Oak Leaf Wine

Inspiration

I have been homebrewing for almost five years now, and in my first year I heard about oak leaf wine. Members of my homebrew club raved about an oak leaf wine a previous member had made and brought to a club meeting. It was so smooth, and the flavor reminded them of a mild bourbon.

All these voice around me talking about how wonderful this libation was, yet I was unable to find anyone who had made it. And there was no way to get a sample. So I did the only thing a homebrewer could do: I did some research and made some myself.

Information

Oak Leaf Wine — One week into fermentation. You can see my rhubarb wine in the next carboy.

After spending months searching on the Internet, it seems like this is the most common recipe, from Jake Keller’s web site. I read about eleven different sites, and they all pretty much plaigerised Jack’s recipe, so it must be pretty good. The one deviation I remember called for four pounds of sugar rather than three. That sounds like some pretty good deviation.

Based on my reading, I developed my own recipe with a few goals in mind:

Oak leaf wine reminded people of bourbon. Therefore, higher alcohol is appropriate.
I wanted to have more consistent measurements than x number of z citrus fruit.
I wanted to keep the batch small enough to fit in a five-gallon carboy but larger than one gallon.
I needed to use oak leaves from our home’s yard.

As a result, I came up with the following recipe

Jake’s Oak Leaf Wine

4 gallons tap water
Approximately 4 gallons of white oak leaves. I wanted to weight them, but the only scale large enough to have a visible screen with a stock pot on it measure in half-pound increments. So there is somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 pounds of leaves.
1 Tablespoon citric acid
1 Tablespoon malic acid
15 pounds sugar – I bought a ten-pound bag and a five-pound bag.
5 campden tablets
2 teaspoons yeast nutrient(1/2 teaspoon per gallon)
1 sachet Montrachet wine yeast

As an aside, I took pictures of the entire process, but when I tried to download them my digital camera corrupted the files so all I have are pictures of the fermentation.

I picked the oak leaves from a Burr oak tree in our front yard. There were some low-hanging branches that needed to be removed to allow better movement under the tree, so I clipped those and picked the leaves into a 5-gallon stock pot, which I filled approximately to the level of the handle rivets.

After picking, I filled the stock pot with cold water and let the leaves soak for a bit to loosen dirt and bugs. Actually, I needed a break while I ate lunch, so I let the leaves soak. The dirt and bugs just sounds like a good justification. After lunch, I made sure to agitate the leaves well in the water and rub them together as I took them from the water, pulling small amounts at a time(5-10 leaves).

Allowing the leaves to stop dripping, I transferred them to a clean container.

I brought the water to a full, rolling boil and lined the pot with my large strainer bag. I then added the oak leaves and allowed the water to return to a boil. I turned off the heat, pushed the leaves below the surface of the water, and placed a lid on the pot.

I left the pot alone for 24 hours.

I added the sugar to the pot and stirred to dissolve.

I drained the pot into a five-gallon carboy.

[notice]Warning: fifteen pounds of sugar adds almost a gallon of volume, so be careful when selecting your volume. Make sure your vessels are large enough.[/notice]

In a glass measuring cup, I placed 1/2 cup water and added the crushed campden tablets and yeast nutrient. Then heated in a microwave to aid is dissolving. Add the campden/nutrient mixture to the carboy, cover with a cloth towel to allow the mixture to off-gas and let rest for 24 hours.

Fill a sanitized container with approximately 1/2 cup warm water and reconstitute the wine yeast. Allow to proof and begin to foam. After stirring to re-suspend any yeast stuck to the container, I pitched the foamy slurry the wine must.

After adding the yeast, it took nearly two days before I noticed pressure on the airlock. I was starting to get a bit nervous, but you can see nice fine co2 bubbles rising in the pictures of the carboy. I’m hoping for the best.

Initial Thoughts

Active Fermentation — Happy yeast make alcohol and carbon dioxide!

When I first transferred the liquid to the carboy, it was the color of very strong tea, nearly coffee-colored. After pitching the yeast, there was a noticeably lighter portion at the top of the carboy.

