Juice vs. Fruit

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Old Philosopher

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I have a question of juice-to-water ratios.

I started out with about 26# of Italian Plums (prunes) a couple days ago. I extracted as much juice as possible with dicing and a press. I ended up with 1.2 gallons of pure juice after making some jelly.

Does anyone have a recommendation on how much I can safely dilute this?
Would adding 3 gallons of water (for a total batch of 4 gallons) be too much?
Should it be closer to a 1:1 ratio?

:a1
 
Ok, this is just a shot in the dark, but:

If by recipes I've read, for 1 gallon total you use 22-24oz of concentrate, and as I've been advised on here you generally boil down juice to 1/3 of its volume to create a concentrate, I would then say that you would want to use 66-72 (or more, I'd likely use more) per total gallon, or at your minimum levels:

(72oz fruit juice)*x + (56oz water)*x = x gallons of wine

Again, I tend to overcompensate on fruit, so I'd likely go about 90+oz juice per gallon and adjust accordingly (with a little extra water to allow for lees/evaporation/etc). However, I've never made wine from concentrate or juice (planning to do a batch later this month, in fact), so someone else on here might bet better able to give a more experienced answer...
 
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Thanks for that.
This is straight juice from pressing and draining. It's not exactly concentrate, per se.
I guess I question boils down to whether 1.2 gal of juice is more than I need for a 4 gallon batch? I like to go heavy on the juice, like you do, to insure flavor and aroma, but if I could get more than 4 gallons out of this juice I'd like to. It's a royal pain to juice plums! After all the work, I'd like to get the most mileage possible.
BTW, the SG of the juice alone is 1.064.
 
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Thanks for that.
This is straight juice from pressing and draining. It's not exactly concentrate, per se.
I guess I question boils down to whether 1.2 gal of juice is more than I need for a 4 gallon batch? I like to go heavy on the juice, like you do, to insure flavor and aroma, but if I could get more than 4 gallons out of this juice I'd like to. It's a royal pain to juice plums! After all the work, I'd like to get the most mileage possible.
BTW, the SG of the juice alone is 1.064.

OP, I don't think you can get 4 gallons of wine out of the 1.2 g of juice you have, that sounds like you are diluting it down pretty far.

Hopefully Tom comes on, I believe he has some experience with plum juice. I'm sure he will know if you can dilute that much
 
I agree with Julie. Again, with no experience (yet) with straight juice, I'd say 1.2gallons is looking more like 2 gallons total of wine. Just from the math; you could try for more, but it'll likely be a bit weak on flavor.

You could possibly throw some of the jam you made into the must, or add water to it and boil it to make an f-pac for later? That's the extent of my theories at the moment so I'll leave it to the more experienced folk, but I'd definitely suggest going for a 2 gallon or so batch from that for what it's worth. Or add some grape concentrate to get more wine, but then it's not pure plum (but still could be quite good; I have an italian plum tree, and I will say that adding wine grape concentrate has given my plum port a much fuller flavor, though I did do both batches of wine with just plums)...
 
Thanks, folks.
I think I'm going add just 1 gallon of water. That way when I rack off the sediment at the 2nd racking, I'll have two honest gallons in the secondary. That will be less than a 1:1 with the water.
 
Thanks, folks.
I think I'm going add just 1 gallon of water. That way when I rack off the sediment at the 2nd racking, I'll have two honest gallons in the secondary. That will be less than a 1:1 with the water.

Good plan. Come back and post how it turns out!
 
OP,
I think you are right on. Add 1 gal of water then ust the winecalc to see how much sugar to add. When adding sugar remove from the fermentor and heat to dissolve the sugar.
FYI. I am making plum wine (6gal) from 40#'s of fresh plum. I would also add PE before adding the yeast.
 
The SG of the straight juice was 1.064.
After adding 1 gal of water, it was at 1.024.
I added 3# of sugar in a syrup made from the juice, and brought it up to SG 1.080.
I did a yeast starter with Premier Cuvee in 1 cup of the water/juice.
Yipes!
The SG went from 1.080 to 1.016 in 3 days! :<
It racked neatly into two secondary 1 gal jugs, under air locks.

I'll probably bottle it after stabilization. I have another 4 gallons of straight juice I need to get going.
 
The SG of the straight juice was 1.064.
After adding 1 gal of water, it was at 1.024.
I added 3# of sugar in a syrup made from the juice, and brought it up to SG 1.080.
I did a yeast starter with Premier Cuvee in 1 cup of the water/juice.
Yipes!
The SG went from 1.080 to 1.016 in 3 days! :<
It racked neatly into two secondary 1 gal jugs, under air locks.

I'll probably bottle it after stabilization. I have another 4 gallons of straight juice I need to get going.

What?
it will not be ready for bottling after you stabilize.
 
What?
it will not be ready for bottling after you stabilize.
Well...yeah. I would prefer to bulk age it, and let it clear in the 1 gal jugs. But my resources are limited. It wouldn't be the first time I had to let it clear in the bottles, and rack it to decanter.
 

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