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logic250

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My wife bought me a wine making kit for a valentines day gift. I thought it would be cool to try and make some dandelion wine. I picked a million of the flowers, followed a recipe I got on line. I started the process in a fermenting bucket, then transferred the liquid to a carboy with a vapor lock. it never cleared and today I decided to bottle it. I tasted some of what was left in the carboy and it was sweet, very sweet seemed to be high alcohol and maybe smelled like vinegar. My question is this; should I uncork the four bottles I got out of it, add a few gallons of water with some yeast and see if I can salvage it or just toss it?
 
Perhaps you need to tell us what recipe you followed, what steps you took, what you added, etc. Also any specific gravity readings would be useful.
 
I guess I can copy and paste a link to the recipe I used. I did not take any specific gravity measurements as I don't know how that would have changed what I was doing which was nothing really but watching the car boy hoping it would clear.
 
Hi Logic,

The hydrometer is important, both at the start of fermentation, and at the end, so that you know the potential alcohol, how well your yeast is going to do, and when to do (and not to do) various steps.

Recipes should really be considered just guidelines, and if you stick with this hobby you will learn how recipes vary and what sorts of things need to be checked to assure that the recipe will work.

For example, in this recipe, which is for one gallon of wine, you have 2.65# of sugar. By my calculations, this yields a SG of 1.101 and alcohol of 13.6, which some might consider pretty high for dandelion wine. That could explain the sweetness, or it could explain high alcohol, but it is hard to know without any SG readings.

Also, it looks like this recipe has the wine going straight into bottles to complete the fermentation, which is unconventional.

If this were my wine, and it smelled of vinegar, I'd toss it. If not, I'd put it back in a carboy and get a SG reading and go from there.
 
Thank you. I hate to toss it because it was so labor intensive. But lesson learned. Thanks again.
 
That recipe does not advise you what yeast to use. What yeast did you use? If you chose an ale yeast it may not have had the tolerance to ferment all that sugar. I agree with Stressbaby: you never really want to toss a wine unless it has gone irredeemably rotten. Even vinegar has its uses - but dandelion wine does not smell or taste like grape wine an if it is sweet then I don't think that you have vinegar. I think you may have a stalled fermentation and if I were you I would get hold of an hydrometer (if you don't have one they cost less than $10) and check the specific gravity of your wine. It should be close to 1.000 If it is significantly higher - say 1.010 or even higher then the wine has not finished fermenting and if the problem is with the yeast then you may want to buy another yeast (in this case a "killer" yeast, say EC -1118) and try to restart the fermentation. Now, if the gravity is above 1.030 I would add some nutrients to the wine (called DAP) but if you cannot get hold of nutrients you can simply take a teaspoon of baker's yeast add to a cup of water and boil that mixture. This will kill the yeast and the dead yeast cells will provide the nitrogen and other matter that the living cells need.
The recipe you used does not advise aeration but yeast really need oxygen to bud and reproduce. If the gravity is around 1.030 I would perhaps take a whisk - sanitize it - and whip some air into the wine. If the gravity is at 1.010 or lower then I might forgo that exercise

To restart it you need to use something like this approach -
1. make a small (say 1 cup) starter for the yeast (I might use apple juice - without preservatives!) but you want to make that starter in the fermenting bucket.
2. Once you can see that the yeast has become active you add 1 cup of your stalled wine and watch to see if that continues to ferment. (I would check with my sanitized hydrometer).
3. After a couple of hours I would then add 2 cups from the stalled wine (you are always working with the starter and doubling its volume).
4. Repeat this every couple of hours until all the stalled wine has been added to the starter.

Using flowers that you have picked to make a wine is a fairly labor intensive first wine to make. But most wine making does not need to be nearly as labor intensive. For example, if you go to your market and pick up a gallon of fruit juice - mango, pineapple, cranberry, pomegranate, orange, just as long as they do not have any preservatives in them you can add (pitch) yeast and ferment out all the fruit sugars. The same applies to honey wine (you simply dilute the honey to bring the gravity down to about 1.090 - which means about 2.25 - 2.5 lbs of honey to make a gallon of mead (you add water or apple juice) .
Good luck!
 
Ahh! Great advice! I'm going to give that a try!! What have I got to lose. I did use a white wine yeast at the advice of a local home brew shop.
 

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