It's May and I almost finished bottling all alcohol I made in 2023. Sounds like a good opportunity to write a quick
summary.
Once again last year the cherry trees blessed us with an amazing amount of fruits. It seems my downy currant
(ribes spictatum) got envious because it followed in the same steps. I usually make my nalewka (the
closest English translation is tincture) only from the cherries, but since they currant was so seemingly eager
I decided to try it out.
The generic procedure is very simple: get some fruits, dip in up to 70-75% alcohol for 3-4 weeks, move the fruits
into different container and drop some sugar on them, wait another 2-3 weeks, get the alcohol from first stage and mix
with liquid released by fruits in second stage. You can twist this a bit, by adding additional sugar stage at the start.
It's usually shorter as it may lead to fermentation. You can also do sugar-alcohol-sugar.
I chose to do alcohol-sugar for both, cherries and currant. I removed stone/seed from the cherries but added some
leaves into the alcohol stage.
The final product was about 1.5 litres of nalewka z czerwonej porzeczki and 2.5 litres of wiśniówka.
They both are incredibly colourful and have a rather strong fruity taste. They are both about 60%. I like them. If you
fancy trying Polish tincture and you happen to plan a visit to Poland, send me an email.
This year I will likely take a break. Even if I wanted to make some, I'd likely not have enough material since the
spring came quite early, backed off for a bit with some cold damaging the plants and making bees lazy (and killing
some). This resulted in little of the flowers getting pollinated and right now there's only a handful of visible growing
fruits.
Until next time!