MediaHound

Just stumbled across this site while researching some Alyogyne Huegelii that I just got,
http://hibiscusmania.free.fr/Album_p...cusmania_1.htm

This is my new addition, it's a blue hibiscus.


Check out the site, some really great photos.

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JoeReal

Hibiscus flowers make nice jamaica wine. I just made one gallon of it last year. It is still aging, can't wait for it already. Interesting colors too, you can have blush, red, yellow, orange or blue-colored hibiscus wine. I have a slight red blush hibiscus wine.

Tropical hibiscus (Hibiscus rosa-sinensis) are on the borderline marginal in our area, just like bananas.

AnnaJW

What an awesome site! Hibiscus is my favorite flower.

Anna

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AnnaJW

JoeReal,

Would love to have the recipe for making Hibiscus wine!

Anna

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MediaHound

Yea - I've never heard of that!
How do you do it?

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JoeReal

Here you go:


Finally made my own wine from my own flowers. This wine have its major flavoring from hibiscus and rose flowers. In Spain, the hibiscus flowers are also known as jamaica. The petals of hibiscus flowers have long been used in making jams, jellies, teas, and cool refreshing summer drinks. It is slightly acidic.

In Mexico, they gather hibiscus flowers, then dehydrate it or cure it, then ground into fine powder and mixed with table sugar or demarara sugar and then sell it off as an instant mix for making drinks, warm or cold. I have tasted this drink and has a very good potential for making great wine by itself. Well, I used to have a healthy stand of red hibiscus. Although Hibiscus are of assorted types and cold hardiness, the one that I have is a little bit cold sensitive, and I have used the red Hibiscus rosa-sinensis. I think most other hibiscus types can be used equally well. There are also several cold hardy hibiscus all over the US. I also happen to have several blooming fragrant roses such as double delight, habitat for humanity, fragrant apricot, Columbus, Queen Elizabeth, etc.

Here's the main ingredients of one gallon wine:
2 lb of fresh hibiscus flowers
1 lb of assorted fragrant rose petals
1 gram grape tannin
2 1/2 lbs sugar
1/2 tsp citric acid
1 1/2 tsp pectic enzyme
1 tsp malic acid
1 tsp yeast energizer
1 tsp yeast nutrient
Montrachet yeast

Basically I steeped the rose petals and used that aromatic water instead of ordinary water in making my wine, that is how far the roses came into the wine making process. You can grind the hibiscus flowers in a blender or food processor. Basically melt the sugar in the warm aromatic (rose-scented) water, and mix all into the primary. Add yeast when temperature cools down to 80 deg F and below. After the primary racking, the wine is amazingly clear and have my wife tasted it and she liked it a lot, she's quite finicky when it comes to wine. She could taste the mildly sweet and sour drink typical of Jamaica, and the rose scent finish after drinking the sample.

MediaHound

yikes
I never have 2LB of hibiscus on hand.
Time to get-a-plantin
Thanks for posting that recipe, Joe.

You've got a lot of tricks up your sleeves!!

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Apologies in advance if I am slow to reply to your PM. I suggest posting in the forums for support if you need something urgent.

JoeReal

But you can order dried flowers of Hibiscus, and in that case, use only 8 oz of dried hibiscus flowers.

Here's some of the online sources:
http://www.oldtimeherbs.com
https://www.surfasonline.com/products/31499.cfm

If you use dried hibiscus, it would be interesting to add 4 oz of dried elderberries also, and make sure to pour boiling water over the dried hibiscus and dried elderberries, about 1 quart and steep for 4 hours at least. Also double the amount of yeast nutrient and add 1 tsp magnesium sulfate.

About my wines: I don't want to see my fruits wasted so the excess becomes wine. With 275 kinds of fruiting plants, I managed to make 48 kinds of wine last year that are mainly from my excess production. I also have a very good recipe for coffee wine that rivals Kahlua minus the very sweet part.

Been making wine for about 30 years todate.

Joe

Casa Del Gatos

Joe,

I am interested in that "Coffee Wine" recipe. I have been making my own coffee liqueur for a LONG time. I started out using bottles of it for christmas gifts to family, now I get requests every year.

Last year, I took a pound of freshly roasted Kona beans and used 151 rum to extract the essence (took about 3 months of soaking) and it was the best ever! I too prefer less sweet so the sugar was cut down.

What kind of yeast do you use? I made a number of wines years ago using champagne yeast and was really impressed with the alcohol content! I calculated that it was close to 30 proof and got a lot of favorable feedback from friends (wonder why?)

