Making Your Own Mulled Wine for Christmas (December 2013)
Making Your Own Mulled Wine for Christmas
Keep it simple this Christmas and make your own home brewed mulled wine for the best flavours. Wine making at its best with HomeBrewWest.
Christmas is the time of year when mulled wine is hugely popular. If you want to get involved in wine making yourself rather than buy a bottle of wine, you could purchase one of our ‘Homebrew Wine Starter Kits’. While we have many kits to choose from, if we had to choose one we would recommend the ‘BrewSmarter Syphonless Wine Starter Kit’ because it makes quality wine without a syphon. Why do I need that? Well, syphoning is messy and can cause lots of problems such as oxidation and bacterial infection. Which are all very bad for your wine. Remember, most wine making kits don’t include a wine ingredients kit so you will need to buy that separately.
Once you have followed the instructions on the kits and made your wine, you can then customise it to make mulled wine. Make sure you make your wine well in advance of Christmas to give your wine the time it needs to age. Don’t expect a wine bottled for 7 days to taste the same as a wine bottled for 28 or 42 days.
Mulled Wine Ingredients
1. 2 bottles of your red home brew wine
2. 2 star anise
3. 1 vanilla pod, cut in half
4. 1 whole nutmeg, to be grated
5. 3 bay leaves, preferably fresh
6. 1 stick of cinnamon
7. 6 whole cloves
8. 200g caster sugar (or brewing sugar)
9. 1 lemon & 1 lime
10. 2 clementines
Instructions for Making Mulled Wine
Step OnePeel large sections of the outer peel from your lemon, limes and clementines. It is a lot faster if you use a speed peeler.
Step Two
Put the caster sugar in a large saucepan over a medium heat, add the pieces of peel and squeeze in the clementine juice.
Step Three
Add in the nutmeg gratings, the cinnamon stick, bay leaves, and add the cloves. Also add in your vanilla pod that you have cut in half and just enough red wine to cover the sugar.
Step Four
Watch the mixture to make sure it simmers and check that the sugar has fully dissolved into the red wine. Bring to the boil. Keep on boiling for approximately 5 minutes or until you have a thick syrup.
Step Five
Turn the heat down low on the thick syrup, adding in your star anise and the rest of your red home brew wine. Very gently heat the wine and using a ladle place into glasses to serve.
And there you have it, mulled wine, entirely homemade…..Christmas in a glass.
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