I hate religion. I hate the way it perpetuates ignorance, false guilt, paedophilia, sectarianism, murder, torture, intolerance, Jehovah witnesses knocking on your door, Jihad suicide bombers, the list goes on.
One could believe that that there are lots people who are incapable of rational thought. They are simply animals to be willingly herded, housed, milked and fleeced.
Thursday 7 November 2013
Friday 12 April 2013
Birch Sap Wine
Over the years I have made wine from a great range of ingredients, (including grapes, eventually!) but birch sap was never one of them. The idea of boring a hole in a tree and collecting sap for the purpose of making wine sounds intriguing, but it was only when my neighbour recently had her birch tree savagely butchered by a couple of cheap cowboys who simply severed the 3 main boughs, tearing the bark in the process. It's a mature tree, the trunk being about ten inches in diameter. It had grown very tall and was close enough to the houses to be a problem by clogging the gutters and drains with leaves. There are very simple and cheap remedies for this: gutter and drain leafguards, which I suggested but my advice was ignored.
There is a curious relationship between humans and trees. There was a time when trees dominated. There are still a few human cultures who live among them, respect them and benefit from what they have to offer. Trees pump oxygen into the atmosphere, without which humans cannot survive yet they are relentlessly destroyed.
March is probably the worst time to prune a birch because this is when the sap starts to rise. The tree started to 'bleed' from its wounds. I tried to 'cauterise' the wounds with a blow torch and apply a coating of wound sealant, but it still kept dripping. So I placed various containers at the base to collect the sap, with a view to make this curious wine. So far, I have gathered 20 litres. It has a pleasant, vaguely sweet flavour. I looked up an old recipe, which involved 2 lemons, 1 sweet orange, 1 seville orange and either a pound of chopped raisins or half a pint of white grape juice concentrate, and 3 pounds of sugar, per gallon. This reminds me of the story of 'Stone Soup', which is about deception. But birch sap wine has been made for centuries and presumably has some credibility worth investigating.
I have some questions about the recipe. It comes from the classic 'First Steps in Winemaking' by C J Berry. I have tried a number of the recipes included and have found some questionable. Let's analyse this one.
First find your tree. If you don't happen to have a mature one in your garden, you have an immediate problem. If you have one, or access to one, you need to drill a hole just within the bark, with a 3/4 inch drill bit and then insert a spigot. Forget that. I used a synthetic wine cork which had been drilled to accept a 10 mm clear plastic tube, the other end of which fitted into a bored bung for a denijohn. You will also need another synthetic cork to plug the hole when you have finished. The hole in the tree should be slanting slightly downwards (80 degrees). In my case, sap dripped for a few days and then stopped, yielding only 2 litres. Most of the sap came from the bleeding wounds above.
These drippings were fairly erratic and difficult to predict, so I arranged a number of wide mouth jars in strategic places. This worked reasonably well untill very heavy rainfall diluted the the sap significantly!
Meanwhile I started processing the wine in batches. The denijohn glass jars I use typically hold 5.5 litres max, somewhat in excess of an imperial gallon, 4.5 litres. Adding chopped raisins, orange and lemon juice and sugar to the bucket of must amounted to over 6 litres. Straining reduced this somewhat. At no time did I consider 3 pounds of sugar per gallon to be valid for anything other than a sweet wine, which, at this stage, I would prefer to avoid.
After 3 weeks the flow slowed down to the occasional drip after I had collected 11 gallons and the tree burst into leaf, so hopefully no harm done. The first batch of wine has fermented down to sg 0.093 and is very dry. I had to add extra yeast nutrient to get it to this point. The alcohol is 13%. It has the bouquet of the citrus peel and has a zesty mouthfeel, which lingers on the palate.
There is a curious relationship between humans and trees. There was a time when trees dominated. There are still a few human cultures who live among them, respect them and benefit from what they have to offer. Trees pump oxygen into the atmosphere, without which humans cannot survive yet they are relentlessly destroyed.
March is probably the worst time to prune a birch because this is when the sap starts to rise. The tree started to 'bleed' from its wounds. I tried to 'cauterise' the wounds with a blow torch and apply a coating of wound sealant, but it still kept dripping. So I placed various containers at the base to collect the sap, with a view to make this curious wine. So far, I have gathered 20 litres. It has a pleasant, vaguely sweet flavour. I looked up an old recipe, which involved 2 lemons, 1 sweet orange, 1 seville orange and either a pound of chopped raisins or half a pint of white grape juice concentrate, and 3 pounds of sugar, per gallon. This reminds me of the story of 'Stone Soup', which is about deception. But birch sap wine has been made for centuries and presumably has some credibility worth investigating.
I have some questions about the recipe. It comes from the classic 'First Steps in Winemaking' by C J Berry. I have tried a number of the recipes included and have found some questionable. Let's analyse this one.
First find your tree. If you don't happen to have a mature one in your garden, you have an immediate problem. If you have one, or access to one, you need to drill a hole just within the bark, with a 3/4 inch drill bit and then insert a spigot. Forget that. I used a synthetic wine cork which had been drilled to accept a 10 mm clear plastic tube, the other end of which fitted into a bored bung for a denijohn. You will also need another synthetic cork to plug the hole when you have finished. The hole in the tree should be slanting slightly downwards (80 degrees). In my case, sap dripped for a few days and then stopped, yielding only 2 litres. Most of the sap came from the bleeding wounds above.
These drippings were fairly erratic and difficult to predict, so I arranged a number of wide mouth jars in strategic places. This worked reasonably well untill very heavy rainfall diluted the the sap significantly!
Meanwhile I started processing the wine in batches. The denijohn glass jars I use typically hold 5.5 litres max, somewhat in excess of an imperial gallon, 4.5 litres. Adding chopped raisins, orange and lemon juice and sugar to the bucket of must amounted to over 6 litres. Straining reduced this somewhat. At no time did I consider 3 pounds of sugar per gallon to be valid for anything other than a sweet wine, which, at this stage, I would prefer to avoid.
After 3 weeks the flow slowed down to the occasional drip after I had collected 11 gallons and the tree burst into leaf, so hopefully no harm done. The first batch of wine has fermented down to sg 0.093 and is very dry. I had to add extra yeast nutrient to get it to this point. The alcohol is 13%. It has the bouquet of the citrus peel and has a zesty mouthfeel, which lingers on the palate.
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