Exotic ingredients

[greenxpaddy]

Reading up on edible berries yesterday....

Did you realise you can brew with hawberries from the hawthorn? Has anyone actually tried a hawberry wine?

And more strange is you can brew with mountain ash berries. I don't know why but I thought I was taught at school that these berries (also known as rowan berries) are poisonous...MIght surprise you that the Welsh used to make a brew called 'diodgriafel' {sic!} with them. Simply mashed berries with water fermented by the wild yeast on the skins.....Fancy a project anyone to see if you can improve on that lol

Other free fruits, outside of the more obvious, you can find in the woods are rosehips and wild cherries .

[simco999]

Poisonous berries - let us know how you go on.

[boingy]

In my short wine making career I've learnt this: don't expect to make a nice tasting wine out of ingredients that taste horrible. It can be done but it's not easy.
Example: Elderberries. They taste nasty. Add some sugar and they taste sweet and nasty. My elderberry wine is now two years old and, well, not great. You can drink it without gagging but you don't want a second glass. Maybe it will improve, if I live long enough.

Blackberries on the other hand taste nice at the start and, guess what, my one year old blackberry wine is delicious. I've already got another couple of batches on the go.

I picked up a couple of demijohns at a boot sale on Sunday and another stall holder saw them and shouted "Wine making! I made pea pod wine once. It was horrible!" and I thought "well, what the f*** did you expect????" (a bit later I found myself wondering how many pea pods it must have needed)

[dave-o]

Example: Elderberries. They taste nasty.

IME they taste nasty when not very ripe. When ripe (i.e. a couple of weeks after they turn red) they are quite nice.

[Dr. Dextrin]

When I lived oop north, the elderberries always tasted horrible and sour and I never managed to make a decent wine out of them. Now I live darn saarf I know they need to ripen until they don't have any acid left at all. They still taste horrible (possibly even worse in fact), but when you add back just enough acid they then make a fine wine when used with other ingredients. Ripeness is the key.

[boingy]

I guess the clue is that quite a lot of the elderberry wine recipes I found actually use just as many blackberries as elderberries.
And even ripe elderberries taste yak to me.