My Irish Grandmother's recipe for Dandelion Wine

[Jerry]

Since we have chosen the Dandelion as the official plant badge of Xmarks, I thought I would post my grandmother's recipe for Dandelion wine. It was included in a disc that my son made us for Christmas. He copied a bunch of old hand written and old recipe newspaper articles to a Cd, from an old notebook he found in my Grandmother's house. There are 55 recipes dating from the 1920s to the early 1950s.



This recipe was dated April, 1926. The one time I ever remember her making this wine was when I was 10 or so. I remember that she strained the mixture and threw out the Dandelion flowers. The birds ate them and got so drunk that some of them couldn't fly. I am going to try making this in the Spring, as soon as the Dandelion's bloom.

[NewEnglander]

That's something to treasure there. I know that the few handwritten recipes my late grandmother (a MacPherson I honor by wearing the kilt) gave to me are cherished. I pulled one out and made Gram's chocolate cake last month in honor of her birthday.
Have you made the wine yet? As a homebrewer it's interesting to see older methods of fermentation and carbonation in the bottle.

[jkane]

I have a friend who makes some every year. I never really liked it. He does not add any citrus though. Maybe that helps. He does 2 grocery sacks of flowers and uses 5 gallons of water. He uses about 10 lbs of sugar. Regular table (corn) sugar, not brown.

Pick the flowers early in the morning. Get as little green as you can on them. No stem at all. The flavor is not that good. If you can let it sit for 5 or 10 years, it gets better. ;-) Actually, it just mellows to the point where it is not so nasty. It never really gets better!

In today's world there is much better yeast! Use wine yeast. Bread yeast can only get to about 4-5% alcohol before it dies. Wine yeast can do 12-13%.

5 lbs of sugar in only 1 gallon of water? WOW! That would be like syrup. Especially with bread yeast. You could put a super yeast in there and get 21% and still have a sweet wine left! That's a lot of sugar. Maybe that is what makes it drinkable. You get a beer level of alcohol out of it, and the sugar covers up the bitterness of the flowers.

Interesting recipe! I am really curious how it would turn out.

[Tobus]

In today's world there is much better yeast! Use wine yeast. Bread yeast can only get to about 4-5% alcohol before it dies. Wine yeast can do 12-13%.

That's what I'm thinking too. I usually only make wild mustang grape wine, but I'd like to maybe try this dandelion recipe too. But I just can't stand using bread yeast in wine. It comes out all funky tasting.

[jkane]

Our first two wines were made from a recipe book my mother had. I would guess a 40's or 50's printing. Both used bread yeast. The first was grape juice (we used welch's because it was all we knew), some raisins, and potatoes. I have since learned that the potatoes were useless without some enzymes to break the starch into sugar. Not sure why the recipe called for it! It also had orange peel which must have been popular for some reason back then. The other wine was cranberry. That is a story by itself!

We didn't have a clue what we were doing, and wanted to drink the stuff after a couple of weeks. Very yeasty, and bready tasting. But it was alcohol, and we were young, newly married and cheap alcohol was good no matter where it came from.

I should mention we could not find a crock, so we used a (yes it was brand new) diaper pail! It ended up coming in handy a couple years later. Never made wine in it again after that. It was nice because it had a sealable top that was not totally air pressure tight.

[Jamais Arriere]

Thanks for sharing.That is surley on the agenda for the spring

[Mr. MacDougall]

Hmm. I'd been thinking of adding some orange peel to my next batch of mead... maybe I should toss in a couple of lemons, as well. Hmmmmmm.