It's a little more involved than some, but quite straightforward. Peel and roughly chop 200g of root ginger into a slow cooker, and add 600g of sugar and the zest of three lemons. Add about 2.5l of boiling water to the pot. 'Cook' overnight. Pour into a demijohn (a bucket would do), and allow to cool to 25–30°C. Add yeast (I used GV3, and added vitamin B tablets and yeast nutrient) and pectolase. Leave it for 24 hours, then add the juice of those three lemons.
Thereafter, stir (agitate) daily for a fortnight. At that point, I'll strain it into a clean demijohn, add 400g of sugar, 350g of chopped raisins, and another 50g of ginger (probably grated). That will ferment for a further ten days.
At this point, you need to bring the fermentation to a halt, while there's still some sugar. It'll need straining again, and this time a Campden tablet and a few grams of potassium sorbate get added. It should clear in a couple of weeks, when 150ml of brandy gets added, and I'll make it up to a gallon. I'll bottle it into 75cl quantities, and it'll then go in the cellar for a couple of months (or longer).
Hopefully, it'll be tasty—though I may not think so personally.
Less secretively, we also started a nettle cordial. This, by contrast, is shockingly simple. Collect nettle tops (the top 3 pairs of leaves), wash and spin dry, and put in a covered container. Add 1kg sugar, 500ml boiling water, and 40g citric acid. That's done: it now gets stirred daily for five days, at which point it will hopefully be delightful. It is, in fact, already smelling pretty good (hint of gooseberry, I think), and the liquid's going slightly pink. Results, as you'd expect, will follow.
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