Seasonal Wine, May - Nettle

[LordEoin]

May is a good month for free ingredients, so here's another one. Nettles!
Normally you'd pick these a bit earlier when they'r very young plants. When they're young you can use the hole plant, but later on you can just take the soft tops.
The tips of young nettle plants can be used for wine an beer (and food).
Nettles are super good for you, very nutritious and plentiful.

The recipes for both the wine and the beer are almost identical apart from the yeast and the amoung of sugar.

1kg nettle tops (about a stuffed plastic shopping bag)
Juice of 2 lemons (no rinds, juice, pulp)
5L water
Brown Table Sugar: wine=1.5kg, beer=500g
Yeast: wine=wine, beer=beer (pretty straight forward)
For wine, feel free to add any fruit juices and flavors you think would be nice)

Here's a picture of the nettle plant, and where to pick from:

You only want the softest bits from right up the top. They're not very stingy up the top but still wear gloves and long sleeves.
If you feel yourself getting stung a lot, you're probably grabbing older leaves which are not as good.

Once you've picked your nettles, bring 5L water to the boil.
Add your nettles. They won't all fit in your pot at first, but they will shrivel and fit after a bit of spoon-squashing and boiling.
Simmer them for 15-20 minutes, then strain the liquid into a sanitised container.
(for the beer, you can also add some Irish Moss to the boil if you want, no need for grains or hops, but its your beer so do whatever you want)

At this stage, the liquid is a really dark green/brown and looks disgusting, but the next part is magic...
Add the sugar and the lemon juice and stir it up.
The liquid changes colour completely from green to light golden brown.
Here's a picture of before and after, but it really doesn't do it justice:


Cool the liquid to your yeast's pitching temperature, pitch the yeast and move to primary.
As far as I remember, this one will have a very thick krausen, so I split it between 2 demijohns for now. I'll combine them once it settles down a bit
Here's a view of the current disorder on top of my brewfridge, there'd normally be a 33l FV up there too, but I just bottled my John Bull Cider, so all buckets are currently empty.


Once the fermentation is complete:
Beer: may take as little as 3-5 days, bottle and prime. It'll clear in the bottles.
Wine: probably about a month, rack to secondary for clearing. Once cleared, bottle.

Neither the wine nor the beer benefit from much aging past clearing and carbonation.
Drink once clear

[johnrm]

FYI, Brett Dundee has made an interesting Nettle Ale

[Blueshed]

had a btl of the River Cottage nettle ale last year and it was nice, need to get my act together and get some demijohns etc and start making small brew like this.

here is the recipe http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2011/may/18/homebrew-from-the-hedgerow

[LordEoin]

Interesting, pretty much the same ingredients 

[Bubbles]

Eoin, I'm loving this series on hedgerow wines you're doing and it would make a great addition to the front page. Would you consider doing a series of articles for the publishing team?

Cheers,
Conor.

[LordEoin]

No worries.
I have wordpress access anyway, so if you want I'll stick them in there too and whoever sorts ou the mainpage can post them if they want

[DEMPSEY]

I presume that people have tried adding nettles or gorse to malt for making beer. Any idea's how this would work and what sort of flavours could be expected.

[LordEoin]

I don't know about nettles, but I've heard of Gorse Ale alright.
I suppose it would add a coconut type aroma to it.

I'll stick all my googling finds for gorse into the gorse thread