Making Fruit Wine

[lockwood1956]

Fruit wine (in this case Blackcurrant)

Adapted from BushcraftUK.com



Day 1

large bucket of blackcurrants



They are fantastically ripe and plump - great for wine, but they won't last too long. So get them prepared as soon as you can
Preparing the Must

Day 1

In wine making terms the "must" is the mushed up grapes or whatever we are going to make wine out of. Its the first stage in our process.

To prepare the must, I will need a couple of large buckets. Everything I use is either food grade white plastic of glass. Don't be tempted to use dustbins etc. - the colour and other nasties can leach out and spoil the wine.

I weighed the bucket of blackcurrants and found I have about seven pounds in weight. I need about 3lbs of fruit for each gallon of wine so i'll make two gallons (12 bottles). I'll need for the first part a brewing container at least twice that volume. I have some 5 gallon beer brewing containers, so I'll use one of those.

First thing is to sanitise everything I use - one bit of nasty will ruin the whole batch. There are proprietary sanitiser, or you can use baby bottle sterilising fluid. I use a cup of plain unscented bleach in 5 gallons of water. I'll leave that in the brewing container for half an hour and wash it out well (twice) before using it

NOTE
Things that are sold as sterilisers are in fact sanitisers, we cannot sterilise (100% germs gone=sterile) , we cannot get things that clean so we sanitise (99% of germs gone)

Next stage is to pick over the black currants and remove any bad ones, stalks, leaves etc. - I ended up with a bit over 6lbs of fruit so I weigh out 6 lbs and eat the rest. They should look like this




I put all those berries into a large, sanitised fine mesh straining bag that looked like this




We tie up the top of the bag with plain white cooking string




For each fruit you need to adjust the recipe for whats needed. In this case, we will add 6lbs of sugar. Blackcurrants are high in tannin so none is neded (if it was we could add grape tannin from a home brew shop or a cup of strong tea or a couple of oak leaves). Blackcurrants are also high in acid (which the mix needs to be for the yeast to work). If we needed to increase acidity, we could add brewers acid blend or orange juice. We do need to add some nutrients for the yeast to live on - 1 vitamin B1 tablet per gallon will do

Now we crush up the berries using our hands or a sanitissed potato masher (inside the bag).

Next we add the sugar to 6 pints of boiling water and make sure the sugar all dissolves, allow to cool to 21 deg C and pour over the berries, mashing again to pulp them up as much as possible.




Now another 10 pints of cold water to bring the temperature down

Finally we are going to kill off any wild yeast present (which can ferment oddly and leave a funny taste). To do this we will add 1 crushed Campden tablet per gallon. We will then leave it for 24 hours.


Removing Pectin

Day 2

The liquid is really changing colour now and all the wild yeasts have been killed out. There is one more optional step to do before we start this stuff fermenting and that is to remove pectin. Pectin is a natural ingredient of many fruits - its the stuff that makes jam set. It also makes your wine cloudy and a bit of a pain to clear.

To get rid of it we'll add a teaspoon of a natural enzyme call pectolase. We'll give that 24 hours to remove all the pectin and while we wait we will start a yeast culture and get fermenting!

Heres how our wine is looking today




It smells quite a bit stronger today and quite "woody" - that will change over time though - going a nice colour though.

[lockwood1956]

Starting Fermenting

Day 3

the must is prepared, any wild yeast and pectin have been removed that may make our wine cloudy. Time to get fermenting. Now we could slug about 5g (a teaspoon full) of any old yeast into the must and hope for the best. But we’re going to do this properly.

So to do get fermenting we need a “starter culture”. That in effect is some living yeast that is already converting sugar to alcohol and CO2. We’ll make that by adding some dried wine yeast to an organic sugar bearing liquid. That’s easy – we’ll put a cup of apple juice in a large glass. Its important to let it come up to room temperature before adding the yeast

You may wish to get this starter going on day one and have it really fizzing by day three



Once that’s happened we’ll take a sachet of fresh wine yeast and add it to the Apple juice.



In an emergency you can use any yeast but proper wine yeast is best. It imparts a better flavour (there are a variety of types that work slightly differently) Your yeast will not only consume sugar and produce as outputs alcohol and CO2, it will also reproduce. A lot. This in effect makes a sludge. A sludge at the bottom of your barrel is easy – just siphon off the nice clear liquid from on top. Floating sludge (or worse yet suspended sludge) is the brewers enemy. So proper wine yeast it is. We empty the wine yeast in and mix well to produce a cloudy liquid. Now we leave it for anything up to a couple of hours. You will see why in a bit.






From the top there are the following –
1) a hydrometer,
2) a measuring jar
3)a “wine thief”.

