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Brew Ha-ha
I hadn’t appreciated just how short the English cherry season is. Having moved into a house with a cherry tree in the back garden, we have been cheerfully waiting for them to ripen. Some of the cherries right at the top of the tree and well out of reach of anything shorter than a giraffe have been glistening red and ripe for some time. On lower branches they have, by and large, remained resolutely yellow with but the slightest hint of redness and so we waited. We waited despite the fact that there has been an increasing shower of soggy, bursty cherries dropping onto the path. These were clearly overripe specimens from the higher reaches.
Except that they probably weren’t. The cherries seem to have moved from unripe to squelchy mess with no interim ripeness. We plucked a jarful from the tree yesterday; it was hardly nature’s bounty, though. There is plenty more sugary wetness in the tree, but sadly it remains both out of reach and far too mushy to harvest. Maybe we will have better luck next year.
In the meantime, the best of what we collected have been washed and dropped into a jar. Our fastidious sorting meant that of those we picked, maybe a third didn’t make the cut as it were, so the jar is only two-thirds full. The majority of them are yellow, though there is the hint of red here and there. I suspect that what we finally end up with will not be a deep and welcoming cerise, but rather a gibbous and malevolent orange. Still, we shall see. Anyway, having rinsed the brutes, we poured in a full bottle of Smirnoff and it is now hidden in the dark where it will steep for a month before we decant the juice out into a second and add sugar to the steeped fruit. That will then get a further month before the vodka is poured back in.
We will either end up with a new life form or some kind of cherry vodka. The bookies have it at even as the moment. Either way, I very much doubt that it will be the deep thrombosis red we were aiming for.
Except that they probably weren’t. The cherries seem to have moved from unripe to squelchy mess with no interim ripeness. We plucked a jarful from the tree yesterday; it was hardly nature’s bounty, though. There is plenty more sugary wetness in the tree, but sadly it remains both out of reach and far too mushy to harvest. Maybe we will have better luck next year.
In the meantime, the best of what we collected have been washed and dropped into a jar. Our fastidious sorting meant that of those we picked, maybe a third didn’t make the cut as it were, so the jar is only two-thirds full. The majority of them are yellow, though there is the hint of red here and there. I suspect that what we finally end up with will not be a deep and welcoming cerise, but rather a gibbous and malevolent orange. Still, we shall see. Anyway, having rinsed the brutes, we poured in a full bottle of Smirnoff and it is now hidden in the dark where it will steep for a month before we decant the juice out into a second and add sugar to the steeped fruit. That will then get a further month before the vodka is poured back in.
We will either end up with a new life form or some kind of cherry vodka. The bookies have it at even as the moment. Either way, I very much doubt that it will be the deep thrombosis red we were aiming for.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/jun/05/nextgenerationpoets.poetry12
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Also, buy Chambord!
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White Cherries:
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