I am expecting a bumper crop of satsumas this year, so Satsuma Wine is an obvious idea. Do you have a simple recipe for citrus wine?

JoeReal

Coffee Wine Pro
by Joe Real

So here's my detailed recipe of the Coffee wine I made. My details are meticulous. You can shorten my details of wine making if you know the general process, use simpler methods, but for me, a lot of things that could go wrong are spelled out in the details. This recipe is for a real coffee wine, meaning that you will have to let some of the coffee flavor undergo fermentation. This wine is remarkably different than coffee liquors such as Kahlua. The coffee liquors are made by immersing coffee beans or mixing instant coffee with vodka or gin, and I also have a recipe that can match the taste of Kahlua. But for the real coffee wine that will undergo fermentation, here’s the recipe.

You can either have cinnamon flavored or vanilla flavored coffee wine. Total Ingredients that you would need for a 5-gallon batch:

10 oz of your favorite instant coffee brand
1/2 to 1 cup of your favorite ground coffee
16 lbs brown sugar
10 tsp yeast nutrient
5 tsp Epsom salt (magnesium sulfate)
15 tsp acid blend
4.5 gallons bottled water
1 tsp grape tannin
10 vanilla bean sticks or 15 cinnamon sticks
1.75 liter cheapest vodka or gin (40% alcohol at least)
1 packet Lalvin EC-1118 or Prestige 8kg Turbo Alcohol Yeast

Notes:
This wine is particularly strong, and if you do this properly, you will end up with a coffee wine that is mildly sweet (or very sweet depending upon how you sweeten this up), very stable, aromatic, and have a really nice kick of 18% alcohol or more. Coffee has neglible nutrients needed by the yeast. So the methods here are different than you would use when making fruit wines. Nonetheless we are fermenting coffee together with brown sugar. The ratio of coffee and water is almost the same as ordinary coffee. I recommend the use of instant coffee in the primary fermentation because instant coffee have usually less amount of oils. Most oils can ruin the aroma of your wine during fermentation and sometimes produces nasty flavors that are hard to get rid of. You can always modify the detailed procedure to suit what you think is best, and I have made my coffe wine particularly detailed and have my reasons for using a particular method over another, but feel free to use which methods suits you best.

I strongly recommend not to use any types of sulfites that are added at any point in time to make this kind of wine. There is absolutely no need to use sulfites, as all of your materials can be sanitized or sterilized (using boiling or very high temperature water which you need to make your coffee anyway), there is therefore no need to protect against bacteria nor wild yeasts, and if you are careful, there is minimal oxidation, so really the use of sulfites is redundant and only invites the rotten egg aroma in otherwise a very fine coffee wine.

I strongly recommend that you do not use any type of plastic nor wide-mouthed primary fermenters. We don't have any fruit pulps nor something to knock down and submerge every day of fermentation. Wide mouth containers in this case will allow the easy escape of coffee aromas and invite oxidation at the same time. So use either a 6 or 6.5 glass gallon carboys as your primary and secondary fermenter, if you only have 5 gallon carboys, split the batch into two carboys.

I often use starter yeast culture, so I have to follow the manufacturer's recommendation which do not recommend rehydration nor the use of starter cultures. Coffee wine is not based on fruits, and has zero nutrients for the yeasts, but fortunately, there are yeast packets that will work even if sugar is the only ingredient in your water, and these are the Turbo Yeast line of products that are often sold to those folks who are fond of distillation. My first hand experience with these yeasts is that they will work best without rehydration, and without using a starter culture simply because all the ingredients needed by the yeast to ferment up to 17.6 lbs (8 kilograms) of plain sugar is already included in the packet. The yeasts are really well conditioned and good to go provided you use the packet and have stored it properly before it expires. There are various types of Turbo Yeast packet, and depending upon the forecasted conditions of your fermentation, you select the appropriate type. The packet that I have chosen is for fermentation when the air temperature is cool enough to maintain the liquid temperature at below 80 deg F. The Prestige 8 Kg Turbo Yeast will die when alcohol is > 14% and when temperature exceeds 80 deg F, otherwise, it will consistently finish at 18% alcohol or higher. If you can't find the Turbo Yeast package, you can always use Lalvin EC-1118, a very hard working yeast that will work in more diverse conditions, and is able to tolerate alcohol content of 18% or more.