All complicated stuff right? Wrong! Lets look at what’s here

1) a weight on a stick
2) a jar
3) a big old turkey baster

A hydrometer sinks a different amount into different “thicknesses” of liquid. It has a scale on. Water reads 1.000 on that scale at 60 degrees F. As you dissolve sugar in the water it becomes “thicker” and the hydrometer sinks less and reads a higher number. Using this you can measure the specific gravity. What is great is that alcohol is not as “thick” as water. So as your must ferments, you can tell how much sugar has fermented into alcohol. By measuring the specific gravity (thickness) at the start and end, you can work out how much alcohol is in your wine and when fermentation has finished.

SEE HERE

So we use our wine thief to suck up some must. This prevents grubby hands and gunk contaminating our must. When we move into narrow necked fermenting vessels later its just plain easier too.



We squirt that liquid into the measuring jar, lower the hydrometer in ..give it a spin to remove CO" (which would affect the reading) and read off the specific gravity. In this case its 1.101. Write that down because we’ll need it in a few weeks. What we have now done is measured exactly how much sugar is in the mix – the total of the fruit sugars already present and the sugar we added.




Pour the sample back in the fermenting vessel.(some people throw it away...but at the very least drink it!)

[lockwood1956]

Yeast starter going nicely



The froth is carbon dioxide bubbles caused by the yeast fermenting the sugar. See how much there is? Our wine will do that too. If we did the first stage of fermenting in a demi-john, the wine would froth up all over the place! So we do the initial (primary) fermentation in a large vessel (bucket) with a big gap in the top (headspace). When its all calmed down, we will use galss containers with small headspace and an airlock. More of that later, but if you remember when we sized the primary fermenting vessel, we went for one at least twice as big as the volume of liquid – now you know why.

So, we have measured our original gravity and we have a starter culture – lets pour the starter culture in and give it a mix.





Finally, we need a lid. Partly to keep our must clean, but also to keep out vinegar flies. These nasty little brutes are attracted to fermenting liquids and they fall into it. Vinegar flies carry bacteria that will turn your wine into vinegar (hence the name). Now we could put a hard lid on. Trouble is as the gas (CO2) builds up, it will blow the lid off. In secondary vessel, we will use an airlock, but in primary fermentation too much gas is produced in the early stages for the airlock to cope with. So we fit a close fitting lid, but do not seal tightly




Secondary Fermentation Vessel

Day 7



Well, the first violent fizzing is slowing down so its time to pop our must into the large bottles we’ll finish off the fermentation in (demijohns).



The first think is to get rid of the fruit in the straining bag. Warning – blackcurrant stains to all get out. So, we carry the whole primary fermenter out to the compost heap. We remove the lid, lift out the bag and let it drip. Don’t squeeze (squeezing forces the mush through the mesh of the straining bag and its hard to get rid of).



This is what the must now looks like. You’ll see some little clumps of material – this is a combination of yeast and tiny blackcurrant particles – we’ll get rid of them in a bit. The little ripples are CO2 rising up



So, lid back on and we carry the primary fermenter back in and set it up on the kitchen counter. Now we’ll see a good reason for using a beer brewing vessel – it has a tap on the bottom. We fit a bit of sanitised plastic pipe on the tap (run in under the hot tap first to soften it). This rig makes getting the must into the demijohns much easier.

[lockwood1956]

Now, to strain out any large bits, we’ll put a nylon tea strainer into a funnel. We then fill the demijohns through this set up




On the left we have an air lock, on the right a rubber bung sized to fit the neck of the demijohn. It has a whole through it the size of the stem of the airlock.
Put the airlock into the bung BEFORE inserting it into the demijohm otherwise there is a danger of pushing the bung into the demijohn. (bben there...done that)




We put enough water into 1/3 fill the airlock – it should look like this




We gently press the bung into the neck of the demijohn, enough to make an airtight seal. It should look like this




Fairly quickly the CO2 will force its way up the stem of the airlock. As it passes the bottom of the curve (see photo) a bubble of CO2 will rise through the water and, with the pressure relieved, the water drops back to the bottom. The pressure builds again and so on.

Winemakings nicest noise...bloop bloop bloop bloop

[lockwood1956]

Finally I rig a light proof jacket up for both demijohns out of brown paper. They are going to sit on my windowsill for a few weeks now and I don’t want the light to bleach that lovely dark colour out. Alternatively you could place the demijohm in a dark place.

Once ferment is finished...S.G. below 1.000 (better still 0.090) then we can proceed to degass, stabilise and clear, rack and then age before bottling



This part of fermentation (in secondary vessel) takes about a month. Can be more or less dependant on temperature. As it slows down, we will siphon the wine into a fresh demijohn leaving any sludge behind (racking off). Once the fermentation stops, we will clear the wine, stablise it (to stop any further fermentation) and sweeten if we want to. We’ll then put it through a wine filter for a final polish, cork it into sterilised bottles, label and seal it.