#guarapo

Mis fotos favoritas de la noche.

Yorkshire Fruit Guarapo.

There’s such a glut of fruit this year I’ve been using it for all sorts, wine, beer, cordial, jam.... but I wanted to do something a little different with our mixed small harvest of fruits, something like a mead but not with honey, mainly because honey is so expensive. Looking to see what I had in to use as a base I had a lot of cane sugar so I thought there must be a name for a fermented cane sugar brew that isn’t wine, and after a bit of research I found this article on Guarapo. A fermented sugarcane juice popular in South America. So I took the name and started to combine recipes on mead, wine and guarapo to create a Yorkshire Fruit Guarapo. It was important to get the right yeast for this as well to stop it turning into wine, I found a good resource here which details the different types of yeast best for mead or melomel as it's called when fruit is added, and went with Lalvin 71B-1122. This is the description:

The 71B-1122 is a red wine yeast, great for cysers and other melomels especially ones using dark fruit like blackberries and cherries. Since it can metabolize maltic acid it produces a rounder, smoother, more aromatic mead that tends to mature more quickly than meads with the other yeasts.

I thought this would work well as I was using lots of dark fruits.

So this is the process and fruit I used:

Firstly I prepared 1kg of Rhubarb from our allotment, it was a little late to take it so it was a bit earthy, but that didn’t matter too much once it was combined with 695g of Golden Cane Sugar, 520g of Demerara and 85g of Golden Caster Cane Sugar. I put this in the FV for 4 days, stirring daily until all the juice was extracted, rinsed and soaked it a bit more then took that syrup and put it aside.

Next I took 280g of Red Gooseberries, 1kg of Blackberries, 450g of Blackcurrants and 2g of Lavender Flowers, crushed gently in the FV with cold water. I then mixed in the Rhubarb syrup and added some Pectolase and left for 24 hours.

The next day in went the yeast nutrient and yeast, this was left in the FV for 7 days, stirring daily and then finally I racked it to a demijohn. There was so much fruit pulp that it blocked up my racking cane so I had to resort to filtering it as you can see in the photo, and anyway it all seemed to work and now it’s steadily bubbling away in the demijohn.

Alistando el guarapo pa está semana

Excuse