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Drink

Barberry Wine

A fermented beverage made from barberries steeped in boiling water and sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Barberry Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the infusion

  1. Bruise the barberries and place them in a large container.

  2. Add 1 gallon of boiling water to the barberries.

  3. Let the mixture sit for at least 3 days, stirring every morning and evening.

Strain and ferment

  1. Strain the mixture through a sieve to extract the juice.

  2. Transfer the juice to a seasoned cask and add 3 pounds of sugar for every gallon of liquid.

Bottle

  1. After a few months, bottle the wine, adding a small lump of loaf sugar to each bottle.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

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

Barberries
Provide the main flavour, tartness and colour of the wine.
Sugar
Provides sweetness and food for fermentation, which produces alcohol.

The step that matters

Stirring the steeping mixture. Stirring twice daily keeps the barberries evenly in contact with the water, so the juice is extracted consistently rather than unevenly across the batch.

“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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