Hello, today I'm going to show you how I make beetroot wine.
I'm Liz Zorab and this is Byther Farm.
And here is a bottle I made before, so this video will show you the processes
that I went through to produce this bottle of wine. It's taken about 15
months to film. And I don't actually drink alcohol anymore, I do taste it to
make sure that it doesn't taste absolutely hideous before I give it to Mr J.
Beetroot wine, it's a funny thing, I expected it to taste it very earthy or
taste of beet roots and it doesn't it's actually very, very pleasant.
There is no beet root taste, there is a kind of, there is a fruity taste almost,
but it's very lovely. Last year when we had a glut of beetroot I gathered a
quantity of beetroot and it took the leaves off the top of them and shook off
the worst of the soil on them and then brought them into the kitchen and gave
rhwm a really thorough wash. I then put them into a pan of boiling water and
boiled them rapidly for about 15 minutes.
Once they were cooked they went into a colander in the sink
and cold water was put over them to cool down very rapidly. That meant I was
able to rub the skins off them and cut the tops and the bottoms off them and cut
them into small pieces.
So all my chopped beetroot went into a very large bowl and I covered it with
boiling water, I covered it with a cloth over the top and I let it sit for about
24 hours for the color and the flavor to infuse into the water.
And then I collected those juices using a sieve and then in the rest of that
beetroot I put into a pan with some hot water and boiled it up again, so I could
extract more juice from it, more flavor, more color. And I did that until
I ended up with about 5 pints of liquid.
I poured some of the liquid into a bowl and I started to add some sugar, stirring
it to dissolve it. I did that a couple of times and with the third pound of sugar
that I was going to use I poured that into demijohn.
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When you're making wine you need to make sure
everything's really clean so I sterilize my demijohn before I used it.
So I put sugar in and then started adding in the beetroot juice.
All that flavor that and color
that we'd extracted from the beet roots, that went in and I took a little bit
more of that liquid, I put it into a jug and I added my yeast. I gave that a good
stir to dissolve it because I use a dried yeast and added that into the demijohn.
And then topped the demijohn up with the liquid with the dissolved
sugar in it.
I filled the demijohn up to its shoulders, just to give that yeast a bit of time to
get going and to get working and if it was going to bubble over I would rather it
wasn't right at the top. If I leave that little gap, it stops that from happening.
And 24 hours later I topped it up to this level.
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So then I needed to put my airlock in the top of the demijohn to stop bacteria getting in.
So you have a bung and one of these. These come in different shapes and sizes
but basically you push the plastic bit into the bung, make sure it's got a nice
seal on it and then you pour some water in that. I actually fill it from that end
because I find it easier. And you want the water to come to about halfway and
this means that the gases produced by the yeast can escape, but the
air can't get in. And then you can sit the little lid back on top if you want to.
When you have a look at them, they don't actually seal it tight.
It does allow the gases to get out. Most the time I don't, I just leave it
like that, but you have then got the risk of things crawl in there which could
not be very pleasant. Anyway, so you put that in.
And it's as simple as that, you have now started your wine. But beetroot wine
can become discolored and go quite brown so you need to block out the light.I
So I use the tea towel wrapped around the demijohn, one corner of the tea towel
tucked in through one handle of demijohn and the other corner tucked in through
the other handle. You then leave your wine in a cool and preferably a darkish
place to ferment.
The next thing to do is to rack your wine off, now what that
actually means is that you're going to take it from one demijohn and siphon it
through to another and you're going to leave behind any sediment that's in the
bottom of it because you don't want that in your wine.
You can repeat the racking off process two or three times to get rid of all the
sediment in the bottom of your demijohns.
So you should end up with a really clear wine.
When it's finished fermenting and you will know that because the
bubbles I will no longer be going up through the airlock, you can bottle it up.
Don't be in any rush to bottle it up, if you've racked off several times
and there's almost no sediment in the bottom of your demijohn, you can leave it
sitting there for a good long time.
And if you've been in too much of a hurry to
get your wine into your bottles you may well find when you open them you'll hear
a fizz or worse than that you'll have masses and masses of bubbles coming up.
and that's, of course, when there is that the risk of the pressure building up so
much that your bottles could explode. So really, you know, it really is worth with
beetroot wine just waiting and letting it sit for maybe several months before
you bottle it up.
And then if you're going to put it in a clear bottle
like this one, it's worth covering it. So I made a tissue paper cover and
then, it's literally just tissue paper with a bit of sticky tape around it, and
then I put this in a very dark cupboard to sit and mature.
Or an even better thing to do is to use a dark bottle so a green or a brown bottle and that will
help exclude some of the light. But all the same it's worth storing it in a dark place.
And this is where you have to start being patient because the longer
you leave that beetroot wine the nicer it's going to be. So I would suggest six
or nine months minimum, eighteen months would be ideal and then
you end up over this rather beautiful great tasting wine.