Illustrated Blackberry Wine Making Part 1

If you read my other blog you know that hubby and I have 5 acres. It’s heavily treed so we don’t have very many blackberries, but neighboring vacant lands do so we decided it was a good time to learn home wine making!

The wine making kit came with equipment to make 6 gallons of wine. In order to do this we were going to have to pick 24 pounds of blackberries. We were only able to pick 18 😦 But as it turns out after adding all of the ingredients we were only about a half a gallon short so I went to the store and bought 2 pounds of frozen blackberries – so not so bad… Below are the pictures of the first few steps in the process.

Here are the berries sitting in the primary fermentor

At this point I couldn’t imagine how it was ever going to be enough berries.

The blackberries had to be squeezed, pressed, and strained through mesh bags. The mesh bags stay in the primary fermentor for the first week as well.

 

Messy!

 

Here are all of the ingredients I added (only a teaspoon or two of each so these little bags will last a long time!)

And here it sits for the next 5 days or so. I forgot to add that I added the yeast after it had sat like this for 24 hours.

Stay tuned over the next week or so as we attempt to figure out how to use a hydrometer, and siphon the must into the secondary fermentor! Weeee!