PawsAlaMode
Junior
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2015
- Messages
- 13
- Reaction score
- 4
I just wanted to formally introduce myself, since I have already posted in the Beginners Wine Making thread. 
I am Sue, a wife/mother/homemaker, I breed Persian cats for show, and I am a hobby gardener, always looking for new ways to preserve my harvests. I don't actually grow much fruit at this time, except the varieties which I generally juice, but I do have a variety of produce I like to ferment, can, or freeze.
I became interested in making fruit wines after a successful attempt at carbonated hard lemonade. This was followed shortly thereafter with a desire to learn to make fruit wines. I love wine, especially red blends and merlot, and thought this might be a fun endeavor.
After starting two 5 gallon batches of fruit wine, I realized I had overfilled the primary fermenter of strawberry wine, as it rose to the top and overflowed, so I pulled a quart of liquid off and put in in the fridge, thinking I might use it to back sweeten the batch later. Meanwhile, I got the notion to try making Korean sake, after trying a friend's homemade peach sake and loving it! Sake is a fast project, a week in summer temps and viola! But it is dry and not sweet at all, so I got the crazy notion to use the quart of strawberry starter to sweeten it. It was lovely, creamy and sweet and fruity. And I thought it would be lovely if it were carbonated, so into my swing top bottles it went. Late that night, there was a terrifying explosion. My children and I ran downstairs to find two bottles (left on the counter, now on the floor) had exploded. We cleaned up the bulk of the mess with great trepidation, and I decided to "vent" the other bottles and rebottle into something less dangerous than glass.
The first bottle I popped open hit the ceiling like a geyser, literally expelling the entire contents of the bottle onto my ceiling and evenly distributing the fluid onto every surface of my rather large kitchen. Which deterred me from opening the other bottles, so I gently put the bottles into a bucket and moved them into the backyard. The next bomb exploded within the hour. The remaining three are still out there, two weeks later. I'm not sure what to do with them. Maybe the hot sun killed the yeast, but somehow I'm still terrified to open them, or even move them to the trash can.
It took a week to remove the traces of strawberry sake from my kitchen. I know it was the excess sugar in the strawberry must that did it, and I knew it as soon as I saw the bottle bomb explosion, but I'm rather leery of carbonating anything again until I have a better understand of the process. I have a third batch of hard lemonade in the fridge at the moment, but I can't open it. In my mind's eye, I can't unsee the geyser of sticky doom that overtook my kitchen.
So I'm hoping regular fruit wine will be a bit more rewarding and less perilous!
Anyway, here I am, hoping to learn, and find camaraderie in this new hobby.
I am Sue, a wife/mother/homemaker, I breed Persian cats for show, and I am a hobby gardener, always looking for new ways to preserve my harvests. I don't actually grow much fruit at this time, except the varieties which I generally juice, but I do have a variety of produce I like to ferment, can, or freeze.I became interested in making fruit wines after a successful attempt at carbonated hard lemonade. This was followed shortly thereafter with a desire to learn to make fruit wines. I love wine, especially red blends and merlot, and thought this might be a fun endeavor.
After starting two 5 gallon batches of fruit wine, I realized I had overfilled the primary fermenter of strawberry wine, as it rose to the top and overflowed, so I pulled a quart of liquid off and put in in the fridge, thinking I might use it to back sweeten the batch later. Meanwhile, I got the notion to try making Korean sake, after trying a friend's homemade peach sake and loving it! Sake is a fast project, a week in summer temps and viola! But it is dry and not sweet at all, so I got the crazy notion to use the quart of strawberry starter to sweeten it. It was lovely, creamy and sweet and fruity. And I thought it would be lovely if it were carbonated, so into my swing top bottles it went. Late that night, there was a terrifying explosion. My children and I ran downstairs to find two bottles (left on the counter, now on the floor) had exploded. We cleaned up the bulk of the mess with great trepidation, and I decided to "vent" the other bottles and rebottle into something less dangerous than glass.
The first bottle I popped open hit the ceiling like a geyser, literally expelling the entire contents of the bottle onto my ceiling and evenly distributing the fluid onto every surface of my rather large kitchen. Which deterred me from opening the other bottles, so I gently put the bottles into a bucket and moved them into the backyard. The next bomb exploded within the hour. The remaining three are still out there, two weeks later. I'm not sure what to do with them. Maybe the hot sun killed the yeast, but somehow I'm still terrified to open them, or even move them to the trash can.
It took a week to remove the traces of strawberry sake from my kitchen. I know it was the excess sugar in the strawberry must that did it, and I knew it as soon as I saw the bottle bomb explosion, but I'm rather leery of carbonating anything again until I have a better understand of the process. I have a third batch of hard lemonade in the fridge at the moment, but I can't open it. In my mind's eye, I can't unsee the geyser of sticky doom that overtook my kitchen.
So I'm hoping regular fruit wine will be a bit more rewarding and less perilous!
Anyway, here I am, hoping to learn, and find camaraderie in this new hobby.
