Homemade Dandelion Wine
This dandelion wine recipe uses a few simple ingredients to capture a warm spring day in a bottle, a taste of early summer sunshine in a glass.
Equipment
- 1 gallon jar or wide mouth fermenter
- 1 lid with airlock for gallon jar, or butter muslin & twine
- 1 gallon jug or demijohn
- 1 lid or stopper with airlock for jug
- 1 fine mesh drawstring nylon brewing bag (optional, but makes racking & removing fruit sediment easier)
- 1 stainless or plastic spoon
- hydrometer & test jar or refractometer
- siphon tubing & racking cane or autosiphon
- no-rinse brewery cleaner & sanitizer
Ingredients
- 20 oz fresh dandelion flowers (about 12 oz of petals after trimming)
- 7½ pints water (120 fluid oz: US pints)
- 3 lbs sugar
- 1 large lemon (zest and juice only, preferably organic)
- 2 tbsp acid blend or citric acid
- 1 tsp yeast nutrient (Wyeast wine yeast nutrient or similar)
- ¼ tsp wine tannin (use colorless oak gall tannin if possible to preserve delicate color)
- 1 each KMS Campden tablet
- 1 packet wine or champagne yeast
Instructions
pick fresh dandelion flowers:
- Choose a spring day when your schedule is clear. You will want to pick the flowers and make your wine immediately after so your flowers don't close up, spoil, or lose their delicate flavor.
- Have patience and pick a lot of flowers... especially once you trim them, this will take awhile. It's better to have a bit too much than not enough. I weighed mine, but you should start with about six to eight cups of dandelion flowers (I used a standard plastic produce bag mostly full of flowers).
prep ingredients & equipment:
- Snip the flower petals free from the bitter green bases of the flowers.
- Wash the lemon, and use a sharp vegetable peeler or paring knife to peel the yellow zest, and add this to your flower petals.
- Squeeze and strain the lemon juice to remove any seeds, and set aside.
- Weigh or measure out the sugar, and get out your other ingredients.
- Wash and sanitize your fermenter & airlock, a large stainless or heat-resistant plastic spoon, a mesh brewing bag, and a large stainless pot.
heat water & sugar:
- Add the sugar and water together to the stainless pot, and stir to dissolve.
- Bring the mixture up just to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally.
steep flowers & add other ingredients:
- Place the dandelion flowers and lemon zest into the mesh brewing bag, and tie it closed.
- Drop this large dandelion tea bag into the boiling hot sugar mixture, dunk it under using a spoon until it is fully submerged, and add the lemon juice.
- Immediately turn the heat off under the pot. Remove the pot from the heat, cover it, and let this mixture cool until lukewarm.
- Stir in the wine tannin, yeast nutrient, and acid blend.
add campden tab & check OG:
- Transfer the brewing bag carefully to a wide-mouthed fermenter (glass or food-grade plastic) and pour the dandelion wine must (the sugar tea) over it.
- Crumble a campden tablet over the mixture and stir it in using a sanitized spoon.
- Check the original specific gravity (OG) and make a note of it in your brewing book, or make a label and attach it to your fermenter (I use painter’s tape and a sharpie to mark my carboys and jugs, as well as a paper notebook).
- Cover the fermenter and fit it with an airlock to keep out fruit flies and other contaminants.
pitch yeast:
- Wait 24 hours after adding the campden tablet for the sulphite levels in your must to drop, and then add your wine yeast.
- If you choose not to use the sulphites, you should pitch your yeast as soon as the wine must temperature drops to a safe range.
- You can sprinkle the dry yeast directly on the surface of your wine must, or make a yeast starter if you prefer, or use a liquid yeast packet.
- Replace the lid and airlock on your fermentation vessel.
primary fermentation:
- Place your fermenter somewhere warm and out of direct sun. Different yeast strains have preferred temperature ranges- check the directions for yours, or try to keep it between 60-70 F if you aren’t sure.
- Higher fermentation temperatures can finish faster, but if your wine gets too warm it can develop off-flavors. Cooler fermentations have a cleaner flavor, but if it gets too cold, it can stunt the yeast and you are more likely to have a stuck fermentation.
- Watch for healthy and continuous streams of bubbles through the airlock. The wine may take up to a day to really get going to a vigorous fermentation, and then will gradually taper off after a few days to two weeks.
- If the wine doesn’t ferment within 24-48 hours, you may need to re-pitch it with a new packet of yeast, or put it somewhere warmer.
rack & clear:
- When the bubbles have slowed or stopped, or about two weeks have passed (generally 10-20 days), you should rack your dandelion wine off of the petals and zest and into another container to finish fermenting and clearing.
- As always, make sure your hands and any equipment you use is clean and sanitized.
- Use a mini-racking cane and siphon tubing if you have them to transfer your dandelion wine from the wide-mouthed primary fermenter into a one gallon jug or carboy, or several growlers.
- Let the flower petal bag drain into the wine, but do not squeeze it. You can remove it before or after siphoning (before is easier, but may stir up more sediment so that your wine will take longer to clarify).
- You can also use a clean large funnel and carefully pour if you don’t have siphon tubing and a racking cane.
- Top your jug with a rubber stopper and airlock, label it, and check the specific gravity again, making a note of it as before.
- Place the jug somewhere dark and relatively cool to settle and age before bottling.
bottle dandelion wine:
- Your dandelion wine is ready to bottle when it is perfectly clear with no sediment, and fully fermented. This will take at minimum about 4 weeks, but you can safely age it longer before bottling and rack once or twice off the lees (yeast sediment) to get it really clear.
- Some yeast strains may take longer to clear and finish fermenting.
- If you aren’t sure, wait a week or two between sampling and measuring the specific gravity. When it has not dropped in several weeks and has fermented to dryness (0.998 or so) you can bottle it.
- Wash and sanitize your bottles, using a bottle brush to get an sediment, and rinse with a one-step cleaner, or use brewing cleaner and then a no-rinse sanitizer like Star-san or sulphite solution to rinse the bottles. I use a spray bottle for the sanitizer, spraying several squirts into the clean bottles, then letting them drain in a bottle drying rack.
- Transfer to a bottling bucket with a spigot and bottling wand, or carefully pour the wine without disturbing any sediment so you don’t end up with a cloudy wine after all your hard work and waiting.
- Fill your bottles, and immediately cork or cap them.
cellar & age
- Bottles with natural corks need to sit upright for a day or two before being turned on their sides for storage to make sure they don’t leak. Corks need time to fully expand after being compressed in the corker, then the corks should be in contact with the wine so they don't dry out. If you used synthetic corks, you can store your bottles either upright or on their sides. Bottles with swing-caps or metal beer caps should be stored upright.
- Label & cellar-age your dandelion wine for at least one month somewhere cool and dark. It is safe to drink immediately but tastes much better with time (sample some periodically and take notes to find what you prefer)!
Notes
Bottling Notes: If you want to bottle your wine with residual sweetness (or especially if you want to back-sweeten them with additional honey or sugar), you should add wine stabilizer (potassium sorbate) to keep it from re-fermenting in the bottles.
A little bit of bottle fermentation can add sparkle, but a lot can push out the corks, or worse, make bottle grenades, or at the least, add sediment to your wine you worked so hard to get clear.
Tried this recipe?Let us know how it was!
