Making Dandelion Wine Step-by-Step #2 - Flower-Picking to Yeast Addition

[eredien]

ab3nd and I are making Dandelion wine this spring. This is an ongoing series of posts.

He and I spent about 3 hours picking dandelions at a park on Tuesday, and then spent another hour cutting off most of the bitter greens, and then another hour boiling them in a big pot on the stove. It was time-consuming; if we ever do anything like this again then we should definitely make it a weekend, rather than an overnight, project.

Then, according to the recipe, the pot of boiled dandelion heads sat for two days with a twice-daily stirring. On Thursday evening, I spent another hour peeling the rind off of two lemons and an orange, and juicing them by hand since we don't have a hand juicer here, and sterilizing the inside of the bucket with some bleach and water.

I was a little worried: unboiled, the pot of dandelions smelled like bitter greens; but when boiled again let out that lovely aroma of almost-honey. I added the rind, boiled for another hour, added the citrus juices and sugar, and let it cool. I'm glad I started to do that around 4, because it took until about 10 at night for the vat-o-sugar to cool off enough to put the yeast in, even with stirring periodically. Around 10 pm I dumped the whole thing in the big bucket, stirred the yeast in, put the lid and the vent on, and sat the whole thing in the pantry closet to sit until Sunday.

Then I spent an hour designing a wine label in gimp. I don't know if we will decide to use this, but I really like it.