My sister Steph is visiting us again, and today we picked 17lb (about 8kg) of damsons from the tree in our front garden. I'm pretty short and Steph's even shorter, so we used a broom to pull the branches towards us. Then we sat in deckchairs and roughly cut them all and chucked them into a 5-gallon bucket with about 2 1/2lb of barley. We covered it with boiling water, put a lid on it and tucked it away in the kitchen. When it gets cool we'll add some pectin-destroying enzyme, to make sure we don't end up with 5 gallons of damson jam. We'll give it a stir every day for about three days, until we have several pints of damson juice. Then on the fourth day we'll strain the juice off the pulp, and add some yeast and sugar, and let it ferment.
17lbs of damsons will make 5 gallons (about 30 bottles) of damson wine, which will be ready in time for Christmas.
2 comments:
Sounds scrummy!
Hi Melanie - great work. I used to make my own wine, and would like to make some this year (plum, do you think? If damson is good, why not plum?). But I no longer have any equipment, and the shop I used to go to is no more, there's a huge shopping mall where it used to be ... any ideas where I can get the stuff I need??
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