As the yeast mixed and began fermenting, particles have dropped to the bottom of the carboy and the color has lightened to the color of iced tea.

I tasted my hydrometer sample and it reminded me of overly-sweetened, weak tea. As the sugar gets fermented out, my hope is that the tannic, subtle flavors are brought to the forefront.

It has been fermenting for two weeks, and the rate of bubbling seems pretty consistent. I’ll be racking it to secondary in mid-September. Maybe I’ll sneak a sample then.

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever fermented?

Surviving Stupidity

I drooled over friends’ kettles with integrated ball valves. It looked so convenient! All you have to do is open a valve and hot water flows into your mash tun or wort flows right out into your fermenter.

I have a confession to make: I have done something stupid while brewing. Repeatedly. I’m not even talking about losing track of time and missing a hop addition or forgetting ingredients, I’m talking about nearly losing the ability to use my left hand. Every time I brewed. Literally, my guardian angel must really like me.

Please view: Exhibit A – the burned-up hand protector. This is a heavy duty pot-holder, which sane people use to remove hot items from the oven or stove top. You probably noticed several layers of fabric are missing and the top layers which are present are charred to a crisp.

Looking at this picture in hindsight, I am almost embarrassed by my own stupidity. For over a year, while using my converted keg brew kettle, the way I transferred hot liquid into my mash tun was to place it on a rack on the ground next to my burner, grab the handle integrated into the keg with my right hand, use the above potholder to grasp the still red-hot bottom of the kettle and tip the kettle into the cooler. The 165-degree F water splashed vigorously out of the kettle, through the air, into the cooler and some of it splashed out, but never enough to soak through the pants I was wearing.

Eventually, I realized what a horrific trip-to-the-emergency-room-in-waiting this process is and decided to do something about it. I purchased a weldless kettle conversion kit and a stainless dip tube. My first few brews went so smoothly, I almost felt lazy. It was so nice not to have to worry if my fingers would slip off the pot-holder and get burned. I didn’t have to worry whether the liquid would splash out and burn me while dumping from one container to another.

Don’t do dumb stuff, like I did. It’s worth the money to set your kettle up correctly and be safe.

If you have any stories about dumb brewing stuff you or “someone you know” have done, share them below.

Back to Back Brew Days

When your beer supply starts to get low, you have to take drastic measures. Over the course of the weekend, I brewed a robust porter and a biere de garde. The result: two fermenters happily bubbling away as 23 gallons of wort becomes beer!

Brewing on back to back days allows certain things to happen and my second brew day ran much more smoothly. My mash tun was already out in the garage, my burner and propane were all set up and ready to go, all the gear I usually have to lug from the basement to the garage skirt was already in my brewing area.

All I had to do was get my grain weighed and crushed, carry my water out and fire up the burner. Having all that stuff set up didn’t really shorten my second brew day much. Rather than carrying stuff up to my brewing area, I had to clean and store my gear. The end result being not much time savings on day two. However, the combined time for the two brew days was much lower than the time for two brew days separated by weeks, when I would have to duplicate the setup time and the cleanup time for two distinct brew days.

So, what are the benefits of back to back brew days besides some minor time savings? I think the main benefit is knowledge. When brewing on a day all by itself, I worry about remembering everything to try to make the day as efficient as possible. The second day, I was really able to think about my process.

I just added a weldless ball valve to my kettle, which is awesome. I am so lucky I hadn’t burned myself. However, my water temp going into the mash tun was much lower because it took a few minutes to run the liquid through a half-inch tube rather than just dumping the kettle into the tun.

My second brew day I realized I could just raise the temp of my strike water, transfer to the mash tun and wait for the water temp to drop to my targeted temp. It’s something obvious, but when I’m in the heat of set up and trying to stay focused, I don’t always think of obvious solutions.

When you can, I think scheduling back-to-back brew days would be great to learn more about your brewing process. In the comments, let me know what you’ve learned from doing brews close together.