The understanding that I’ve had for years has been that the loquat tree itself is very cold tolerant. When winter storm Uri hit in 2021, it hit the low temperature of 6 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature which Austin sees only every fifty years or so (although global warming might be changing that, so fingers crossed!). Even with this extremely low temperature, the ostensibly tropical loquat trees largely survived. You can see some damaged trees to this day (prune your dead limbs, loquat owners!), but by and large the trees themselves pulled through.

I also had the understanding that while the fruit has a modest amount of freeze tolerance, the flowers have only a small ability to withstand freeze. For this reason we lose the loquat crop every third year. But what are the actual numbers on this, and what have we seen in the past? To answer these questions, I correlated Austin’s historical freeze records and my last 13 years of loquat harvest records.

In the following harvest summaries, I’ve defined a good year as one where nearly every loquat tree was loaded with fruit, a mediocre year has some fruit available but you have to hunt for trees which have survivors, and a bad year has few to no surviving fruit. Whether it’s the local micro-climate or genetic variation between the plants, we’ve been noticing that some trees have more survivors on bad years than others (but we will not tell you which ones those are, sorry).

For each month of winter, I have the date and temperature of the coldest night.

2012 – GOOD LOQUAT YEAR Dec7-22°, Jan14-22°, Feb12-29°, enough loquats to make pie

2013 – GOOD LOQUAT YEAR, Dec30-21°, Jan6-25°, Feb16-28°, March1-26°, harvested loquats at our friend John’s house

2014 BAD LOQUAT YEAR Dec 16-25°, Jan7-12°, Feb27-25°, no records of any harvest

2015 – GOOD LOQUAT YEAR, Nov19-26°, Dec29-25°, Jan8-21°, Feb-25°, made pie and jam

2016 – GOOD LOQUAT YEAR, Nov23-27°, Dec19-28°, Jan23-25°, Feb5-23°, made a batch of wine

2017 – MEDIOCRE LOQUAT YEAR, Dec19-24°, Jan8-16°, we found enough loquats to make jam

2018 –MEDIOCRE LOQUAT YEAR, Dec13-27°,Jan3 – 15°, Jan17-15°, Feb11-29°, discovered only four surviving fruit

2019 GOOD LOQUAT YEAR, Nov14-24°, Dec16-28°, Jan24 – 25°, Feb13-27°,March6-24°, made a batch of chutney

2020 – GOOD LOQUAT YEAR, Dec19-20°, Jan8-24°, Feb27-24°, made chutney, candy, and wine

2021 – BAD LOQUAT YEAR, Feb16 – 6°,  Uri. No survivors

2022 –  BAD LOQUAT YEAR, Dec12-26°, Jan3 – 21°, Jan22-19°, Feb6 – 18°, March13-19°, no records of harvest

2023 – BAD LOQUAT YEAR, Dec23-14°, Jan14 – 25°, Feb17 -24°, no records of a harvest

2024 – MEDIOCRE LOQUAT YEAR, Jan13 – 21°, Jan17 – 11°, found enough loquats to make icecream and throw an invite-only Loquat Fest

2025 – BAD LOQUAT YEAR, °, Dec12-26°, Jan21-22 – 16°, Feb20 – 19, a mere handful of loquats found despite a wide search of the city

Results of the Loquat Frost Tolerance Study

Looking at the numbers, the first thing that jumps out is the terrible string of bad winters since the formation of Loquat Fest. Is Loquat Fest itself a curse on the Austin loquat harvest? We can only hope that’s pure superstition.

Here’s some generalized conclusions:

• We can expect a good harvest roughly 50% of the time
• We can expect to find essentially nothing 25% of the time
• If the freezes stay in the twenties all winter, then we’ll have a blockbuster loquat harvest
• If the freezes get into the teens, then the harvest will suffer
• If the sub-20s freezes happen in late January or later, then the results will be better, but still not great

The spanner in this whole discussion is the comparison between 2024 and 2025. The winter of 2024 was demonstrably colder than 2025, yet it had a much better (although admittedly poor) loquat harvest. Let’s just stick a pin in that question for now, once this weekend shakes out we may have more insight into that discrepancy.

But Will the Loquats Survive for the 2026 Harvest?

Yeah, I don’t know. If it gets into the teens this weekend, then it’s probably not going to be a good year. But maybe there will be something?

How Do I Protect My Loquats from Freeze?

