Lingonberry Juice

Lingonberry is very healthy and full of vitamins. This juice is done without freezing or cooking the berries which should preserve all vitamins and what ever else good things there is in the tasty (but sour) and pretty red berries.

Lingonberry is also one of the easiest berries to pick and they don't make a mess like blueberries.

Also lingonberry has plenty of natural preservatives so this juice has quite nice shelf life. I don't know exactly how long, because we usually finish this juice in just some weeks.

For the juice you need only

• 2-3 kg of Lingonberries
• 1-2 kg of Sugar (exact amount depends how much you get juice)
• 25g of Tartaric acid E334
• 2 litres of water

And tools:

• 2 buckets (or other containers of your choice)
• tool to crush the berries
• Funnel
• Sieve
• Deep scoop
• Filtering cloth
• Bottles

Step 1: Preparing Berries

Clean the berries and crush them in a bucket.

It is easier to crush them in small batches. Make sure that most of the berries are crushed. Some berries can be whole, we will later on re-use the leftovers and crush them again.

Step 2: Acid and Water

Tartaric acid is crystallic white powder. Dissolve 25g of acid to about half a litre of water.

Add the acid to the bucket with the crushed berries.

Add water until you have approximately 3,5 litres to 4 litres of berry-water mix.

Step 3: Waiting...

Store your berry-water mix in a cool place covered with lid. Wait for 3 days and your juice is ready for filtering.

Step 4: Filtering

You can start by mixing the water-berry mixture a bit.

Place sieve to the other bucket and place the filtering cloth in it.

Scoop the berry mixture to the sieve and let it filter. This is slow process and easier with bit smaller batches.

Collect all filtered berry mash for re-use.

Step 5: Adding Sugar and Bottling

Now you should have about 2 litres of juice.

You need 1/2 kg of sugar for each litre of juice. So if you have 2 litres of juice add 1 kg of sugar and mix until the sugar is dissolved.

Clean bottles and use funnel to fill them.

Cap the bottles and your juice is ready!

Store the juice in cool place and enjoy your vitamins through the long dark winter.

Bonus round:

You can re-use the collected berry mash. Just follow the same instructions with once used berry mash and you get almost as good lingonberry juice for the second run. It will probably have slightly lighter color, but the taste is there.