Grapefruit Wine Day 4: The many grapefruit rinds - plus peach wine update!

Jonee here. Sam's headed down to the big smoke for a few days and so I'm tackling the Grapefruit on my own this time. My turn I suppose. I've got a busy few days coming up, so I decided to knock out the potentially time consuming job of boiling the must, straining it (before adding the yeast this time) and then popping in the winemaking workhorse; the Yeast! - this time I'm using a 'Super Yeast' compound (mainly out of necessity, as Wilkinsons had run out of the regular wine yeast packets (is it me or are they running their stocks down? I hope they're still going to be getting home-brew products in) which is purported to aid clearing (making the finished product clearer) along with yielding a higher alcohol wine. This is only good news as far as I'm concerned! We're making wine after all, not fruit juice.

The purist in me would like to keep things simple and not use anything pre-made, but as I said, I didn't have much choice in the matter.

With the must boiled, strained and back in the fermenting barrel I decided to test the sugar levels using the hydrometer again. The sugar level was less than it had been when we tested it 4 days ago (it was now nearing the top of the blue 'Start Wine' band) which means that the wine would come out less alcoholic than we'd originally thought. I decided to add the remaining half bag of sugar to the mix and (almost on a whim) added about half a bottle of pure water to top the wine up to the 3 gallon mark. I'm not really sure why I did this, it just seemed cleaner somehow to have an exact amount of wine rather than something random. OCD? possibly. I tested the wine again with the hydrometer and it was acceptably close to the bottom of the blue band, indicating an ideal amount of sugar to be turned into a wine of reasonable potency.

I added the recommended amount of Pectolase (2 teaspoons) to the must (this is supposed to aid wine clearing also). This wine had better be CLEAR!

After it had cooled I added 3 heaped teaspoons of the 'Super Yeast Compound' as directed (1 heaped teaspoon per full gallon of wine must (this is probably why I felt compelled to engineer a round number earlier) and set the fermentation barrel to work under the stairs.

Temperature is a concern in the fermenting process, I hope it's warm enough for the little fellows to do their thankless work.

PEACH WINE UPDATE

While I was in the cupboard I pulled the Peach wine out and tested it with the hydrometer. It was out of the blue band

altogether and into the small red band above that, indicating that a lot of the sugar has been used up. It was reading about an S.G. (Specific Gravity) of 1.035 (remember that water has an S.G. of 1.00 and the larger the number, the denser/more sugary the solution is and therefore the lower down the hydrometer the reading will be. The target is to get the S.G. back to roughly a reading of 1.00 (the thick black line) Regardless of the maths involved, the hydrometer is showing that it's almost at the stage where it can be rated on a scale of sweet to dry. The longer you leave the yeast to do its thing, the more alcoholic it becomes, but also the dryer it is. Here's a hint; the wine can always be made sweeter later, but it can't be made more alcoholic, nor can it be made dryer, so we'll probably leave it to do its stuff for a good while yet.

In attempting to discover the alcoholic content of this premature batch of peach wine I refer to a formula that the wise wine lady gave us.
To figure it out accurately we would need the starting S.G. which we do not have, but I think we can assume that it was at least as low as the bottom of the blue 'Start Wine' band on the hydrometer, since we put in a similar amount of sugar as in the Grapefruit wine, only there was a lot less of the peach must. With that in mind we had a potential reading of 1.090 at the start (the bottom of the blue band) and a temporary end reading of 1.035.

So,

Start S.G. = 1.090
End S.G. = 1.035
means a drop of = 0.055

Here come the magic formula!

55 (divided by) 7.36 = 7.47% alcohol by volume.

At the moment the peach wine is at least 7.47% alcoholic by volume. I'm impressed so far, and will be following its progress with great interest! (to figure out the proof you need to multiply the 7.47% by 7-4ths. I don't know how to do this so I'll leave it to your capable brains)

P.S. even the wine lady didn't understand what the 7.36 (that you divide the S.G. difference drop with) represents. It's some mathsy/Sciencey thing that is better left to other, more capable people to think about. It works though. She assured us that it works.

Love you all.

Jonee.

Grapefruit Wine Day 1: The Bumper Box of Grapefruit

With a trip to the intimidating wine lady under our belts, we felt equipped to have a crack at a new batch of wine, altering our method slightly to accommodate the new information in our brains. As a guide, we're now using a combination of both this and this book, after wise wine woman assured us that "First Steps in Winemaking" is the only book to read for winemaking advice.

We popped to Aldi to have a look at what cheap fruit we could get our hands on, and hit the jackpot: we left the shop with a crate of 34 grapefruit, as well as a couple of extra bits for additional flavour. The fruit we bought gave us 7.5 litres of fruit juice, which we doubled with bottled water to get 15 litres of fruity liquid.

