Tea and prune wine recipe

Ingredients
3 cups strong tea
340gm prunes (dried)
340gm sultanas (dried)
1kg granulated sugar
3 lemons
1/4 tsp Marmite/yeast extract
All-purpose wine Yeast

Stage 1

Rinse prunes, soak for a day, remove stones and mash them up in your bucket. Add rinsed and chopped sultanas, and cover bucket. Warm half a litre of water in a large saucepan, and stir in the sugar and marmite. When dissolved, cover and cool, then add to bucket. Make tea, strain and allow to cool, and add to bucket. Add juice from lemons to bucket. Top up to 4 litres or within 5cm of the top of your FV. Pitch yeast and cover; leave in a warm place, stirring twice daily, for ten days.

Stage 2
After 10 days rack into a demijohn, and chuck out the solids. Top up to neck with cold water; leave to ferment to dryness. This can take a month at 18C.

Wait 2 weeks after fermentation has finished, then rack into another DJ. Top up to neck with wine of similar flavour and colour, or cold water. Leave to mature and clear for 9 months before bottling. Leave at least 2-3 months after bottling before drinking; peaks 24 months after racking to mature.

Wurzel's Orange

A really simple wine recipe from orange juice and grape juice - covered here. Knocked up two batches today, each with 1kg sugar instead of the 1.5lbs mentioned; used 2tsp young's GP wine yeast to get things going, and also added some oak chips into one of them to see if there's any discernable flavour difference. First airlock bubble came out within 30 minutes!

Bottling peach & lychee

Bottled one demijohn of this; still very sharp, and not completely clear.

Bottling Jingle Jug

Gorgeous red colour; FG 1013. Malty - needs to prime and then cool. abv 4%.

Kicking off swine scrumpy

Ingredients ready to go. There's not much Danish bacon around; I certainly couldn't find any - apparently the Japs are paying more for it than we do so it's going all the way over there! More than happy with British smoked. Yeast is rehydrating over at the side, and there's a litre of apple juice just in case.



Seven litres of pulp! Gave the food processor a good battering. Bramleys are much softer apples and were harder to work with than the cox, but a few raisins in there and everything starts moving again once they find the blades. This FV won't do.



Mmmmm delicious! Probably not that bad as stuffing.



Almost impossible to get a specific gravity - a floor of chunks pushes the hydrometer up, and the floaty bits push it down - and definitely impossible to get a meaningful one what with all the sugar being in solid chunks of apple.



Reminds me why I don't go out on the town of a weekend



What better way to finish than a big bacon buttie, washed down with Bradfield Brewery Farmer's Stout (sadly not made in Yorkshire squares, but delicious nevertheless!)

I wonder what the bacon'll taste like after it comes out?