Procedure:
1. Flavoring preparation: Cut up all the vanilla beans into 1" sticks, and place them inside the 1.75 Liter vodka or gin bottle that is filled with 40% alcohol (or 45% or greater). You will have to remove some liquid that will be displaced, and also remove the plastic guard at the mouth of the bottle (you can pry this open with a bread knife), then load your flavoring to be soaked for at least a couple months or more. Place back the plastic guard after you dropped your flavoring and top off with the gin or vodka that you initially removed. I love to use vanilla beans instead of the vanilla extracts, you can buy them at about $1 each from eBay. Vanilla beans have more complex flavor compared to store-bought vanilla extracts (which are often adulterated), and the flavor from the beans are best extracted by immersing in at least 35% alcohol for a long time, the industry dictates that for a legal 100% pure vanilla extract, it should be done with a 35% ethyl alcohol, but we can use vodka or gin which is at least 40% ethyl alcohol, and we are not selling our extracts, we just want to use a more potent one for flavoring. You will really get nice vanilla aroma with this technique. But if you like cinnamon, simply replace your vanilla beans with cinnamon sticks, and there is no need to cut up the cinnamon sticks, but sometimes they are big, so split up or splinter these sticks vertically until they will fit the mouth of the bottle, drop them in, cover the bottle back tightly. Place this bottle in a safe place. This will be used later in the process. This will give enough time for the flavor to be extracted into the alcohol. You can also forego any of the flavoring if you want plain coffee, but you will still need this bottle of vodka or gin for the final coffee conditioning and topping off purposes.

2. Primary fermentation: Split your 4.5 gallon water into various pots so that you can boil them all. In one of the pots, boil 10 lbs of brown sugar in 2 gallons of water. Boil also additional 2 quarts of ordinary tap water. Pour the boiled tap water into the pitcher and load up about 1 cup into the 6 or 6.5 gallon carboy, lift it up, cover one end with a rubber stopper with a hole on it, then shake gently and slowly roll it to let the hot water crawl over the entire inside of the carboy. Repeat again with another cup, and then finally the rest of the water in the pitcher. The purpose here is to gently warm up the glass carboy so that when we dump our hot coffee, it will not break due to the sudden temperature surge. Then let the carboy stand, cover it with plastic saran wrap. Meanwhile, let the other boiled water cool down to about 175 deg F. As soon as it has cooled down to 175 deg F, throw away the water inside the glass carboy that we used earlier. Then prepare coffee by mixing them in the pitcher. You can use 1/2 cup or more of instant coffee per pitcherful of hot water (175 deg F), then load them up in the glass carboy, also add 2 tsp or more of your acid blend while mixing the coffee until they are all used up. Do not use the sugar syrup, the one that has 10 lbs of sugar dissolved in it, coffee will not easily dissolve on it, but you will add this last to your carboy. With the other 2.5 gallons of hot water, you should be able to mix away the entire 8 oz of your instant coffee and acid blend. Make sure to save a half pitcher full of your coffee mix in another clean pitcher, cover with saran wrap tightly secured with rubber band and set it aside. Do not mix everything all at once, add slowly and stir into the hot water, otherwise you will have big clumps of instant coffee that will be very hard to dissolve, and would become very sticky too. Now add that remaining 2 gallon (actually this will be more than 2 gallons after adding 10 lbs of sugar) of brown sugar syrup into the carboy. Cover the carboy with paper towel secured with rubber band. Let everything cool down to 80 deg F or slightly below that temperature. Then in the half pitcher full of coffee mix that you set aside, pour the entire contents of the Turbo yeast packet or Lalvin EC1118 yeast, magnesium sulfate, grape tannin, acid blends and only 5 tsp of yeast nutrient then stir well. Remove cover from carboy and pour the dissolved yeast packet into the carboy. If there are residues left in the pitcher, simply pour some liquid from the carboy back into the pitcher, stir again, and dump contents back into the carboy. Nope, I did not forget the rest of the yeast nutrients, you will not use it at this stage, so just hold on to it. This will surely make a hell of big foamy bubbles and this will surely overflow once fermentation is started, no matter how high is your clearance from the top of the carboy. So you may think of recapturing the overflow. Use a short rigid tube on the stopper on the carboy instead of the bubbler, then connect a small siphon hose unto this tube. Simply get a clean 1.75 Liter bottle and place the hose from the carboy tubing into the wine bottle. Secure the hose on the bottle with cotton balls to let the air out.

continued...

JoeReal

coffee wine pro continued....