Loquat trees very quickly become too large to completely cover, and certainly too large to put in a pot which you can take inside. But it doesn’t take much to make the difference between a crop that survives and one which does not, the difference is just a few degrees. Planting the trees in protected areas around buildings or fences may help (this is an avenue of ongoing study, so email us if you noticed anything interesting). It may help to plant trees descended from variants with a known propensity to survive cold (this is an ongoing plant husbandry goal of Loquat Fest).

This weekend I’m experimenting with partial wrapping of trees. Since it’s hard to wrap an entire tree, I merely wrapped a couple of limbs so I wouldn’t have to suffer through a year without loquats in a worse case winter scenario.

A few things to keep in mind when covering plants in Texas. A single layer of plastic tarp probably won’t do you any good, since it has terrible heat retention properties. You will want to use two layers of tarp, or use some other material which comes in giant sheets, is waterproof, is thick enough to hold in heat, and is affordable. Canvas may fit this bill, but I’ve never seen it for sale, whereas giant plastic tarps are super-cheap at Harbor Freight. Also, make sure your edges are sealed the same way you would seal the openings of a parka before going outside in Minnesota. If the wind levers open a gap in your covering along the ground, it will whisk out all your heat and scorch and frost-sensitive plants inside. What I’ll do is weigh the edges of the tarp down with a continuous line of firewood logs. And thirdly, an electric heat source is great, but the more effective they are the more dangerous they are once you put them outside in a bunch of dry plants during a windstorm. In the above photo I’m using a seedling heating mat (it’s inside the tarp so you actually can’t see it), which is reasonably waterproof and doesn’t get scorching hot, just pretty warm.

So hang in there! We’ll have good loquat harvests again, just give it time.

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After splitting the loquats and removing the pits and pith, soak them in a couple cups of water and a tablespoon of Mexican cooking lime, aka ‘cal.’ This is not lime the fruit, but the highly toxic chemical powder, the same stuff that makes corn meal gooey enough to roll into tortillas. After six hours or so of soaking, remove the loquats from the highly alkaline water, and they should now have a slightly more coherent structure which will prevent them from completely dissolving when boiled in a thick syrup for a long time. Rinse thoroughly. Now place the loquats into the solution of sugar water and start a low and slow boil, for hours and hours. Some recipes say seven hours! Eventually there will be no water left, and the loquats will be more sugar than fruit. The result is good for snacks or for use in fruitcakes later in the year when you have more pecans than you know what to do with.

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Homemade ice cream is very forgiving. If you’re feeling immortal, increase the quantities of cream and sugar from what I have below.

• About a cup and a half of loquats, pulse-chipped
• Half cup sugar
• Half cup milk
• Three yolks
• Salt
• cup cream

De-pit and de-pith the loquats, putting it in the food processor with the sugar. Give it a few chops. You want this juicy but also a bit chunky. Add the milk and yolks and salt. Bring to a boil until the fruit has got the consistency you want. Let cool a bit before adding the cream. Chill the custard in the fridge before putting it in the ice cream machine. The ice cream is ready when it’s completely locked up on the paddle.

The post Loquat Ice Cream Recipe appeared first on Loquat Fest.

6T soy sauce

3T brown sugar

2T rice wine

A couple handfuls of pitted loquats

1/2 onion

1T minced garlic

1T red pepper paste

1t minced ginger

1/2t black pepper

2T Sesame oil 

Blend marinade, soak meat in it overnight in fridge.

Grill the steak bits on skewers.

Top with green onions and sesame seeds if you so desire.

The post Loquat Bulgogi Recipe appeared first on Loquat Fest.

Photos and recipe by the inimiatable cpbeacom!

Loquat tepache. Turned out yummy. And overcarbonated. The loquat adds a nice acidity like a sour beer. It’s a normal tepache recipe but with half the pineapple skin and core replaced with a roughly equal volume of pitted loquats.

Here’s the process: melt a cone of piloncillo in a cup or so of water on the stove. Just heat it and stir it until dissolved. You could grate it to speed things up but then you have to wash a grater. Set aside to chill. Cut up a pineapple, and eat the flesh. Put half the skin and core into a half gallon jar. Add a cinnamon stick. Add a roughly equal volume of pitted loquats. Maybe 2-3 dozen. I just rip them in half and toss the seeds. The seeds would give a nice almond extract flavor if you left them but also have varying unknown levels of cyanide. Some folk eat em, but some folk sniff gasoline too. Pour the cooled sugar water in the jar and then enough water to get to the shoulder of the jar. Cover the jar with cloth and a rubber band, or if you’re fancy like me, an airlock lid.

