For anyone that has apple trees in their garden and never gets around to eating all of them before they go soft and start succumbing to disease, this apple wine recipe is a perfect solution to the problem of what to do with all the excess fruit! And the resulting wine tastes delicious! (...even my friends, family and colleagues agree!)
Equipment
Before we get started though there are a list of basic tool and equipment you'll need. These include:
1) The apples - a mix of different apples works best as each variety will have subtle differences in flavour, sweetness etc. I used a roughly 50/50 mix of cooking apples (Bramley Seedling I believe) and sharp-tasting eating apples, but you could even use crab apples too!
2) Caster Sugar- It's not necessary to get brewing sugar; caster sugar works just as well. The amount will vary depending on how sweet you like your wine and how much wine you are making. Typically ~1kg per gallon for dry wine, ~1.5kg per gallon for a fairly sweet wine.
3) Raisins - use 500g per gallon. Chopped or crush these as much possible before using
4) Lemons - Use the juice of 2 lemons per gallon of wine.
5) Pectolase - £1.25 from Wilkos. Whilst not essential this will help reduce haze in the wine, helping it settle more quickly and will also help extract more of the juice out of the apples in the initial steps.
6) Yeast - Choosing the right yeast strain can be crucial as it can determine not only how strong your resulting wine will be, but how quickly it will ferment and the temperature range at which it will ferment. I tend to prefer yeast strains which are more tolerant of wide ranges of conditions and therefore suggest Lalvin D47 (achieves up to ~14% ABV) and Lalvin EC1118 (achieves up to ~18% ABV). Although I have found that the Wilko wine yeast (Gervin Universal Wine Yeast) behaves very similarly to the Lalvin EC-1118 and makes a great strong wine, even fermenting at rather cold temperatures of ~14°C. One 5g packet of yeast can be used to start 1-5 gallons of wine. When I do large batches (5 gallon; 25 litres) I generally add two sachets as I like to get the fermentation started quickly.
7) Yeast nutrient - Available from most places, including Wilko's! I generally use ~1 level teaspoon per gallon.
Other equipment you'll need (but will already have if you've made wines before) includes:
1) A plastic container &lid large enough for the quantity you wish to make - I bought a 25L plastic container specifically made for home brewing from Wilko's for £10.
2) Milton sterilising tablets or equivalent - used for sterilising your equipment before you use it!
3) Straining bag - not essential but definitely worth while getting. It saves a lot of time when separating the juice from the solids after the initial fermentation
4) Siphon - The Range has the best cost-effective siphon I have used. For £4 it comes with an attachment that prevents larger solid material getting into the tube, a clip to attach to the fermenting bucket and a tap to shut off easily. Honestly you can set it up and then just walk away while it fills up the demijohns!
5) Glass demijohns, plastic bungs and air locks - the number you'll need depends on the amount of wine you'll be making. Glass demi's aren't cheap to buy if you get them new, but I buy mine from Gumtree, Facebook marketplace and even charity shops for ~£3 each. Each one holds 1 gallon (equivalent to ~5-6 bottles of wine)
6) Some empty wine bottles - corked bottles work better than screw caps but both can be used. If using corked bottles you'll need to get some corks and a corking tool (both can be found in Wilko's...honestly Wilko's and The Range are fab for beginners home brewing essentials!!)
Quantities
Now you've got all the basic equipment, it's time to work out how much wine you want to make: 1 gallon of wine is equivalent to ~5/6 bottles of wine.
During my first venture into making wine, I decided to go all out and make 10 gallons worth! Luckily it turned out really well and the investment in all the equipment paid off. I ended up with ~50 bottles worth of a lovely sweet (and rather STRONG!) apple wine that for some reason reminds me of a pineau des charentes - a fortified French white wine that is mixed with Cognac.
I have given quantities per gallon in the equipment list above for most of the ingredients, however you will notice that I haven't stated for apples. This is because I don't generally determine the quantity of apples to use by how much they weigh. Instead I base it on volume.
Generally you'll need enough apples that, once chopped into small chunks, will fill the fermenting bucket to the amount of wine that you wish to make. Ie. I wanted to make 2 x 25L (2 x 5 gallon) of wine so once chopped up, they needed to fill the bucket to the 25L mark. The picture below shows all the lovely apples I harvested from my two trees which I used to make 50L of apple wine, although I had around 3/4 of a carrier bag left over at the end.
Recipe
So now you have everything you need, its time to get started! So here it is in a stepwise order..
1) Sterilise the equipment
Using the Milton tablets (1 tablet per gallon of water), sterilise your fermenting bucket, straining bag and a large plastic spoon (used for stirring the wine). Leave in the Milton solution for around 15 minutes and then rinse with tap water.
