Homegrown Homebrew

Touring through wine country or some of our region's wonderful microbreweries might leave the impression that the production of adult beverages should be left to the experts. With kegs, tanks, and other fermentation equipment larger than many cars, one might reasonably conclude that a small-scale homebrew operation is costly and infeasible. Not the case. Homebrewing is relatively inexpensive, straightforward, and leaves ample room to experiment with flavors grown right in your backyard.

As any person that has ever grown a zucchini plant can tell you, it is often challenging to keep up with an abundant harvest. I ran into this last year when our plum tree gave us more fruit than we could possibly eat. Rather than letting delicious fruit go to waste (and having already used up all my jam jars), I went looking around online for creative ways to preserve my plum harvest. Up for an adventure, I decided to make plum wine.

Grapes might be the staple fruit for winemaking, mainly because the yeast that causes fermentation is found naturally on their skins. However, with commercial yeast readily available, one can make wine out of other fruits, edible blossoms, even sweet veggies! With a few cheap food-safe buckets, some boiling water, sugar, wine yeast, and lemon juice, old glass bottles, clean corks, and a strainer, I mashed up a five-gallon bucket-full of plums and (mostly) let time take care of the rest. The yeasts break down the sugars in the fruit, yielding alcohol and a variety of complex flavors. The key ingredient here is time, with months, even years being necessary before maturity.

Hungry for more, I perused my garden for more homegrown homebrew options. I was curious to try a concoction made from edible flower blossoms, and discovering a recipe from an old book, I endeavored to make marigold cordial, a fermented liqueur made from marigold petals, raisins, honey, yeast, and brandy. The process was much the same: an initial steep followed by straining, fermenting, and bottling.

Over the last year, I have patiently waited for these brews to mature. Just this past week, I popped open both bottles for a sample taste. After nine or so months in the bottle, the plum wine is still quite sweet, and as expected, needs many more months to mellow out. The marigold cordial, however, was quite nice. It tasted like mead (probably due to the honey used in the recipe) but with an added floral complexity that balanced out much of the sweetness. 

With these amateur successes under my belt from last summer's harvest, I have been keeping my Google browser busy looking up recipe options for other things growing in my yard that can yield tasty adult drinks. Noticing an overgrown walnut tree encroaching into my driveway, I looked up a recipe for nocino, a sweet walnut liqueur made from unripe, green walnuts. With the walnut fruit still tender enough to slice open, I combined them with vodka, sugar, orange peel, and spices to make my first liqueur. It is an even easier process than the fermented drinks I made last year because it uses already-distilled alcohol to preserve and age fruits and spices into a boozy concoction best enjoyed as a flavorful addition to a cocktail. I'll be stirring the nocino every day for the next six weeks and then straining it into a bottle to age for a year or two before use. It couldn't be easier.

As summer kicks into gear and my garden explodes with flowers, herbs, and fruits, I'm excited to see what else I can craft into homebrew. It's out of my scope to provide specific recipes here, but there are great books and resources online for just about anything you might dream of brewing up. As always, make sure you look for tried and tested recipes from reputable sources. Most importantly, make sure you use thoroughly sanitized, food-safe equipment and avoid recipes that call for distilling (a process requiring a bit more expertise due to the production of toxic methanol). Though these words of caution should be taken seriously, I hope they don't scare you away from a world of endless possibilities that, with proper research, can turn an abundant garden into a variety of new, unique flavors.