Taste it once a day including right now. You’ll know when it’s ready when it goes from just tasting overly sweet to tasting yummy and balanced. In warm weather like now, it will probably be ready in 3 days or 4. While you’re tasting push anything sticking up, back down. Once it seems ready, strain it. It makes a little over a quart, or 3 – 12oz bottles.

Then either drink it all, or put it in the fridge, or bottle it. Left at room temp, it will start to taste funky and sour, as wild bacteria overpower the wild yeast. In the fridge it should be good for 2 or 3 days. Bottle it if you have the equipment and it will carbonate in the bottle. I left it about 3 more days at room temp in the bottle and then in the fridge about a week. Obviously, it’s a little overcarbonated. It’s also noticeably drier than before as it kept fermenting. When I bottled it, it was still a little sweet, but it was starting to taste funky so I went with it.

He adds: Oh yeah, I was out of piloncillo cones, so I just used a cup of sugar and a 1/4 cup of molasses.

The post CPBeacom’s Loquat Tepache appeared first on Loquat Fest.

But let’s drill down into some specifics. I’ll try to write this to it’ll be useful both to those with homebrew experience and those without.

Picking Loquats for Fermenting

You’re going to want the orangest, juiciest loquats you can find. Typically the riper the fruit is, the more sugars it will have and the less sour it will be. To a certain extent you can counter-balance the sour by adding more sugar, but that’s going to leave you with a heavier wine.

Second, pick a lot. For all the loquat recipes I’ve made, the wine is the hungriest for raw loquat-stock. For the batch of loquat wine in these pictures, I picked about eight and a half gallons of fruit, and I ended up with only a gallon and a half in my first-stage carboy. So that’s about 35 glasses of wine (5 fl.oz. per pour) for about two hours of work. If you’re doing a cider (12 fl.oz. per pour), that might only be 16 glasses. That’s why I typically buff up my batches with sugar to make them stretch across more servings.

Extracting the Juice from your Loquats

So, I’m no moneybags, but I tend to buy homebrew equipment piece by piece, as I get annoyed by doing it the hard way. Here’s the easy way of doing it if you’ve got the equipment.

• Run the loquats, stems and all, through a fruit crusher
• Put the loquat pulp in a consumer grade wine/fruit press

That’s pretty easy, and it takes only a few minutes to juice up an afternoon’s worth of picking. It’s fast enough that you don’t have to worry about the juice browning in the air. It will run you about $150 to get to that point though.

The Hard Way to Extract Juice

Here’s some other techniques we’ve used over the years.

• de-seed the loquats by hand.
• put them through a blender
• squeeze the loquat slurry through a cheese-cloth

That takes over an hour to do, sometimes longer, which can cause browning. If you do this, you could try dredging the loquats in white sugar as you go to keep their color. You’re going to be adding sugar later anyways, so it won’t affect the finished product.

We’ve also used a sauce strainer with mixed results. This might be a better choice for jellies, because it lets more of the pulp through than the wine press. And it also spits out the skins in a weirdly dry excretion, which you might be able to use for something else, like a bread maybe, but I haven’t gone down that route yet. But mostly the sauce strainer just jams up, which is hugely annoying.

Another option which is feasible, but I’ve not tried, is putting the loquats in a bucket or steel pot, mashing them with the end of a two-by-four, and then pressing through a colander.

Basically, you’ve got some engineering problems ahead of you if you’re trying to pull juice from loquats, so I’d love to hear how you solve them!

How Much Sugar for Loquat Wine?

That’s a really good question. There may not be enough sugar in loquat juice normally to make a cider you want to drink. It’s worth a try, but I honestly haven’t even taken a specific gravity of raw loquat juice.

The cheapest and most effective sugar is regular old white baking sugar from your grocery store. When I first started home brewing, everyone thought that white sugar would cause a ‘corny’ taste, so you had to counter-logically use corn sugar instead. This turns out to be a myth. White sugar ferments off without taste, leaving behind only alcohol. The more you add, the heavier the wine, the less you add, the lighter the cider that you get. Rule of thumb is two pounds of sugar per gallon, and watch your hydrometer for a specific gravity matching your target. My last batch had a specific gravity of 1.065, which should give me a light table wine.

