Banana Wine
So simple and a recipe for any time of the year
What the recipe says ...
Ingredients:
Chopped bananas
- 3 lbs (1.3 kg) ripe bananas
- 2 lbs (900 g) white or brown sugar
- 1 cup of strong black tea
- 8 oz (220 g) golden raisins
- 1 tsp pectolase
- 1 tbsp citric acid
- 1 tsp yeast
- 1 tsp yeast nutrient
Peel and chop the bananas then place in a large stockpot, add sugar and stir.
Pour a gallon of hot but not boiling water over the top.
Cook on a medium heat for about 45 minutes but don’t let the mixture boil.
Stir constantly and use a potato masher to mush it all up.
Bananas just off the boil
Meanwhile, chop the raisins and toss them into a clean sterilised brew bin or bucket.
Remove the banana mixture from the heat and allow it to cool down for about 10 minutes.
Strain the liquid into the brew bin and squeeze out every last drop. It looks and smells horrible at this stage!
When the mess has cooled down to about 20°C add the pectolase and leave it for 24 hours.
The following day add the citric acid, black tea, yeast nutrient, and of course the yeast.
Cover the bin and leave to ferment for 5 days stirring daily.
Strain the “the thick-looking mess, a lot like soapsuds” into clean and sterilised demijohns. Twice!
Crushed raisins
Leave for at least a month.
Rack into clean demijohns.
Leave for at least 3 months before racking again.
Repeat until the liquor is clear and then bottle.
Leave for at least 6 months as this wine improves with age.
What I did ...
I pretty much followed the recipe but …
Strain banana juice
I used:
- 3 kg bananas
- 2 kg sugar
- juice of 1 lemon
- 500 g raisins
- 800 ml of strong black tea
- 1 tsp of pectolase
- 1 tsp yeast nutrient
- 1 tsp dried yeast
Banana Mess
The sliced bananas went into my pot along with 2 litres of water.
Turned up the heat and added the sugar and cooked the nanas for about an hour – without the mixture boiling.
Meanwhile the squashed raisins went into the fermentor followed by the tea and lemon juice.
When cool enough to not burn my hands I squeezed out the juice from the banana mixture.
Mucky stuff!
Then went in about 3 litres of cold water to bring the specific gravity down to 1.090.
The following day in went the pectolase.
For some reason it was two days later I added the yeast nutrient and the yeast.
Ten days later the mucky stuff was strained into demijohns.
Just over a fortnight later I racked it again.
Twelve days after that I racked it again and this time added a crushed campden tablet to stabilise the wine. The specific gravity was down to 1.000.
Six weeks later it was back-sweetened to a specific gravity of 1.020 and bottled a fortnight after settling.
This is an amazing wine and one everybody should make at least once in their brewing career.
