Beet Wine
After doing a few kit wines where we order the grapes pre-juiced, we decided to turn back to our roots …our beet roots that is. We’re going back to making wine from fruits & veggies. As you know, our first, and so far best, wine is the blueberry wine. The taste, the color, the clean crispness is amazing. Unfortunately, we only made 5 bottles of it. This time we made beet wine and the recipe says kind of the same thing – tastes nothing like beets but has a beautiful color.
I am very happy about the economy of this wine, as compared to the blueberry wine or any of the other wines. Blueberry wine probably averaged at $10/bottle, due to the high cost of blueberries. Beets were $.89 per lb., so we are out like $5 for the beets and other $5 for the other ingredients. So we are looking at $1/bottle. And, as I dicovered tonight, it gets even cheaper! Because the way to make beet wine is to boil the beets and use the now-red water as the wine base. And now we have plenty of boiled beets to eat.
Tonight we got our second run from those beets, via Lateef’s idea: Russian Borscht. This is a soup that involves beets as the main ingredient, followed by carrots, cabbage and onions. We have been meaning to thin out our carrots in the garden, and still have plenty of cabbage sitting out there waiting to be harvested. So, before I delve into the intricacies of beet wine making, please see a picture of our carrot harvest (I know, the are funny looking because we didn’t till the soil too good this year) and of the Borscht soup.
Now, on to the beet wine. We got the beets from the farmers market, the honey from the same place, and the other ingredients from the grocery store (oranges, orange juice, sugar, etc).
Basically the beets get cut up and boiled, then everything else gets added and boiled. All containers were sterilized. So the only thing unboiled and/or unsterilized was the ‘zest of the orange’. Because of this, we decided to leave out the Campden tablet, which kills any “wild yeast”. This is pretty risky as by not killing any potential wild yeast, we can end up with a spoiled batch. However, it also lowers the preservatives in the wine. As Lateef’s dad advised us before we got married, “take risks”. We’re laying all on the line right here baby! We are still going to wait 24 hours before adding the yeast so that all the flavors can combine. Also we are waiting because to start the yeast would take at least 1 hour, and it was 11:30pm on a Sunday night, and we were falling apart.
When we took the specific gravity, which is the starting measurement for determining how much alcohol it might have, it was high at 1.15. If this stuff ferments to completion, then the alcohol content will be 20%. Yikes. Probably the yeast will get drunk with power and die early.
24 hours later, we heard the beginnings of the yeast orgy. The familiar bubbling, frothing sound coming from the bucket was a good sign. Here’s a pic. It looks like a disgusting bubbling brew.
