Birch Wine
Ingredients
Directions
Collect and clean the sap
Bore holes in the birch tree to collect sap.
Boil the fresh sap until no more scum rises.
Sweeten, boil and ferment
Add 2 pounds of sugar for every gallon of sap.
Boil for 30 minutes, skimming off any scum.
Let it cool almost completely, then add a little yeast to ferment.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Fresh birch sap
- Forms the liquid base and carries the wine's mild birch flavor.
- Sugar
- Feeds the yeast, which converts it into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.
- Yeast
- Converts the sugar into alcohol during fermentation.
The step that matters
Adding the yeast. Yeast is killed by high heat, so the boiled sap must cool almost completely before the yeast goes in. Adding it while the liquid is still hot can stop fermentation before it starts.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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