If you add more sugar after the first fermentation stage is complete, a process called syruping, you can trick the yeast into creating a much higher alcohol level than a normal wine, which is what usually makes a sherry heavier than a normal wine.

My first batch of loquat wine I fortified with honey, essentially making a loquat mead. Unlike white sugar, honey definitely ferments off leaving a taste behind, a taste which I’ve come to realize I don’t particularly care for. Also, honey is a lot more expensive than white sugar, so I don’t see myself making loquat mead any time soon, but it’s there if you want it.

Sterilizing the Juice

This is a step very familiar to home brewers. If you let nature take its course, any fruit juice will ferment due to the germs which are everywhere in the real world. The problem is that most of those germs will make a gross-tasting wine. Preferably only the scientifically husbanded yeast strain you buy in the brew shop will do the fermentation.

There are three generally accepted techniques for controlling the fermentation of wines and ciders:

1. Use sulfates to kill everything in the juice. Usually these are campden tablets, available from any brew shop. After a few days, the must is sterile and the sulfates have evaporated and you can add your own yeast. The disadvantage of this is it adds chemicals to the finished product which may cause headaches depending on dosage and susceptibility. If you’ve had a bad hangover from cheap wine, sulfates may have had a hand in that.
2. Pasteurize the juice by heating. They say this causes the finished product to lose a “bright” flavor or develop a cooked-fruit taste. I’ve found in practice that most people haven’t had loquat wine before, so they don’t know the difference, if there actually is one. And if you add enough sugar, your tasters will quickly become too drunk to complain. Most resources online say to heat it up to 160F or 180F for several minutes. I’ve used 140F and then crashed the temperature with a wort cooler coil and not had any problems.
3. Give it a hefty dose of yeast. The loquats are going to be pretty acidic right off the bat, which is bad for bacteria, so if you turbo-charge your yeast before adding it to the must, it will probably take over and out-compete any local germs before they can get a foothold. If you’re wrong about that, and some gross-tasting strain of bacteria or mold gets into the juice, you’ve just ruined hours of work and your only chance to make loquat wine until next year at least.
4. Don’t do anything. This is not a generally accepted way of doing it, however it’s how wine and booze has been made for thousands of years. I’ve not tried it with loquats, but I have with wild grapes. If you mash up the fruit and leave it in a bucket, nature takes its course. The batch of mustang grape wine I made that way came out distinctly vinegary, but diluted with Big Swig sparkling water it was drinkable and had enough of a kick to make it worthwhile.

Fermenting Your Loquat Wine

If you’re a home brewer, you already have some carboys and air locks on hand. If you’re not a home brewer you might be able to rig something with materials on hand. You basically want a pretty clean container that you can seal, with a device for allowing escaping carbon dioxide to go out, without outside air coming back in. Recently I went into my local home brew shop and asked for a ‘yeast lock’ and the clerk laughed at me, although to his credit he tried to walk back his first reaction.

I think you should buy a glass carboy for this, but in the past I’ve used food grade plastic buckets. When I worked at a bakery the cherry filling would come in five gallon plastic buckets. After scooping it all out into pies and pastries and whatnot, I could drill a hole in the lid and put one end of a vinyl tube through the hole and the other end in a glass of vodka. The plastic buckets are hard to keep clean, they break easily, and they never seem to hold a good seal, but you can use it until you get tired of all the extra work. Don’t use the Home Depot buckets, they aren’t food-grade, they’ll make your loquat wine taste like a Home Depot paint and adhesives section.

So add the yeast to the juice, and it should start fermenting visibly within twelve hours or so. They say the type of yeast you use will affect the final taste more than anything else. I haven’t done this often enough to give advice on that end, but keep records of which yeast you use and the final results until you find something you like.

After the bubbling out the airlock slows, rack the wine into the second stage carboy (a process done with a fairly inexpensive kit of tubes available at a brew shop). In this stage you want two things to happen. You want all fermentation to reach its conclusion (or your bottles will explode), and you want the wine to clarify. Both these processes can take some time. It’s fun to watch the clarification line fall down the side of the carboy over the course of weeks, like a dust storm taking forever to settle over a desert valley.

Bottling Loquat Wine

There are a lot of options for bottling once the second stage of fermentation is complete. I happen to have about two hundred beer bottles I got for free off Craigslist, so all my home brewing is centered on getting that used up. You can use empty wine bottles, which you can cork using a fairly inexpensive device from a local home brew shop. I’ve used a hammer to drive corks into wine bottles, back in the day when I was even cheaper than I am now, and I would not recommend it. Not only does it not work very well, but there’s a high likelihood of shattering the bottles.

