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Wine, Birch
A wine used to be made from the sap of the birch tree, though now it is scarcely known. The sap contains so much saccharine matter as to be fermented; it is to be obtained in the month of March, when it begins to ascend, by boring a hole in each tree, about a foot from the ground, large enough to admit a faucet, which is to be inserted. The sap will flow for several days into a vessel placed to receive it, without injury to the tree. Having obtained as much as is necessary, the hole should be stopped with a peg. To a gallon of this sap add a quart of honey or two pounds and a half of sugar, and boil them together, stirring the whole; add also two ounces of hops for every nine gallons, a few cloves, and a rind or two of lemons. Ferment this with yeast, transfer it to the cask, refine with isinglass, and proceed as in making other British wines. In about two months the wine may be bottled, and in two months more it will be fit for use. It will improve by keeping.
A country wine that starts with tapping a tree, which means the first half of the work happens outdoors in early spring. The instructions assume a reader already familiar with "other British wines" — the fermenting, racking and fining steps are all left implicit.
- Sap will not waitBirch sap is roughly 1 per cent sugar and full of wild yeasts and bacteria; it clouds and sours within a day or two at room temperature. Collect into a clean covered vessel, keep it cold, and boil it the same day if possible.
- Tapping the treeMarch is right for most of Britain — the run lasts a couple of weeks between the first thaw and bud break. A single small bore in a mature trunk, sealed afterwards, does little harm, but the tree must be yours or tapped with permission, and a young or already-stressed birch should be left alone.
- Imperial measuresThe book's gallon is the imperial gallon, 1.2 US gallons or about 4.5 litres; the quart is 40 fl oz, not 32. An imperial quart of honey weighs about 3.5 lb, and since honey is roughly a fifth water that is in the same range as the two and a half pounds of sugar offered as an alternative.
- Hops in proportionTwo ounces per nine gallons works out to about 6 grams per imperial gallon. Boiling that with the sweetened sap for 20-30 minutes gives light bitterness and some preservative effect; much more than that and the result tastes like flat beer.
- "Ferment this with yeast"For a book of this period this meant ale barm or baker's yeast pitched into the warm liquor. A dried wine yeast pitched below 25C gives a cleaner result and a more reliable finish; either way, cool the boiled must to blood heat or under before pitching.
- Bottling too soonThe two-month timetable is the real hazard. Bottle a wine that is still fermenting and the bottles can burst. Check that the gravity has been stable for a fortnight and the airlock is silent before bottling, whatever the calendar says.
- IsinglassFish-swim-bladder finings, still sold for beer and wine and still effective. Bentonite or simply six months' patience in a cool place will clear the wine as well, and neither is animal-derived in the way isinglass is.
- Yield and strengthA gallon of sap with 2.5 lb of sugar has enough sugar for something in the region of 12 per cent alcohol, and a gallon fills about six 75 cl bottles before racking losses. The flavour is faint and slightly resinous, which may be why the cloves and lemon peel are there.
Birch wine was one of the standard "British wines" — the domestic, non-grape country wines made in households with no access to imported claret. Tapping birches for sap is old and widespread across northern and eastern Europe, where the fresh sap is still drunk as a spring tonic, and the practice was known in seventeenth-century England: John Evelyn discusses birch and its wine in Sylva (1664). The entry opens by admitting the drink is "scarcely known" by its own day, and that is the interesting part: by the late Victorian period cheap sugar, cheap imported wine and an increasingly urban population are the usual explanations offered for the decline of this class of seasonal home-brewed drinks. The entry survives here as a piece of reference rather than a live suggestion.