If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you may recall the Prison Wine I made two or three years ago. If you haven’t been following this blog that long, well….. I made Prison Wine two or three years ago.
Prison Wine is extremely easy to make. Here’s the recipe, if you are interested. I made my first batch with apples, but you can use any fruit. If you’re using berries, just squish them up a bit before you measure in the six cups.
Not only can Prison Wine be fairly potent, it can also be VERY sweet. I experimented using less sugar and ended up with a couple of batches of vinegar. I was able to successfully cut the amount of sugar down to about 5 cups, but there was frankly little difference in the sweetness.
This year I decided to try making some Prison Wine out of the raspberries we picked in June, and I decided to do something a little different. I used our beer making buckets, instead of a gallon glass jar. This allowed me to add more water – plus the bucket has an airlock, so I didn’t have to worry about the wine bubbling out when it got to fermenting or about it getting too much oxygen. I ended up using 10 cups of smashed raspberries, 6 cups of sugar, and 2 gallons of water. It fermented for about 6 weeks. And this past weekend, we bottled it.
I like this batch MUCH better than the previous ones. It’s not near as sweet. And it kind of tastes like a Merlot – well, at least like I imagine a Merlot would taste if it was made in prison using only smuggled fruit, stolen sugar, and some kind of water.
But just look how pretty this stuff is:
And the really cool thing is that one of our neighbors traded me a bottle of that wine for a dozen fertile eggs from his chickens! So I’m going to stick those eggs under yet ANOTHER broody hen and see what hatches.
Oh, for those of you keeping score, I currently have three more broodies – two Phoenix’s and one Hamburg. The Phoenix’s are due to hatch theirs out next week. The Hamburg went broody this week, and it is she that is going to get the neighbor’s eggs tonight.
That makes a total of nine broodies this year. Two of them have gone broody three times this year.
Thank goodness for Prison Wine. I think I need it right about now.
Bee Free,
Penny
