2022-12-29 03:45:03.732727+01 by Dan Lyke 5 comments
Just so I can find it later: Whole lot of persimmon and pindo fruit into the wine vat, will add yeast tomorrow. We were gonna do the whole freezer full, but ran out of room with about half the fruit done, and we've still got a bunch of persimmons ripening, so we'll do another batch in a month or so. We have the carboys for it, I just need to figure out where to store them while they're aging.
[ related topics: Wines and Spirits ]
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#Comment Re: Just so I can find it later made: 2022-12-29 19:17:48.88049+01 by: stevesh
Any particular books or kits you can recommend to someone who wants to get in to home winemaking?
#Comment Re: Just so I can find it later made: 2022-12-30 21:57:22.791921+01 by: Dan Lyke
I started with The Beverage People fruit winemaking kit.
They have so many articles on how-to on their site that I could get lost there. I've been working off roughly their "fruit wines at home" recipe, though I think I've been skipping the tartaric acid so far (it went into the latest batch, I need to get more of it).
And we'll see when the batch currently in secondary fermentation finishes, but I think that the fruit we've done so far does better with like a month or two in the wine, rather than the 5-7 days they suggest.
I bought a couple of boxes of 375ml bottles, and corks, and then when I actually got to bottling realized that I had no way to get the corks in the bottles, so you'll either have to use stoppers that can be inserted without a corker (eg: those tapered corks with the wood or plastic tops, or something similar), screw or bail top bottles, or buy a corking machine. I bought a corking machine, it has a clamp that holds the bottle in place, jaws which squeeze the cork down, so bring the lever down to squeeze the cork, hold it there for 10-15 seconds, then press it into the bottle.
But, yeah, mostly we're just grabbing fruit from around the neighborhood, tossing it in a bucket with some yeast nutrient and a couple of crushed campden tablets (for the sulfites), waiting a day, adding yeast, waiting a month or so, siphoning that off into another vessel, waiting a few months, and bottling.
And learning from our fucking around, though we'd probably be doing more of that if we kept better notes.
#Comment Re: Just so I can find it later made: 2022-12-31 00:19:42.548474+01 by: stevesh
Thanks. I have access to a ton of free apples, so I thought I'd start there.
#Comment Re: Just so I can find it later made: 2022-12-31 06:17:44.265932+01 by: Dan Lyke
When I was a kid we just left the cider out overnight. As an adult if learned that we were particularly lucky about would yeasts, so just tossing some champagne yeast in apple juice and a few days or on the counter will give you a sweet bubbly. Especially if you cap the bottle.
#Comment Re: Just so I can find it later made: 2022-12-31 13:49:19.016519+01 by: DaveP [edit history]
I wrote a book on making mead which is fermented honey. Specifically, a few recipes (with techniques) on making mead with apple juice added which might be helpful.
I frequently used apple juice as a starter medium for yeast that were going to go into a mead, since honey is poor in yeast nutrients, and apple juice basically has everything the yeast need. If you have specific questions, I’ll be happy to answer them, either here or in the fediverse
@davepolaschek@bookstodon.com, though note that my feed is now busy enough that I sometimes miss things. Haven’t yet determined whether that’s due to my server, or a design issue in mastodon, or what.
Edited to add: I tended to use boiling for sanitation, rather than adding sulfites. Both are valid approaches,
but boiling is harder to screw up, and tends to get into the scratches in plastic fermenters, which can be a
perilous thing for newbies. I also sanitized all the equipment with bleach beforehand, as I strongly believed
that cleanliness was one of the most important parts of fermenting. Obviously, that’s not the only way to go, but I preferred to lose some aromas to the boiling over adding sulfites, which have their own issues with the taste of the finished product.
But overall, just keep in mind that people have been fermenting things for millennia. It’s not that hard, and it’s almost impossible to ferment something that will kill you without it smelling and tasting horrible. About the worst that can go wrong is getting vinegar, which isn’t all bad, and that’s pretty darned obvious.
Edited a second time to remove spurious newlines that were added in the editing process, breaking links and such. Ugh! Using an iPad if Dan wants to debug that…
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