White Grape Juice and Jelly

Are you getting sick of the canning posts yet?  Well... I blog about what I do, and canning plays a huge part in my life this time of year.  I am sooo ready for canning season to be over. 

Today I'm going to show you how to can grape juice. 

We planted some grape plants this year, but they won't produce any grapes for 2-3 more years.  Luckily we were able to go pick some from some friends.  They are green juicing grapes, but we don't know what kind. They smell just like the Concord grapes we used to get.  

 This is the juicer I use. It's my mother-in-law's.

The bottom pan you fill with water to boil. The top part you fill with grapes. As they steam the juice gathers in the middle part. When you remove the clamp on the tube the juice flows out into your jars.

First step is to wash your grapes.  Fill your clean sink with water and let the grapes soak. 

Fill up your pan with grapes. You do not need to remove the stems.  Place the lid on and let them steam.

They will start to look like this. The skins will split. Mash them up to get all the juice out and add more grapes.  

Keep doing this until you run out of grapes.  If your pan gets too full of skins and stems, dump them out and start over. Unclamp the hose and let the juice stream into your jars.


Process jars in a water bath canner for 20 minutes.(adjusted for my altitude)
Look at the difference in the color. The one on the left has not been processed yet and the one on the right has.  I thought it was interesting.

Even though it looks more like pink lemonade than grape juice, it tastes just as good as the concord grape juice we've made in the past.
We picked about 3 diaper boxes full and this is how much juice we got - 23 quarts. I used some of it for jelly.

Jellys is actually really easy if you've already juiced your grapes. You just add the juice, sugar and a dab of butter, bring it to a boil, add the pectin and boil 1 more minute and then ladle into jars and process 10 minutes (adjusted for my altitude). There are detailed instructions that comes with the pectin. I prefer to use liquid pectin.

Did you know that if your jelly doesn't set that you can remake it? That happened to me this time around. The instructions in the pectin tell you how to do it. It gives you measurements of sugar and pectin to add and you basically just make it again.