Day 2 - 18/07/06
Righto, 24 hours have now passed.
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 then we'll 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 huh?
Day 3 - 19/07/06
Well, weve prepared a must, removed any wild yeast and pectin 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 were 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. Well make that by adding some dried wine yeast to an organic sugar bearing liquid. Thats easy well put a cup of orange juice in a large glass. Its important to let it come up to room temperature before adding the yeast (cold is the enemy of yeast).
Once thats happened well take a sachet of fresh wine yeast and add it to the OJ.
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) and it sinks. Bread yeast floats. 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.
We could go and get a brew on now (for our colonial cousins, getting a brew on is nothing to do with wine or beer its what we really call making a cup of tea). However we are going to be really fancy with this wine, so Im going to show you a few useful bits of kit.
From the top there are the following
1) a hydrometer,
2) a measuring jar
3)a wine thief.
All complicated stuff right? Wrong! Lets re-play whats 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 1000 on that scale. 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 amount of sugar. 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. Clever huh? 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 and read off the specific gravity. In this case its 1101. Well write that down cos well 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.
We pour the must back in the fermenting vessel.
Now we get a brew on. Its a warm day so well check our starter culture in half an hour .
Look at it now
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.
Now, you can skip all that stuff and just bung your yeast in its up to you leave out the fancy stuff if you want
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 fermentation, we will use an airlock, but in primary fermentation too much gas is sometimes produced for the airlock to cope with. So we fit a close fitting lide that has tiny holes melted in with a red hot needle (too fine for a vinegar fly to pass through). Thatll keep the little so and sos out
More when the initial violent fizzing stops!
Red
Righto, 24 hours have now passed.
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 then we'll 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 huh?
Day 3 - 19/07/06
Well, weve prepared a must, removed any wild yeast and pectin 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 were 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. Well make that by adding some dried wine yeast to an organic sugar bearing liquid. Thats easy well put a cup of orange juice in a large glass. Its important to let it come up to room temperature before adding the yeast (cold is the enemy of yeast).
Once thats happened well take a sachet of fresh wine yeast and add it to the OJ.
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) and it sinks. Bread yeast floats. 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.
We could go and get a brew on now (for our colonial cousins, getting a brew on is nothing to do with wine or beer its what we really call making a cup of tea). However we are going to be really fancy with this wine, so Im going to show you a few useful bits of kit.
From the top there are the following
1) a hydrometer,
2) a measuring jar
3)a wine thief.
All complicated stuff right? Wrong! Lets re-play whats 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 1000 on that scale. 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 amount of sugar. 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. Clever huh? 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 and read off the specific gravity. In this case its 1101. Well write that down cos well 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.
We pour the must back in the fermenting vessel.
Now we get a brew on. Its a warm day so well check our starter culture in half an hour .
Look at it now
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.
Now, you can skip all that stuff and just bung your yeast in its up to you leave out the fancy stuff if you want
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 fermentation, we will use an airlock, but in primary fermentation too much gas is sometimes produced for the airlock to cope with. So we fit a close fitting lide that has tiny holes melted in with a red hot needle (too fine for a vinegar fly to pass through). Thatll keep the little so and sos out
More when the initial violent fizzing stops!
Red
