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i am about to bottle up my batch of dandelion wine from last year and start a new batch i cant wait!
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Re: dandelion wine!
Wed, April 16, 2008 - 5:59 AMThat sounds interesting. How do you go about dandelion wine? Does it take tons of dandelion flowers? And what sort of flavor do you get? -
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Re: dandelion wine!
Wed, April 16, 2008 - 12:16 PMthere are a few recipes online but i just kinda winged it
my recipe is as follows
4 gallons of water
2.5 pounds of dandelion petals
a little bit of lemmon juice and peals
1 packet of champaign yeast
23 cups of sugar
12 0z of honey
basically i boiled the water and then added it to the dlion. pedals i mixed it with sugar and let it cool
when it was warm but not hot i added some yeast which i started in a small amount of the dlion "tea"
after it fermented for a few days i put it in to the carboys with an air lock
i racked when it cleared out and re racked a few times when there was a lot of sediment on the bottom
it has a very light sweet flavor
my friends like this best out of all the wine i make
its about 15% alc i added some sulfides to stop the ferment after a while and it has been sitting for about a year mellowing...
this year i plan on only making dlion wine....i am going to tweak the recipie a little bit just to see if i can make it better i think i might add a little bit more honey to it and try a few other things
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Re: dandelion wine!
Wed, April 16, 2008 - 12:21 PMWhere the hell do you find 2.5 pounds of dandelion petals?!?! You stop mowing and weeding your yard? ;-) -
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Re: dandelion wine!
Thu, April 17, 2008 - 5:51 AMmostly along the rail road tracks and other out of the way areas i try and get to places before the lawn mower comes ;-) -
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Re: dandelion wine!
Thu, April 17, 2008 - 10:08 AMWhen you say dandelion petals... Do you mean the yellow petals of the flower portion (and avoiding using the base)?
Or do you mean the leaves off the stem?
It sounds lik eyou mean the yellow flower petals, but plucking that many sounds like a painful amount of work....
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Re: dandelion wine!
Thu, April 17, 2008 - 10:23 AM
careful harvesting anything around tracks
...usually the soils are contaminated. -
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Re: dandelion wine!
Thu, April 17, 2008 - 10:35 AMYeah, I think I'll stick to the yard and some open areas near the woods when I go looking.
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Re: dandelion wine!
Thu, April 17, 2008 - 10:09 AM*grins* I was going to ask about that myself! I'd be hard put to find that many dandelions around my yard! I'll probably have to wait to try that one until next year though, our dandelions have already hit their peak for now. : (
It does sound wonderful though!
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Re: dandelion wine!
Thu, April 17, 2008 - 12:18 PMWhen I was about five my parents made dandelion wine. I remember crawling all over the ground on our farm picking dandelion heads. The second memory from that experiment was all of the jugs suddenly exploding, one after the other, in the middle of dinner one night. In my memory the wine was pouring down from the top of the fridge, which I now know would explain the explosions. It must have been way too warm.
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Re: dandelion wine!
Thu, April 17, 2008 - 1:07 PMOh! One more question! Can you exchange some of that sugar for honey? How much more to balance out the honey/sugar ratio? That suddenly looked like an unholy amount of sugar when I wrote it down! : ) -
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Re: dandelion wine!
Fri, April 18, 2008 - 6:23 AMyou can change the ratio i just used my hydrometer to measure the potential alcohol content and i wanted it to be about 15 percent. so i just kept adding sugar till i got there. as for the dlions by the tracks it is usualy a bit away from the tracks in open areas the ground there hardly gets mowed so there is plenty of time for tons of the dlions to grow.... granted there still maybe be some contamination but honestly im not worried about it... if i grow a third arm or a 4th eyeball then ill be a little nervous and maybe cut back on my consumption of the stuff ;-) -
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Re: dandelion wine!
Fri, April 18, 2008 - 6:27 AMone last thing i pick the yellow parts, if you get to much green it can make it bitter, as for the amount of work its not so bad i had my friend and my bro help me deflower the heads that i picked. i think i had 1 or 2really full grocery store plastic bag filled with heads and that made about 2.5 ish pounds.... the only thing is i dont remember if i weighed the petals or the heads. if i get a chance to start a new batch this week ill let you know what i used -
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Re: dandelion wine!
Mon, April 21, 2008 - 5:48 PMso you pick the heads, you then just peel off the green from around the head or cut the yellow out?
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