Strawberries on Sale? How to . . .

“Make Strawberry Wine”
(Woman’s Exponent, “Household Hint,” May 1, 1873)

“Nothing can be more delicious; nothing can be more healthful. In all cases of dyspepsia, or of slow, nervous fevers, or of impure blood, or of ill-regulated bilious apparatus, it will be found a great palliative, and a powerful aid to other remedies of a more decided character.”

“Three quarts of strawberries make one quart of juice. Add three quarts of water and three pounds of the best sugar. Use a clean, sweet cask, leave the bung out for fermentation. When the fermentation subsides close the cask tightly and the wine is ready for use. Tightly stopped it will keep ten years, if necessary, but in my experience it has always been found too attractive to be kept quite so long a time.”

15 comments for “Strawberries on Sale? How to . . .

  1. Sounds like an idea! I have a flat of strawberries in my fridge right now.

    :)

  2. 3 POUNDS of sugar? Don’t tell me: it cooks out during the fermentation process.

  3. I know. It sounded like a lot of sugar to me, too. But then again, I’ve never tasted wine. Perhaps it is sweeter than I think?

  4. Okay so you have 1 quart (4 cups) of strawberry juice, 3 quarts of water (12 cups) and 3 lbs (~7 cups) of sugar.

    Thats 7 cups of sugar to 16 cups of liquid.
    That’s slightly less than twice the amount of sugar in prepared kool aid. In case you were wondering.

  5. Googling around, this seems a little light on sugar for typical strawberry wine recipes — The ones I’m finding run from 1:1 to 1:3 ratio of sugar to strawberries, by weight. (How much does a quarter of berries weigh?)

    Leave it to Mormon commenters to get into a discussion of the sugar content rather than the alcohol!

  6. It varies with the variety of yeast, but if I recall correctly, most cannot tolerate more than around 11% alcohol content before they drown in their own wastes and fermentation stops. Thus much of the sugar is going to remain unfermented.

    If you want a higher alcohol content, you’re going to have to distill the strawberry wine to make strawberry brandy. I’m guessing the Women’s Exponent would draw the line there.

  7. Forget the alcohol or sugar content, any recipe that has the instruction to “leave the bung out” can’t be that bad!

  8. 3 cups of sugar in 3 quarts of water gives a solution of approximately 20% sugar.

    With anaerobic fermentation, all the sugar is consumed. When sugar is fermented it breaks down to ~51% ethanol and ~49% CO2 by weight.

    So a solution of 20% sugar will create a solution that is 10.2% ethanol.

    Of course, the strawberries themselves add water to the solution, so this recipe is not likely to produce wine with more than 7-8% ethanol.

  9. Oops, my mistake, read three cups instead of three pounds. Ignore my last post.

    Vader is right though, the yeast will die at 11-14% ethanol, so that’s the best you can get with home fermentation.

  10. Yes, Kaimi. If you’re making this for FHE, you’d defnitely better. I’ve had that song in my head all day long.

  11. Nice post.

    I was reading an old post about medical marijuana and people commented that smoking causes cancer and tars up your lungs. I couldn’t post there so I thought here would be ok. There are forms of canabis consumption that avoid the health risks of smoking including vaporizing. Look it up.

    Thanks.

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