3. Secondary fermentor. You will do this using the same carboy. After 7 to 10 days, obtain a clean food grade plastic pail. Place the remaining brown sugar, 6 lbs into this pail and siphon off about two gallons of must from the primary unto the pail, add the remaining 10 tsp of yeast nutrient at this time, then stir very well to dissolve the sugar, and if you have the bottle of overflow must that you have saved, mix it in also. After the bubbles have died down, pour back into the primary. This time, you will not have as much foam developing, now you can place the regular air lock on the top. Just check to make sure everyday that you do not have anymore overflows and that the air lock have always some liquid in the trap. I use vodka or gin as my liquid in the airlock trap. Let this ferment for at least 2 months more before racking. If you still have fermentation, let it go for another month. You should end up with 18 to 21% alcohol on your coffee wine.


4. Racking and topping off. After 2 months or whatever time it took to complete your secondary, get a very clean 5 gallon glass carboy. Rack off from the seconday very carefully, leaving the sediments. This will be a real challenge because it will be difficult to see the tip of your racking cane. Save the sediments on a small narrow screw top bottle to recover more coffee wine for later purposes. You have not forgotten that 1/2 to 1 cup of ground coffee that I listed earlier, did you? We will use this along with the flavored gin or vodka that we saved earlier. Estimate the amount you would need for topping off, and if you do all the previous steps properly and depends upon how you rack your wine, you would only need about half a gallon to top off. Make half of the volume that you would need for topping off by brewing your ground coffee. For a half gallon volume, we would need to brew a quart of strong dark coffee from 1/2 cup of ground coffee, if you need more than this, just follow the same ratio for more coffee. I would recommend that you use an espresso machine to extract the coffee from the ground coffee. If you don't have an espresso machine, just use an ordinary coffee maker to brew really dark very strong coffee. Save the coffee extracts unto a clean pitcher. Then mix the coffee with the same amount of the flavored gin or vodka that you saved earlier, which would be 1 quart in our case, to have the whole estimated volume, which in our case would be 1/2 gallon, that you would need to completely top off the 5-gallon carboy. By mixing it with vodka or gin, you maintain almost the same 20% alcohol of your coffee wine. Adding the same amount of brewed strong coffee and gin or vodka will produce a flavored topoff that contains 20% alcohol. At this stage, it is okay to use brewed or espresso coffee from ground coffee because there will be no more significant fermentation that will happen beyond this stage, no danger of creating foul smell from aromatic oils of coffee, and besides at alcohol content of 18% or more, this is one truly stable wine. Then cover the 5-gallon carboy with an airlock, make sure there is alcohol in the liquid trap, use vodka or gin in your airlock. Let it stay in a warm place for 1 month to release the gasses.

5. Secondary racking: After a month, rack off unto another 5-gallon carboy and this time add whatever wine you have recovered from the bottled sediments you saved earlier, also add the remaining flavored vodka or gin for topping off, mix with a fresh batch of espresso or strong coffee from ground coffee, maintain the same volume of Vodka and Coffee. If you want more flavor, add the vanilla beans or cinnanom sticks directly inside the carboy. If you want a double or triple the caffeine, it is a good time to add at this stage also, follow recommendations on the rate of caffeine powder that you would need, excessive usage of additional caffeine can induce palpitations, nervousness and other caffeine related problems, so it is your responsibility to do the calculations right. You can buy caffeine powder from eBay merchants. Remove the airlock and replace this with a silicon bung, or solid rubber stopper, secure with duct tape or wire or both, and stash away in your cellar to age until it is one year from the date you started fermentation.

6. Final racking and sweetening: After one year from fermentation start date, rack off and sweeten to taste. Wait one week and then bottle the coffee wine.

JoeReal

Here's the basic ingredients to make one gallon of your favorite citrus wine. A big 5 gallon batch is better for me though.

One thing to note is that citrus juices have high citric acid (although some are nearly acidless), so it is important to add malic and tartaric acid (you can buy these at a wine shop or ebay). The recipe is generic for citruses. I would recommend Valencias, mandarins, lemons but not grapefruits and navels as they become bitter quickly.

Main ingredient:
Enough citrus fruits (mandarins, lemons) to make a quart of juice, you can mix and match, for example, you can use 10 big fruits of valencias mixed with 2 lisbon lemons, or perhaps throw in a blood orange in the mix to create a red-colored citrus wine. (I will add blood orange next season since I have enough fruits this time).

Standard ingredients
2 1/4 lbs sugar (for dry wine, add up to total of 3 lbs for strong sweet wine)
1/2 tsp pectic enzyme
1 tsp yeast nutrient
1 tsp malic acid
1 tsp tartaric acid
1 crushed campden tablet(optional for me, depends on type of citrus fruit)
1 packet of Lalvin EC1118 yeast or any of your favorite wine yeast.

