for the liquid to drain totally through this cheesecloth. But I want to make sure I can get every last drop I possibly can of this delicious blackberry wine into that bucket. So for two hours, I'm going to wait. Our blackberry wine has a strained through. So now I'm just going to use a funnel and fill up our little jug here and see how much wine we get. So I got one and about three quarter jugs of the blackberry wine. Look how great it is. Now I put balloons on top and I put a little cut, a little snip, I'm going to get a little closer look, you guys can see it. A little snip in each one of the balloons. And that acts as the airlock. You've seen those airlocks you can put on top of your things that you brew. We like to use balloons. And what that's going to do is that it's going to let the CO2 out and keep oxygen from getting in there. Now we're going to let this sit probably for right around five days to a week. And we will see that there'll be sediment on the bottom. And then the next step will be either we're going to take it out of there, put it into these jugs again, to decrease the sediment, or it'll go into bottles depending on how much sediment comes out. Day five of our wine doing its awesome fermentation, our blackberry wine. And so we're going to actually siphon it from the bigger jugs. We're going to actually put it into our five gallon pail because it's a little bit too tark for us. We're going to add a little bit of sugar to it. And then we're going to bottle it and we are going to pasteurize it in our canner to stop the fermentation process. So we're going to show you how we, I guess, siphon it from the bigger jug into a smaller bottle or into a five gallon pail like we're doing right now. Okay, so I'm just going to take my little rubber hose, I guess it's called. Let's see, what is it? Yeah, okay. So Tony's actually going to siphon it and he's going to just kind of suck on the end there. Here it comes. And we're just going to siphon it into our pail. Why do we siphon it? We're siphoning it because we want to make sure we get the sediment out of the, or we separate, I guess, the wine from the sediment. So, we'll be back in a flash. Okay, I'm going to give you guys a look at what the sediment actually looks like. I don't know if you can see it if we tilt the bottle. You see that, Tony? No, bring it up here. You see the sediment in the bottom of the bottle there? It's like a little cakey coating. There you go. We really don't want that in our wine. So we're going to, so that's why we siphon this out. Okay, so we added about another quarter cup of sugar. So now it's just the right dryness for us. It tastes fantastic. And Tony is just going to use a funnel and he is scooping it with just a regular measuring cup into our sterile flip-top bottles that we use for our wine. Now he's going to fill up each one of these bottles till, about how far from the top, Tony? About an inch and a half from the bottom ring. The bottom ring of the bottle. Out of the cap part. Or of the cap, sorry. He's going to point out that spot right there, about an inch and a half. You don't want to have too much head space. There you go. So we're going to fill up those bottles and the next step will be pasteurization. So we have our filled wine bottles in our cold water bath. And it's only about half full, this canner, because it doesn't need to be totally submerged because we only need the temperature of the wine inside the bottle to hit 74 degrees Celsius. And now we don't have the lids closed either because we don't want them exploding, of course. We've scrunched little pieces of tin foil on top, which also helps from, I guess, the carbonation can come out, but no foreign objects can go inside because that's all blocked off. We have a little thermometer here that we can actually poke, nice little thermometer, poke into the tin foil until we heat it up to 74 degrees Celsius on the inside. Tony, you have anything you want to say about this? No, we'll keep it at 74 for 15 seconds. And in commercial wineries, they do this with a chemical additive. We just like to keep our wine really simple. We don't add anything to it except sugar and fruit usually. So we'll just use a heat pasteurization process and make sure that it doesn't actually pressure up the bottle and explode. Yep, that's a bad thing. So remember in one of the previous videos for the blackberry wine, I had talked about that we had added some starter, actually from a previous brewing we had done of our elderflower and rhubarb champagne. And we kept the stuff that was at the bottom, like that kind of the sediment stuff that was at the bottom of our bottles, just in case we needed it as a starter for something else, which we did this time. And the reason is because, sometimes people don't wash their berries and it has that natural yeast on them that'll naturally start to ferment and start eating the sugars and such. Because our blackberries grow on along a road, a fairly busy road, they'd be covered in dust. And I think it would be disgusting to have dirty blackberries that have bugs and such in your wine. So I washed them and I washed off a bunch of that yeast. So I couldn't get the fermentation really going after the first couple of days. So I added some of our starter. But what else you could use, or also what you could use is some apple cider vinegar or raw honey. And that'll get that fermentation happening. So we are just at 58 degrees right now. And you can see here how the bubbling is happening in the clear bottle. You can see how it's foaming. But what's also happening is this gas is being released. That's why we got this awesome little piece of tin foil on there, but no funky stuff is getting in on the inside. So we're getting there. So we're at 74 degrees Celsius right now. And then we're gonna let them sit at 74 for 15 seconds. And then we are turning them off and removing them from the canner. So the last step is to just wipe these guys off. We're gonna let them cool down to room temperature first, of course, before we throw our little toppers on them or little corks in them, and they are good to go. Our blackberry wine is finished and ready to be enjoyed whenever we decide we want to enjoy it. Thanks for tuning in guys. And always, you know, make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel, ring those bells, I guess. And thanks so much.