The main difference in our method was the use of a hydrometer, which measures all sorts of things about your fruity mess. Most importantly at this part of the process, it told us how much sugar to add to our juice to get a decent alcohol percentage later on. By far the best bit about the hydrometer is that it's all colour coded, so there seems to be no need to know what the numbers mean. I certainly don't. Nevertheless, our must had a pre-sugar level of 1.015 on the hydrometer (just below the thick black band). To ensure that there's enough sugar in there to ferment properly, you need a measurement that's nearer the bottom of the blue band. Once we'd added 2.5kg of sugar that measurement was 1.09, which was perfect.
To reiterate, I have no idea what those numbers mean. Just go with it.

Once the sugar was added and it was all measured and good, we popped all the skins and flesh back in the tub to sit for a week in the hopes that they'll somehow add to the flavour. It might work.

What we now have in the cupboard under the stairs (along with the peaches - don't forget them) is:

34 grapefruits
2 mangoes
6 oranges
3 lemons
7.5l water
2.5kg sugar

all mushed up into 15 (absolutely delicious) litres of soon-to-be wine. Watch this space.


Sam and Jonee

Day 13: The visit to the wise wine lady.

Today our winemaking adventures took an interesting turn, after we popped to Leyland to have a look around the homebrew shop.
We met a lady in the shop who, in exchange for a variety of winemaking products, liberated Jonee of much of his cash. She also took a great deal of time out of her day to tell us that almost everything we've done so far is absolutely wrong. She said a lot of things that I can't remember, but I'll try and summarise.

After a week of gently stewing, we needed to strain the fruity mixture and then add the yeast, I think. It is at that point that we also need to use a hydrometer to measure the density of the stuff - it is by doing this that we can approximate the alcohol content of the wine later on.

We went home and immediately tried to rectify our errors so far - hilarity ensued.


We tasted a little of the wine at this part of the process, and Jonee is keen for me to stress that it tasted lovely.
The nice lady also mentioned that all the old wine recipes - those more than 40 years old - are wrong, because they didn't know all the science back then. That's great news for us, because the recipe we're (loosely) following was written in 1978, 32 years ago. Still, we're expecting that it's not totally accurate, as we've realised.

We might start a new batch at some point - Jonee's been eyeing up some juicy pears...

Sam and Jonee

Day 9: Peach sponge and the big mess.

9 days after the initial peachy process, I got on with the winemaking (this time without Jonee. He's on holiday or something). What follows is a record of the day's events.

I extracted the peachy gloop from under the stairs, and opened her up. What I found was not pretty, but it was interesting. The mixture had settled, leaving a thick layer of mousse-like sediment on the top, with the liquid underneath. You can sort of see what I mean in this picture.

The benefit of the solid layer was that it was pretty easy to scoop out the suspicious-looking bits. Nothing was too suspect, but there were a couple of slightly discoloured patches I thought we'd be better off without, so they went in the bin. I'm sure it's fine. I gave it a good stirring, so you can't tell there was anything wrong.

I decanted the 10 litres of mixture into 4 pans - turns out I had just enough room - and proceeded to boil it all up to kill any cheeky yeasts and bacteria that had worked their way in. If you find yourself doing this, make sure there's enough room in the pans. I made quite a mess when the stuff started to boil over.



It worked out well though, as I had enough wine yeast for 9 litres of wine, and I reckon I lost about a litre to evaporation and over-enthusiastic stirring. I waited a few hours for the mixture to cool, popped the yeast in and put it back under the stairs. Job done.

Sam x

Day 1: The peachy gloop.

The first step on the road to home-made wine happiness was to avail ourselves of the necessary equipment. In this case, the necessary equipment turned out to be pretty much just one large fermentation barrel (perhaps a little too large). With the barrel purchased, we were ready to choose our fruit. After a little time browsing the market, we chose to make our wine out of peaches, because peaches are cheap. As it's our first go, we chose to make a (relatively) small amount, so we bought 6 punnets, which ended up giving us 4.9kg of peachy pulp, after being enthusiastically pushed through a food processor.


We added 2.2kg of white granulated sugar to the gloop and 4 litres of water, which left us with 10 litres of a mixture that looks remarkably like sick, but smells amazing. It's gone under the stairs for a week to have a sleep, but we'll wake it up a week from now for a bit of boiling and to introduce it to the yeast. Exciting times.

That's all for now!

Sam and Jonee

An introduction to the task at hand.

Today we decided to try and make wine. Inspired by Dolly Freed's 1978 book 'Possum Living: How to live well without a job and with (almost) no money', we popped out and bought the necessary bits and bobs, then set about making a fine peach wine.

We'll be making notes on our progress here, so do keep having a look to see how far we've got. It's a fairly long process, so updates may not be regular, but bear with us.


When we're not making wine, we're doing this. Have a look.