Pass This Over
The next batch of DIY Brewing is under way. This is the first Bigger Batch of Wine! – Black cherry Concord Grape – Passover type wine. the link is to Photobucket… it works (click upon the title to got the link…the arm hand thingie) on this old crater of an xp machine and was taken by an android phone.
9 juices – grape “” frozen from concentrate
Walmart “harvest” something or other brand which is a blend of corn syrup apple and grape juices citric acid but otherwise no dreaded sodium benzoate.
2 quarts of JUST black cherry juice from the shelf stable aisle
Monotrachet yeast
2.5 lbs of sugar – granulated lregular white likely beet sugar.
this has an additional 3/4 gallon of water and later will receive another gallon or four more quarts of black cherry juice.
The blogs I read say I can expect 3 to 8 weeks of fermentation. I so far have neglected the campden tablets and also the yeast nutrient…oops.
I was good enough to sanitize after cleaning the vessels of which I’ve four on loan but need only this and a second to rack into as in avoid the extra yucky yeast on the bottom and let the wine “clear” this was achieved by taking a hot as I can stand bubble bath and swishing a long scrubby bent to scrub all I could – this is because water weighs just over eight pounds per gallon and if i have six and a half gallon vessels I would be maneuvering well over fifty pounds of wet glass…. pardon me for wishing to live 😉 after the bath outside the bottles were rinsed twice and filled with 200 ppm bleach solution to sanitize them…however the haha of that was I had to do this in the mud so this defeated the bottles from being outward side clean lol…yes I wiped them down but still hahaha. since all my stoppers were disgusting I had to put plastic wrap over the tops and cork them with the yucky stoppers til use. this is clean and sealed but not confidence boosting.
costs are, carboys are sixty dollars apiece if broken but otherwise on loan; the stoppers and brewing stuffs like campden tablets of the potassium metabisulfate variety is 20 cents worth; the universal stopper with hole for fermentation lock roughly fifty cents a crack; the fermentation lock is 2 and a half dollars; siphoning tube is roughly 2 bucks; the blended frozen juice without impairing preservatives is one dollar a 48 oz prepared container of concentrate *Harvest, at Walmart and the shelf stable black cherry juice *JUST was four dollars per quart (32oz;) there is more bottles of the bc juice to go but I’ll get there. this leaves just under 40 dollars total a five ish gallon 4 upon racking off batch – as I have difficulty with this step. I thus expect @ 750ml wine bottles to five times four or about 20 bottles worth of product to save and plenty for taste test and l stage filtering off as many of the sediments I can.
the ultimate taste GOAL or “style” is a medium to lighter body wine than the cloying typical syrup of Passover wine with the brewed but also fresh tones of juice… or a Michigan table sweet type taste.. with roughly as intended to be handled as in juice in after main fermentation of 20%roughly 1-% alcohol by volume. assuming…have fun with that word… that Montrachet yeast bubbles all that sugar it can to 13% about it’s limit of alcohol and co2 production before it cant do any more.
the dandelion wine slowly clears. when it sufficiently does so I may age it with wood and perhaps some pink peppercorns if it still has that spicy bitter woodier tast note I think it did. depending on clarity….
Both wine batches might be serviceable by late fall.
five gallon beer kits are about 30-40 ish dollars. One of my roommates is uncomfortable with the idea of whiskey production…especially the home distillation… hot pressurize flammable ? Iiiiieee! *please note i can choose to ignore this concern but I can do so ignoring a paying customer….um nah.
almondcoffeed 