If you are shooting for a cider or a champagne-style wine, you can add priming sugar at this time. I’ve been just adding a teaspoon of white sugar to each of the beer bottles. Then it’ll take a few weeks or a few months for the wine to condition. This is one reason I use beer-bottles for this, so I can sample from time to time to see how it’s coming along, which of course is a huge sacrifice for me to make.

Drinking Your Loquat Wine

Drink this with friends, dude! Or better yet, drink it with your friends at Loquat Fest!

Let us know if you tried this and any insights you earned. We do approve the comments you make below!

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Here’s a recipe which I adapted from the FarmToTableLA.com prickly pear candy recipe. The final result tastes a bit like a cross between a fruit rollup and a gumdrop. One of the changes, which was obvious once I’d had a bite, was to add a coating of chili and sugar. You can find chili-lime-salt powder in the candy sections of any of your more reputable carnicerias.

• 4 cups of deseeded/debutted loquats,
• 1/3cup lime juice
• 5 cups sugar
• 2 cups (one jar) of apple sauce
• 2 heaping Tablespoons of pectin
• spicy chili powder

As you remove the pits and the butts from the loquats, coat them in a mixture of the sugar and lime juice. This will keep the fruit from oxidizing and turning an unsightly brown.

Blend the loquats until they look almost like apple-sauce. Mix them with the remaining sugar, the apple sauce, and the pectin.

Cook the mixture slowly on the stove while stirring constantly. You want to get it up to about 225 degrees, basically you’re going to cook out all the moisture. It should reduce by about three quarters. So you’re looking at a lot of stirring. On the plus side, the extended stewing will completely dissolve those annoying scraps of loquat skin. If you keep the mixture moving, it will prevent a lot of the bubble-splutter which could scald you or stick loquat pulp all over your kitchen.

When it’s done, it’ll look and feel thick, almost like toffee. Pour it in a shallow pan and leave it in the fridge overnight. Drying a bit will do it good. In the morning, cut it into squares and dredge them in a mixture of sugar and spicy chili powder.

The post Loquat Candy Recipe appeared first on Loquat Fest.

Loquats are an ideal fruit for margaritas; sour with just a hint of sweetness, they counterbalance any tequila nicely and play well with bright flavors like orange and lime. As a bonus, slightly underripe loquats, with their signature tang, work perfectly well in this tantalizing, slightly brown cocktail.

You will need:

1.5-2 cups of loquat flesh (from about 1 pound of whole loquats; any size will work, but larger fruits are easier to seed and peel)

4 ounces of tequila, whatever kind you prefer

2 ounces of triple sec or Cointreau

The juice of two medium-sized limes

2 tablespoons of sweetener, such as agave nectar, honey, or simple syrup

2 cups of ice

A plate with a thin layer of kosher salt (optional)

Peel and seed your loquats. It’s okay if you leave some of the peels on, but the seeds are slightly toxic, so be sure to remove all of those.

Pour all ingredients (except salt) in a blender.

Blend on a medium-high setting until the mixture is and cold and smooth.

If you like a salted rim, run the spent limes along the rims of two glasses and dip the glasses in the salt. Serve and enjoy.

The post Loquatritas! appeared first on Loquat Fest.

But two things to keep in mind: One – the ajwain is really what makes this taste like an authentic chutney. Or at least it makes you want to think it’s an authentic chutney. And two – go about two steps higher with whatever level of spices you initially think is good. Once it gets in the cans, it’ll mellow a bunch.

Ingredients

A pot of loquats, de-butted and de-pitted
Ajwain — ground up with Garam masala
Garam masala, bay leaves — fresh ground, about a third cup
Chopped onions – two
Salt – 1T
Coriander – 2T
Cayenne – 2T
Ginger, diced and powdered
Star anise — about seven whole
Additional dried fruit — fig
Chopped up jalapenos, about six, with seeds
Red wine vinegar – a bunch of glugs, about a cup, or a little less
Cardamom pods, ground, 2T(unground size)

How to cook:

Stir it all up, cook it until the tastes meld! Then can as you normally would. Serve with pretty much anything that needs a kick of something exciting. This is great in sandwiches.

Enjoy! And let me know in the comments how it goes!

The post Loquat Chutney appeared first on Loquat Fest.