Strawberry Wine Recipes 5 Gallons

Today I’m sharing our strawberry wine recipe. This is one of the first fruit wines - or country wines - most people will try making, and for good reason:

Not only are strawberries generally easy to come by - even outside of strawberry season - they make a delicious fruit wine.

It's also a great way to use up large amounts of strawberries. I'm sure we're not alone in having had those times when our desire to go berry picking resulted in WAY more strawberries than we'd be able to eat before they go bad!

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While many wine drinkers may turn up their noses at a sweet wine, residual sweetness is definitely required to bring out the strawberry flavour.

Not really a red wine or white wine, strawberries make a pink, delicate wine. Especially in the summertime, this makes for a nice light dinner wine.

Add some water and yeast, and let it go through the fermentation process for a while, before you move the wine off the fruit and let it continue doing its thing.

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Also, a note: Because the entire process takes several months, I recommend starting a fresh batch of strawberry wine shortly after opening your first bottle of finished wine.

While you can technically make a batch of wine using only fruit, you’ll get a much better finished wine if you use some additional ingredients.

This recipe is very flexible in terms of what kind of strawberries you use. Pick your own strawberries - wild strawberries or commercial - fresh or frozen, organic strawberries, or... inorganic strawberries. (LOL)

Strawberry Canned Fruit Wine Base 96oz #10 Can Vintners Harvest 3 5 Gal

You can use fresh or frozen strawberries, there are just a few differences in how to use them, and a few good things to keep in mind:

For the most flavorful wine, use ripe fruit. You’ll want to through to remove anything that's not ripe, is moldy, etc. (Ripe strawberries have much better flavour and sweetness than under ripe fruit.)

I like to chop the strawberries* and let them sit in sugar for a couple hours before starting on the wine making, as it - maceration - draws the strawberry juice out of the berries

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Use plain white granulated sugar - or cane sugar - as brown sugar could overpower the delicate taste of the strawberries with the molasses flavour.

Your wine’s final ABV will vary wildly dependent on a few things: The initial sugar content of the strawberries you use, how much sugar you add, and what kind of yeast you use (more on that in a bit)

Sugar - both in the base wine itself, and from the added sugars - is what feeds the yeast, the yeast eats up the sugars and gives off alcohol as the byproduct of that process.

Strawberry Wine Punch {large Batch}

At some point, the environment they’re living in - the brewing wine - becomes too high in alcohol for the yeast to survive. They die off, the fermentation stops.

That is, some yeast will be able to survive higher amounts of alcohol in the wine, so they’ll continue producing it longer than some other types.

Some types of yeast will bring you to something like an 6-8% ABV, while others will let things run wild until close to 20% ABV.

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I know firsthand how frustrating this can be, so ask your local homebrew supply shop for recommendations based on what you’re looking for.

1. If you want a sweet wine with a low-ish ABV - without having to back sweeten it (more on that in a bit) - choose a yeast with a lower tolerance for alcohol.

2. If you’re looking for a dry wine with a low ABV, choose a yeast with a lower tolerance for alcohol, and don’t use a ton of sugar.

Strawberry Wine. The Banana Mass Experiment

3. If you want a sweet wine with a high ABV, use a bunch of sugar with a high-tolerance yeast... and be prepared to backsweeten it.

If you want to know the actual ABV you arrive at, you’ll want to take specific gravity readings along the way. At the very least, you need the reading from right before you add the yeast, and the final reading.

While some old fashioned country wine recipes will use lemon juice, acid blend is a powdered acid product, used to regulate the acid level in white.

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Boiling or simmering fruit activates the pectin in it - this is how you make jam. When it comes to wine making, that pectin can lead to cloudy or hazy wines.

Wine Tannin is a component of grape skins, which gives wine part of its character. It imparts a sort of bitter, astringent mouth feel to wine, and makes wine... taste like wine.

If you think about the difference between red wine and white wine in that sense - red wine has a lot more tannin than white.

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Anyway, we use a touch of it in this wine, to round it out a bit and make it taste more like a “proper” wine.

Wine stabilizers - such as sodium bisulfite or potassium sorbate - are used at the end of the fermentation, to STOP fermentation.

This can be a safety issue - wine that continues to ferment after bottling will pressurize the bottle, and the bottle can explode!

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This wild yeast is why you are able to make a wine product with nothing but fruit - the wild yeasts cause natural fermentation.

However, wild yeasts can also bring different flavors to your wine - and it’s not usually a good thing. Killing off wild yeasts is generally recommended.

This recipe uses boiling water instead of Campden tablets, though. While supplementary ingredients help, I do like to avoid them when it’s reasonable to do so!

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As a note, you can easily scale this wine recipe up - in fact, there's a function inside the recipe card itself to do the math for you!

One note, though: You don't need to multiply the yeast, but the software doesn't know that. We will use one pack of yeast for anything from 1-5x batches, and then 1 pouch for every 5x batches beyond that.

Therefore, you can pretty much ignore all of the nutritional info it gives you: it’s calculated on everything that goes into the wine.

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It does not take into account how much sugar will be fermented out, how much volume is lost to racking, the fact that the fruit pulp is removed before the final product, etc.

2 x 1 gallon glass carboys - I use one gallon carboys as the secondary fermentation vessel. 1 narrow neck gallon jug for the second round of fermentation, the other to rack it off onto for the next round of fermentation.

1 air lock and rubber stopper - To cap off the fermenters. These prevent contaminants from entering the wine, while allowing the carbon dioxide to escape.

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Nylon straining bag - Optional. If you’d like a bit less pulp to deal with when racking off the primary fermentation container, you can pour the cooked strawberry mixture into a brew bag and tie it off.

Sometimes - usually, even - you’ll find that the yeast went a bit too far with their smorgasbord, and you end up with a strawberry wine that’s not as sweet as you’d like it.

Place in a large pot, along with the sugar. Using a potato masher or VERY clean hands, stir and mash strawberries. Let sit for an hour.

Take A Sip Of Strawberries

Pour mixture into a freshly sanitized fermenting bucket. Cover with sanitized lid and air lock, leave it in a cool place and allow it to cool to room temperature overnight.

The next day, give the mixture a quick stir with a long, sanitized spoon, and – using sanitized equipment* – take a specific gravity reading of the liquid (strain out any strawberries).

Within 48 hours, you should notice initial stages of yeast activity – bubbles in the airlock, carbonation and /or swirling in the wine must. This means you’re good to go!

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Put the carboy in a cool (not cold - aim for a temperature of 61-77F), dark place and leave it alone for a month or so.

Using sanitized equipment, rack wine off the sediment, into a clean, freshly sanitized carboy. Cap with sanitized airlock, leave it alone for another 2-3 months.

When your wine has been racked a few times and shows NO more fermenting activity for a month or so (no bubbles in the airlock, no more sediment being produced, you can move on to bottling. **

Summertime & Strawberry Wine

If stabilizing, follow the instructions on your selected type of wine stabilizer to stop fermentation. For potassium sorbate, this needs to be done 2-3 days before bottling.

** If you're sampling as you're going, and your wine reaches the right sweet/dry level for you, you don't need to wait for the fermentation activity to end. Just skip ahead to stabilization!

While you've got your current homebrew fermenting away, why not consider putting a batch of something else on, to occupy your wait time? Here are a few of my other wine, cider, and mead recipes:

Tasty Homemade Strawberry Wine Recipe

Before you chow down, be sure to take some pics of your handiwork! If you Instagram it, be sure to tag me - @CA - or post it to My Facebook Page - so I can cheer you on!

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