Backyard Beverages

Call it a hippie cliché, old fashioned, backwater brew or what have you, but we decided to try a batch of dandelion wine.  Of the many stories I've heard about it, I've never known anyone who has actually confessed to making or drinking dandelion wine.

We did our best to follow a "Pennsylvania German" pre-prohibition recipe we found randomly on the web. Warning: this recipe calls for a lot of sugar.

We had a really hard time getting the yeast to start and were about to start over when it quickly fermented the dandelion syrup into something passable as an adult beverage/cleaning product.

Almost ready to bottle. We'll give it another week or so in the secondary fermenter.

This hasn't been the only experimental drink we've been working on. Inspired by a post over on Hunter Angler Gardener Cook we tried a bit of homemade root beer last night.

We took the easy track for the first attempt by making it in the common form as a non-alcoholic soda.

Luckily we have a sassafras tree in our back yard so collecting a bit of root was as simple as pulling up a few of the saplings surrounding the main tree and cutting off the roots.

We made sure to hang on to the leaves in hopes of making filé powder for gumbo. We'll let you know how that goes.

Cutting up the roots before boiling them was a good bit of fun.  It was the first time we've had a need to use our loppers in the kitchen. The pint jar there is full of root beer syrup.

We've also been in the habit lately of using our mixer (with attachment) to make ice cream.  I couldn't resist having a root beer float using a bit of our last batch of vanilla ice cream.

Words can't describe how good it was. I'm tempted to head to the kitchen for another one right now.

Pea Pod Crunk Juice

At last we've found the time to make a small batch of wine. This is our first attempt at making wine, so we're really optimistic!

We've mentioned before our love for the British sitcom The Good Neighbors (aka The Good Life) and their hilarious adventures in sustainability. One of the recurring jokes of the series is their high test home made wine that they call Peapod Burgundy.

Inspired by their antics we froze pea pods from our garden this summer. Sadly we didn't have quite enough so we had to pick up additional peas from the store but here is our improvised recipe pulled together from several wine sites.

3 lbs. pea pods (about half from our garden)
3 tiny limes (from our sad little lime tree probably equal to 1 full lime)
5 cups sugar
1 black English breakfast tea bag
1 gram Red Star Premier Cuvee dry white wine yeast
1 tsp yeast nutrient
1 gallon water

We boiled the pea pods and lime peel for 30 minutes. We then strained the hot must into another container with the sugar, nutrient, lime juice and tea bag. Once all the sugar had dissolved, we funneled it into a 1 gallon jug and pitched the yeast. Since then the air lock has been bubbling away in a dark corner. We tasted the must before pitching the yeast and it has a surprisingly sweet but earthy fruity flavor something like a very sweet herbal tea.

Upon the recommendation of our good friend Pragmatiste we've christened the wine "Lady Lydia Peapod's Royal Holiday Wine" after our bulldog Lydia. It's only fitting since Peapod is her actual middle name.

Sadly the fermentation and clarification process will take a full year so we won't be able to raise a glass until the next holiday season. I'm sure it'll be worth the wait!