THE ORIGINAL PLUM WINE

Meeting friends in a cafe. Playing piano with fireflies at sunset. This summer, discover the new world of life and change. Once you learn how to make old fashioned plum wine at home, you’ll open a world of possibilities!

I love my homemade wine…more than the store bought kind. It tastes so good, and is so inexpensive to make…really! Get great wine, fast! 

Easy old fashioned plum wine at home in 2021!

This recipe is unlike others, as it doesn’t take many months…AND it’s delicious to boot.

What you will need for your old fashioned plum wine:

• 5lbs (2.25 kilos) of plums (We personally have wild plums on our property so that’s what this based off.)
• 3lbs (1.35 kilos) of sugar
• 1 gallon of water
• 1 teaspoon of fresh lemon juice
• 1 packet cider yeast (key to speeding things up)

Storing all your ingredients and equipment in one place is a really good idea. This will make it easier to clean and prepare your brewing equipment when you are done brewing and will make sure you have all of your ingredients on hand in case you need to make additions or subtractions during the brewing process. This also makes it easier to compare recipes since you can see the total number of ingredients used in creating each recipe as well as how many different items are used. Now keep in mind, if you don’t have all the exact supplies that’s okay! There’s usually a way around it, think of back when half the stuff I’m about to list didn’t exist! They still had beer and wine right? Most this stuff you can find on craigslist, 100% at a local brewing store or you can order on amazon. 

• Fermentation bucket
  
• Demijohns or carboys
• Airlocks with rubber stoppers
• Siphon hose
• a funnel
• Wine bottles (we just sanitize our old ones), corks, and a corker
• Sterilization solution

What to do to make your old fashioned plum wine:

1. Wash those plums, and get rid of any bad ones. Throw em in a sterilized bucket and mash em up with something like perhaps a potato masher or clean bottle. KEEP IN MIND – you DO NOT have to keep the pits in, I personally like to as it gives a almondy taste to the finished product. BUT there is sometimes a concern with cyanide, as the biggest cause of cyanide leeching into your brew is because of cracking the seeds so you want to be careful to not break the pits as you’re mashing.
2. Next you bring a gallon of water to a boil and pour it on top of those mushed plums. Then put a lid on it, swirl around once a day for 3-4 days.
3. After those 3-4 days are up you’ll want to stir in your lemon juice and sugar. Once that’s all mixed together sprinkle your yeast on top, cover and let sit for about an hour. Then come back and give it a good stir, once all these steps are complete you can seal it up again for another 4 days. You can stir it a couple times a day or you can simple pick up the bucket and swirl it around (which is much easier).
4. Next up, moving into the demijohns or carboys. I find the easiest way to do this is with a siphon hose and funnel.  Just remember to keep the siphon hose off the bottom of the bucket so not to siphon all the yeast into the carboy. Top the carboy up with an airlock and you’re once again ready to wait another couple weeks, then move over into new sterilized carboys again leaving the sediment in the bottom.
5.  WAIT another 3 weeks, then check it out, give it a try and see how you like it. So at this point you can bottle it, but remember it can become unsafe if you have too many bottles stored up for a long period of time at this stage. As they are still active and can produce too much carbonation if left to sit too long, which can lead to the bottle exploding. So if you’re going to want to be saving them for a while I would re-rack them into new carboys for another few weeks.
6. So the longer you wait to drink and continue racking the wine, the dryer and clearer it will get, you can continue this process for a few months re-racking monthly.

Happy wine making!

We hope you enjoyed learning how to make your own old fashioned plum wine, here’s a couple tips for if you don’t have all the listed things above:

1.  In the past we have used a regular bucket from home hardware and a safe thick plastic which we poured all our ingredients into tied up with a rubber band and put the lid on the bucket.
2. We also have used the same bottles as our “carboys” when we didn’t have carboys, and instead of using an airlock we just used balloons, the balloons will start blowing up if the fermentation process is not done.
3. It’s a bit of a pain to filter out the bottles one by one into other bottles, as obviously a bottle doesn’t hold as much as a carboy but it is doable. We used a brita filter, and coffee filters + a funnel when filtering each couple weeks.

Making it super simple to make old fashioned plum wine at home without having to spend much money!

Check out some of our other content here for more cool ideas.