Cranberry Wine

I'm slowly making the move to greater than 1 gallon batches of beer.  The biggest expense in doing this is upgrading my brewing pots and mash tun.  Since I'm still buying furniture for my new apartment, I can't really justify those expenses yet.  However, fermenters are pretty inexpensive, and that's all you need to make wine.

I've made a few batches of wine in the past that have worked out pretty well.  Peaches made some of the best wine I've had.  Their flavor held up amazingly without the aid of sugar.  Blackberries made pretty good wine, but I had to add some sugar and preservatives (called back-sweetening).

Around this time of year cranberry sauce is pretty inexpensive, much more affordable than whole cranberries (at least down in Texas).  My idea was to use cranberry juice and cranberry sauce to make up the must.  It's always a good idea to use as much pure juice as you can.  The artificial flavors of "fake" juice will impact how the final product tastes, and a lot of fruit tastes different after fermentation.  The classic Cranberry cocktail juice is basically cranberry flavored sugar water.  Since I'm already not able to use raw fruit, I wanted to stay as close to real ingredients as I could.  I wasn't able to find 100% cranberry juice.  The juice I ended up using was a blend of 4 juices (cranberry, grape, apple, and pear) with cranberry as the main component and flavor.  The juice had a SG of around 1.040.  I was shooting for a strong wine, but the sugar content of the cranberry juice and sauce was much less than I was expecting.  Since I was expecting to have more sugar from the juice/sauce, I didn't stock up my pantry before blending the must.  I had 2 pounds of white table sugar and 1 pound of brown sugar that I added to raise the gravity to 1.080.  It means the wine will only be about 10-11%. Not quite the 14-15% I was shooting for.


I have no idea how cranberries are going to taste post-fermentation, but that's what experiments are for.

Cranberry Table Wine
//6 gallon batch

Ingredients

9.5 bottles 100% Juice Cranberry Juice (1/2 used for starter)
10 cans whole berry cranberry jelly
2 lbs white sugar
1 lb brown sugar


Additives
6 tsp Fermax yeast nutrient
3 tsp pectic enzyme (may need more to compensate for the jelly)
6 Campden tablets, crushed (to sanitize the must before pitching yeast)

Ferment
1L starter of Lalvin 71B-1122 (white, red, rose wines yeast)
With no airlock activity after 24 hours, I panicked
Sprinkled 1 packet Lalvin EC-1118 (champagne, all purpose)
OG 1.080

Notes
Blended Dec 1st
I wish I used more cranberry sauce, since it added less sugar than expected

First Tasting
Rack to secondary Dec 17th
Color is orange/pink, surprising since the juice and sauce was more maroon/burgundy
Very tart, will probably need to backsweeten this one.
Usually I'm trying to guess the final taste of my young wines through the alcohol heat, but there was none this time.

I had about a half gallon of wine and a half gallon of lees leftover after transfer.  (Lees are the wine equivalent of trub, the yeast and fruit parts leftover after racking.)  I put these leftovers into jugs to freeze and melt out some of the sugar and alcohol.  Maybe that can boost the weak body of the wine. I may end up freezing more and making a port/sherry.

Spontaneous Plum Wine

Not having a job and being home all day, I tend to end up browsing the internet for random brewing styles and techniques (rather than applying for jobs like I should be).  I found 'dinosaur plums', which apparently are pluots.  Like any good homebrewer, I spent the night doing various Googles for plum, apricot, and pluot wine recipes.  I'm still planning a pluot wine, but in the process I happened upon Slivovitz, a distilled plum brandy.  I found it interesting that this maker didn't add any yeast to the mix, just plums.

Basically, you add some plums, let them start fermenting, and add more plums.  Repeat until the fermenter is full.  No stirring or mixing until the last addition. He used whole plums, but they won't fit into my 1 gallon jug.  I cut them into eights and pitted them (some recipes call for branches and pits, others recommend only using the flesh). I also added 8 ounces of honey that I found in my cabinet.  I'm hoping it might add some 'wild' bugs stuck in the honey. 

Obviously I won't be distilling it, since it's illegal in the States. Maybe that means it's just a $20 experiment in making rotten plum mush. Maybe I'll try making it into an ice wine, that seems closer to Slivovitz than plain wash/wine. Who knows? I'll just keep going and see what I get. 

Plum Mush

8 oz Honey - 8/27/2012

2 lb Black Plums (walmart) - 8/27/2012

//Notes
No yeast pitched. Relying on the natural yeast on the skin of the fruit (or trapped in the honey)
Cleaned jug with OxyClean (no sanitizer)

pitted and cut plums to fit into fermenter 

Day 1 - Lots of liquid leaving the fruit.  Small bubbles forming around fruit at the surface.  Airlock bubbles every 45 seconds, so something is happening.

Day 4 - The plum meat is floating in their own juice. Its amazing how red/purple the juice is. Even more amazing is how much there is. The airlock has been consistently been bubbling every minute. There is a Lacto looking pellicle forming. Maybe the fermentation is mostly lacto right now, because it formed very fast. Waiting until the plum meat starts to break down before adding more plums. 

Peach Wine

Let me start my first post on my new blog with a statement. I'm a beer brewer. However, my current living situation makes it difficult for me to find time to brew. To continue my fermentation-based hobby, I'm making fruit wines (and beer when I have time) at my dad's house. We just bottled a fantastic blackberry wine, and since peach season is wrapping up here in Texas, we decided that would be an interesting country wine to try and make. 

There is an orchard (Henrietta Creek) close to where I live. The season was ending sooner than we expected, and was essentially over. They had a half dozen trees still producing, and what they had left was very small. I got around 3 pounds of peaches at 80 cents a pound though, so I wasn't complaining. 

I topped this off with a few pounds of white peaches from Sprouts, and a few pounds of yellow peaches from Central Market. I didn't realize how overpriced CM is (we went there first). I probably wont be going there for fruit again.



I'm not sure why I wanted to mix varieties of peaches. I just couldn't decide what I wanted to get. I have heard that peach wine often lacks in body, so I'm hoping that the variety can add some complexity that it might otherwise lack. I de-stoned and chopped the peaches into small chunks. Then they went into the blender with a little bit of water. To the peach mush, I added sugar and topped up to 3-1/2 gallons. (The volume was determined by how many pounds of peaches I had.) Additives went in, and a lot of stirring to aerate. Pitched 1 packet of Lalvin EC-1118 as recommended by the LHBS.

I followed the basic recipe in the "Enjoy Home Winemaking" book/pamphlet given to me at my LHBS. 

Indecisive Peach Wine

Must

2.678 lbs Henrietta Farms Yellow Peaches 

3.428 lbs Central Market Yellow Peaches

2.266 lbs Sprouts White Peaches

7.5 lbs white table sugar

Additives

3.5 tsp Yeast Nutrient

5.25 tsp Acid Blend

7 tsp Pectic Enzyme

.75 tsp Wine Tannin

4 Campden Tablets

Yeast

1 packet Lalvin EC-1118 

Notes

Brewed 7/24/12

Collected 3.5 gallons total must

OG 1.100