The Accidental Smallholder Forum

Food & crafts => Recipes => Topic started by: aliceinwonderland on February 15, 2012, 11:44:43 pm

Title: Rhubarb champagne (and how to stop it exploding)
Post by: aliceinwonderland on February 15, 2012, 11:44:43 pm

Hello again,
A quick question, this time about rhubarb - I've just harvested about 4kg of rhubarb (that's 4kg after the leaves have been chopped off...), and so am planning to make some rhubarb champagne to my grandma's old recipe, but I have some rather messy memories of exploding bottles... We used to make rhubarb champagne a lot when I was a kid, but would occasionally have a particularly hot summer and the laundry would be coated in sticky sweet fizzy pink stuff and a few bits of shattered glass.

Does anyone have any suggestions, other than keeping all the bottles in the fridge or drinking it all very quickly, for how to stop the bottles exploding after a certain amount of time?

I'll be using swing-top glass bottles, and will be keeping them in as cool a place as I have, but if we have a hot day (and summer is definitely not over yet) then I may be mopping rhubarb champagne off the floor, walls and ceiling just like I did when I was little... I was thinking, maybe, could I pop the 'cork' every now and then to release the gas, or will this make the champagne go off?

Thanks for any ideas!
Alice

Title: Re: Rhubarb champagne (and how to stop it exploding)
Post by: Womble on February 16, 2012, 01:06:12 pm

I've made this a couple of times now, but always in a demijohn with a bubbler. Once the bubbling nearly stops, then I transfer to plastic lemonade bottles (i.e. no shards if any go bang). Once a decent pressure has built up, you can put them in the fridge to stop further gas generation.

HTH!