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Ginger Wine
Boil, in a perfectly clean copper, six gallons of water, eighteen pounds of loaf sugar, the thin rinds of seven lemons and two Seville oranges, half a pound of unbleached ginger, bruised, and a quarter of a pound of raisins. Boil for an hour, skim carefully, and pour off into a large vat until the next day. The preparation must not be left in the copper. Strain, add the juice of the lemons and oranges, an ounce of isinglass, and two table-spoonfuls of thick fresh yeast. Put the ginger wine into a cask, stir it each day until fermentation ceases, which will be in two or three days. Bung it up, and leave it for six weeks. Strain it into another cask, and in four weeks it will be ready for bottling. A quart of brandy may be added, or not. Sufficient for a nine-gallon cask. Probable cost, 1s. 2d. per gallon. A very superior wine may be made by substituting cider for water.
A full nine-gallon batch of country wine, written for a household with a brewhouse copper and cellar casks. It scales down cleanly, but three details in the original will trip up a modern brewer: the copper, the vague yeast, and the instruction to bung up after two or three days.
- Scale it down firstNine gallons is about 41 litres. Divided by nine, a one-gallon (4.5 L) batch takes 2 lb sugar, the zest and juice of roughly one lemon (plus a share of a bitter orange), about 1 oz bruised dried ginger and a scant 1/2 oz raisins.
- The copperAn unlined copper is tolerable for a sugar-and-water boil, and it may be no accident that the book insists the liquor not stand in it overnight and that the citrus juice goes in only after straining. Acid plus copper plus time means dissolved copper. Use stainless steel or food-grade plastic throughout.
- "Bung it up" after two or three daysWhat ceases in two or three days is the visible foaming, not the fermentation. Sealing a cask at that point builds pressure that can burst it. Use an airlock and wait for a stable hydrometer reading over several days before closing anything tight.
- Thick fresh yeastThis means barm skimmed from a brewery or from bread dough. Two tablespoons of it is replaced by one or two 5 g sachets of wine yeast for the full nine gallons, hydrated as the packet directs.
- Loaf sugar and unbleached gingerLoaf sugar was refined white sugar broken from a cone; ordinary granulated is the same thing. "Unbleached" ginger is dried root that has not been sulphured or scraped white, sold now as whole dried ginger; bruise it with a mallet rather than powdering it.
- IsinglassA fining agent made from fish swim bladders, added to drop the wine clear. Still sold to brewers, but any modern finings will do, or simply give the wine longer in bulk and let it settle.
- Seville orangesBitter marmalade oranges, in season only in midwinter. Out of season, use the zest of a regular orange plus an extra squeeze of lemon for acidity; the point of the Seville is bitterness in the peel, not sweetness.
- Zest, not pith"Thin rinds" is doing real work. Pared peel with white pith attached turns the finished wine harsh, and it sits in the liquor for a full hour of boiling.
- Strength and timing18 lb of sugar in nine gallons is a heavy must, and the result is a sweet wine of perhaps 12 per cent at most, less if it stops sweet, and higher with the optional brandy. Ten weeks to bottling is the minimum; time in the bottle improves it.
Ginger wine belongs to the large Victorian family of household "wines" made without grapes, alongside cowslip, parsnip, elderberry and rhubarb, all of them fermented from sugar and water with something for flavour. Dried ginger arrived from Jamaica and the East Indies and kept indefinitely on a shelf, and ginger wine appears in many general cookery books of the period. It was drunk as a warming winter cordial rather than at table, often mixed with whisky, and the commercial green ginger wines that survive today trace themselves to eighteenth-century London houses, a claim generally repeated rather than documented. The recipe closes with the suggestion of substituting cider for water.