Tompopo Brewhouse & Winery
Big Pete : our first dandelion wine
Brewed on the evening of May 10, 2009
Dandelion wine brewed for no other reason than that we have a shitload of dandelions in our yard. Named for my brother because I boiled up the flowers on the night of his birthday. Didn't plant to, it just worked out that way.
My Darling B kept saying she wanted me to make dandelion wine and we had an especialy good crop this spring so, with her help plucking the blossoms and stripping them from the stalks, we boiled up this batch. It took three or four hours to strip the yellow petals from the greens; if you want to try this, don't underestimate how long it takes to fill a two-quart measuring cup with teensy-tiny dandelion petals.
I have never made wine before, just beer, but after reading this recipe on the internet I felt it wasn't so different that I couldn't take a swing at it. After plucking the petals I let them steep for two days according to the recipe, then brought it to a boil, which I let roll for ten minutes before straining it into a pot containing three pounds of granulated sugar.
I cooled the pot by immersing it in cold water in the kitchen sink, then added the juice of the two oranges and pitched the yeast. I tried dry yeast for white wine, on the recommendation of the guy at Brew & Grow. Funneled the soup into a one-gallon bottle, stopped it with a fermentation lock and moved it to the basement.
Sunday, May 17, 2009 : 6:00 pm
Fermentation has slowed down enough to make me worry that the soup isn’t warm enough, so I moved it upstairs to a corner of the kitchen where it should get up to at least seventy degrees.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
We had a very warm, muggy day today and the batch of Big Pete, sitting in a remote corner of the kitchen, must have picked up enough of the summer warmth to boost fermentation quite a bit. Each bubble comes through the fermentation lock with a Poit! that is audible from the living room.
© 2009 Dave Okonski