2) Prepare the apples
This is probably the most time consuming step of the whole process. Tip your quarry of apples into a sink and give them a quick wash. There's no need to peel the apples, all you need to do is chop them up into small chunks to maximise their surface area so more juice can escape from them. You do however want to get rid of the core and check for grubs in them. You can normally tell if there are grubs though as they leave small imperfections on the apple surface and will often burrow towards the core. After chopping each apple, place into the straining bag within the fermenting bucket - repeat until the apples reach the desired level for the amount of wine you wish to make. Too much is always better than too little!!
3) Top up and Cover for 24-48 hours
Once you're happy you have enough apples, boil the kettle and fill the bucket with as much water as it takes to cover all the apples (they need to be submerged), although they do tend to start floating. Don't worry about the volume of water you're adding, just make sure you add just enough to cover them. Then add a teaspoon of pectolase per gallon of wine and stir thoroughly with your sterilised spoon. Then cover and leave 48-72 hours.
4) Remove the solids
You'll notice the colour of the liquid changing to more 'apple juice' type colour after a few days. At this point, you want to lift the straining bag containing the solid apples from the bucket, leaving the 'apple juice' behind. Don't squeeze the bag, to extract more juice, just try to get as much out as you can while holding it for a couple of minutes. The solid stuff can then be composted as it's the liquid you'll be needing for the wine.
5) Add the remaining ingredients
You'll notice that the liquid level will have dropped considerably. I started off with 25L worth of apples and was left with ~10L of juice. To this I then added cooled boiled water (topped up to 25L mark) as well as the required amounts of caster sugar (7.5kg - came out rather sweet), squashed raisins (2.5kg) and lemon juice (from 8 lemons). Stir well to dissolve all the sugar. You can then take a hydrometer reading if you want to know the percentage.
Once your mixture has reached room temperature you can add the yeast nutrient (5 level teaspoons), again stir well. And then finally you add the yeast (10g), but don't stir. Just sprinkle on top and then cover loosely. Once the fermentation starts (which it normally does within hours, the gas build up will pop off the lid if you put it on too tight. I tend to leave a small gap and then cover with a tea towel to stop anything getting in.
This initially fermentation step will take around 5 days to 2 weeks. So make sure it is somewhere at a fairly constant temperature and stir daily. Usually it's a good idea to leave your stirring spoon in the bucket so you don't need to sterilise it everyday! You'll be able to tell when the initial fermentation is complete as it won't be bubbling anywhere near as vigorously and there will be quite a bit of sediment accumulating on the bottom. It will look abit strange and will smell slightly musty and appley during this step.
6) Rack the wine
After the initial fermentation has slowed right down, you'll want to start thinking about siphoning off into your demijohns.
First sterilise your demi's, the siphon, airlocks and bungs using the Milton tablets.
Once you've done this, without disturbing the wine too much, lift the fermenting bucket so that it sits higher than your demijohns - otherwise you won't be able to siphon it off! Then sit your siphon inside the bucket, with the bottom resting just higher than the sediment level and clip hold in place. Then suck through until it starts coming out of the tap and leave it to fill up your demi's to the shoulder point.
Once filled, attach your sterilised bung and airlock (use milton fluid for inside the airlock). Repeat until the majority of your apple wine has been siphoned off.
At this point, your apple wine should look really cloudy. This is normal. It can take months for it to clear, but it eventually will. For now, all you need to do is sit and wait. The image below shows what to expect after this initial siphon (although the image below is ginger wine so the apple wine will be darker in colour - like apple juice)
7) ...And rack again...and again...
Racking is one of those steps that can be seen as a pain, but is crucial to how crystal clear you want the finished wine to be. Over time, you will see layers of sediment building up in the demijohns as the yeast consume all the available sugars and gradually die off. When you get more than 2cm or so of sediment, rack off into a clean, sterilised demijohn - making sure you don't accidentally take any of the sediment with you otherwise your work will be for nothing!
Repeat this process over some months until the wine is perfectly clear and there is no further bubbling in the airlock - although I tend to find the bubbling stops way before the wine is completely cleared.
I racked my wine twice I believe before bottling it some 6-12 months later - the image above shows how clear it should be. I left mine in the demijohns probably longer than I needed to as I was in no rush to bottle it. With apple wine, its good to be patient as the wine tastes much better after 1 year so if you can hold off drinking it straight away, its worth it!. I made mine in September 2018 and right now it tastes fab!
And whilst the initial outlay for the equipment can be expensive, if you're wanting a fun new hobby to try out as a way to use up some excess fruit you might have, it is definitely worth it. I have just started a ginger wine off that I've just transferred over to the demijohns and since I have all the equipment, it will work out that per bottle it will have cost me ~£1 per bottle (details on the ginger wine recipe to come!). And you can dabble with all kinds of fruit and flowers - berries, rhubarb, even dandelion flowers - and with so many in the hedgerows at my workplace, that's definitely one I'm going to be having a go at as soon as they appear this year.
Anyway, do let me know how you get on and if you have any questions about the recipe. I'm always happy to help when I can! And please subscribe for more DIY fun ... homemade fruit gins and brandy will be coming up shortly!
Happy wine-making!! :)
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