The ground around Mutsu has been dormant for months as the winter lingered on, but now Spring seems to have broken through and as a result of the recent good weather– dandelions have literally popped up out of the ground.

Recently I read an article about making Tanpopo Wine (Dandelion) making (hat tip to Lexi) and thought how hard could it be to try? To date I’ve made beer twice, attempted grape juice “poison” (which was horrible), apple cider (which has been sitting for at least 1 or 2 months), and now I wanted to make this. The details to making can be found here:

Dandelion Wine

I more or less followed this using my desecration & experience as a guide.

As to the taste of the wine, only time will tell, but in my experience the brewcrafting of teas & wines are related in someways. I mean if you’re going to make mint wine, then I’d wager that you’d have to you make a mint tea first– then add sugar & some other stuff to a brewing vessel– add your brewer’s yeast– wait a week for it to brew the booze part– then another month or two for conditioning and you would have some sort of alcoholic mint type wine.  Thus, the taste of the tea is likely a good guess to what the wine might taste like. So with the left overs I made a tea, added sugar & cinnamon spice, and had a sip.

The taste of dandelions was apparent, but not intrusive. The sugar & cinnamon complimented it, as well as hid the likely bitter taste of the flowers. My best guess based on the tea is that the wine will be a bit bitter like a bitter beer might be– but it’ll have a great spring smell and taste like dandelions. We’ll see I guess.

So next up on the brewer’s schedule is another beer and maybe another cider (like perhaps a fresh squeezed orange juice cider). The beer will be an ale– it’ll likely be very similar to my last two beers, but probably light in color- but heavy in taste. It’ll be a combination of both my last beers’ recipies which I believe will make the perfect balance between flavor (which my first beer had) and carbonation (which my last beer had).

If anyone has an idea for a unique wine or beer recipe for summer, or autumn, I’d like to know about it.

In the meantime,

Cheers!

~J out.

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