Joe's zesto (optional):
1/2 cup vodka or rhum
citrus zest

If you want my version of citrus zest, do this first: Select about 1-2 citrus fruits that you are going to use and take out their zest. The zest is the very thin outer layer of citrus peel that contains the color of the citrus skin. You can remove this with a zesting knife or potato peeler. With a potato peeler, be careful not to take out any white of rind as these are very bitter (except for the quat types of citruses). Zesting knife is easier to use as it is a lot easier to avoid taking out the zest. Collect the zest into small jar that contains the half cup of vodka. Vodka must be at least 80 proof. Cover tightly and set aside until needed. This allows time for the alcohol in the vodka to extract the oils from the citrus skin. The final solution after the alcohol extraction process can be used also in cooking and flavoring just like how you use vanilla extract. Avoid using grapefruits and pumellos as sources of zest, but I can't really stop you if you do so. Nice zests come from limes, lemons, oranges and mandarins in that order of my personal preference.

Place 2 quarts of water into a large kettle and put the heat to high. Drop in the sugar and stir until it dissolves, you don't need to have the water reach boiling point, just warm enough to dissolve the sugar. Set aside to cool and start juicing your citruses.

You can extract the juice from your citruses with a juicer or however you do it but avoid crushing the seeds. Pulps would be okay, so no need to filter for pulps, just the seeds. If you are using navels and other citrus juices that gets bitter very quickly, I would strongly advice to add the crushed campden tablet into the receiving container. Whether you use campden or not, you have to add also the malic acid and tartaric acid into the receiving container. Stir the collected juice in the container as you proceed with the extraction. This slows down the oxidation of the juice and help prevent turning it very bitter very quickly. Do not drink the collected juice with the campden tablet dissolved on it especially if you are sensitive to sulfites. Stop when you have enough juice collected, about 1 quart to produce a gallon of citrus wine. Add pectic enzyme to the collected juice and stir, cover, and set aside for at least 5 minutes while waiting for the warm sugar solution you prepared earlier to cool down to 100 deg F or warm to the touch.

When the sugar solution is warm to the touch, pour the citrus juice, the sugar solution into your primary fermenter (could be just a bucket with cover or at least a 2-gallon glass container that you can cover). Add the yeast nutrient, pour out the yeast packet, and stir. Make sure to top off with clean cool water to make a gallon and 1 cup of total final volume. Cover the primary fermenter but not air tight. After 5 to 10 days, rack it off to the secondary fermentor (not necessarily secondary fermentation which is a different kind of fermentation), at this time you can add more sugar if you want to sweeten the wine, you can also add more citrus juice to top off the lost volume due to racking. After the fermentation in the secondary fermentor (could take anywhere from 1 to 3 months, once no more bubbles forming), rack off unto an aging container, add the zest in vodka that you prepare earlier.

Rack off from sediments every 2 months until clear and then age off for longer periods. The wine is very drinkable after 4 months after fermentation has stopped, but within one year, the taste will truly mature.

When you make it a sweet and strong citrus wine, just like what I got for Benny, you can squeeze a slice of lemon or lime per glass of wine before you drink it. This brings about the sensation of full range of citrus flavor that is pleasing to the palate and gives you a nice warming effect coming from the inside, evoking the pleasant memories of your harvested citruses.

Note that I find it actually too hard to work in one gallon batches rather than 5 gallons as there are no sutiable and appropriate volume containers for one-gallon batches. Consult your local wine shop supplies for more tips. Anyway, just scale up the ingredients unto bigger volume batches by simple ratio computations.

JoeReal

Here's one that's floating around in the internet. As opposed to wines, liquors are much more expensive to make than wine. I prefer my coffee wine recipe I posted earlier than this Kahlua-like recipe:


Kahlua Coffee Liqueur

1 cup light corn syrup
½ cup sugar
5 teaspoons instant coffee
½ cup hot water
1 1/3 cups vodka
1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract

Combine corn syrup, sugar, and instant coffee with hot water in a medium pitcher or large jar. Stir or

shake until sugar is dissolved. Add vodka and vanilla extract and stir well. Store in a covered container.

tropicalfreakfla

jarred, where do i find a blue hibiscus like the on ein the pic?? blue is my favorite color.
thanks...cliff

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my thing is bananas, gingers, heliconias & plumeria

laymonplantcity

If anyone is interested in purchasing some amazing hibiscus please contact me at laymonplantcity i have about 50 different kinds that i sell at my nursery in central florida i will ship them.

MediaHound

sorry for the delayed response, Cliff
here's two current auctions on ebay (for two different kinds of blue hibiscus)

auction one
auction two

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Apologies in advance if I am slow to reply to your PM. I suggest posting in the forums for support if you need something urgent.