May 2016 WOTM Club

This is open for anyone to join, at any time in May, by making a 1 gallon (or larger, for example, mine last month was 3 gallons) experimental batch. If you have never made it and want to call it an experiment, have at it.

Post your recipe, and all the steps you do.
We love pictures, so any you take will be greatly appreciated.
We hope that at the end of the month you will give us a breakdown on what you learned, what you could have done better, and what you did right.

I will post a summary of who participated and wine type in the beginning post.
Then we move on to the next month's club. Feel free to drop in occasionally and post updates as you move through the process of creating your wine.

In May 2017, we will all take our May 2016 experiment out for a spin and post our results in this thread. Of course, you don't have to wait until May of next year, but we like to give all of these wines a chance to grow up a bit. If yours turns out great, post it in the recipes section.
If not, feel free to open up and discuss what happened.

Some months we have a lot of people participate, and sometimes life catches up with us and we aren't able to ferment as much as we might like. Feel free to drop in, drop by, drop a comment, whatever.
We welcome questions and suggestions from participants and casual observers alike.

If you aren't participating in this months thread, feel free to share your thoughts and ideas for any WOTM wines you have planned for this year.

I got started a wee bit early on my May WOTM club.

I had it all planned out to do an herbal mead using the first herbs out of my garden this year.

Then Prince died, and I had to change it up. This is a mead that has been in my plans for awhile, but I was never really ready to make it until now.

She Drank a Raspberry Bochet (yes, cheesy, I know. DON'T CARE!)

16 oz frozen mixed berries
12 oz frozen raspberries
1 vanilla bean
1 quart, plus 1 cup honey
1 tsp pectic enzyme
1 tsp nutrient
1/2 tsp energizer
RC212 yeast
48 oz can of raspberry puree

First, honey was added to my crockpot to carmelize it. I also cut open and scraped out a vanilla bean, and threw all of it in the crockpot as well.
I tested the color every hour of cooking, picture shows the cook progression. This cooked for just about 8 hours. I cannot convey to you guys how incredible the honey tasted and smelled. It was amazing.

When the cook was complete, I added 3.5 quarts of boiling water, then added the frozen fruit.
After everything cooled down, I poured it into the primary and added 1 tsp pectic enzyme, 24 hours later I added the nutrient, energizer, and yeast.
Once the SG gets fairly low, I'll rack off the fruit then add the puree.

Jeri,
8 hours in the crock pot on what setting?

Stressbaby said:

Jeri,
8 hours in the crock pot on what setting?

Click to expand...

I put it on the lowest setting for my crockpot.

Ok, SG is at 1.02

I won't have time to rack this weekend, so I went ahead and racked it today, then added the raspberry puree.
As with last months peach puree, there was absolutely no change in the SG after adding.

Iced tea wine

Boil a large pot of water and steep 30 bags of tetley tea. Leave in water until cool.

Combine in pail with:
6 cans of welches white grape juice concentrate
2 bottles of Real Lemon juice
Sugar to desired SG

Let sit overnight (my thought process is that leaving it will burn off some of the preservatives in the lemon and grape juices...... Also... I didn't have yeast and the stores were closed!) as a side note: if ever you need 6 gallons of iced tea to serve at a party, this mix tasted amazing!

Combine with
2 tsp nutrient
1 tsp energizer
EC-1118 yeast.

Note: I did not add any tannin... Should have plenty from the tea!

This batch took off like a monster. Fermented below 1.010 within 2 days and is now racked.

The blend sound pretty wonderful.

I've been following the sweet tea wine thread.
It sounds fairly interesting and I'm wondering how it ends up tasting.
I've also heard yeast loves the tea and coffee wine/meads, due to all the caffeine in them.
Cool how caffeine revs up even simpler organisms.

Coffee... Wine....???!?!?!?!?!!!!

I know what my next batch is going to be!!

I want to do a cinnamon vanilla coffee mead!

I want to try a mead so badly but honey is very expensive... Even at farmers markets it would still be about $80 to make a 6 gallon batch.

The last price I got was $7.00 dollars a pound here in Maine. This was from
a bee keeping group.

Bill

Elderberry. I don't know if this counts as it is my second attempt but from my first batch of homegrown elderberries. And I am throwing in a wild card also.

11 pounds of frozen elderberries harvested last fall from the first fruit of of new bushes.
3 bags of frozen skins leftover from Petit Verdot kits
Water to bring the combined mess slightly above the 4 gallon line on the bucket.
About 5 tsp of acid blend
Yeast Nutrient.
Basically the Krauss recipe for elderberry with a slight volume modification and the Petit Verdot leftovers
Montrachet yeast. Slightly expired but life is short.

Norton said:

Elderberry. I don't know if this counts as it is my second attempt but from my first batch of homegrown elderberries. And I am throwing in a wild card also.

11 pounds of frozen elderberries harvested last fall from the first fruit of of new bushes.
3 bags of frozen skins leftover from Petit Verdot kits
Water to bring the combined mess slightly above the 4 gallon line on the bucket.
About 5 tsp of acid blend
Yeast Nutrient.
Basically the Krauss recipe for elderberry with a slight volume modification and the Petit Verdot leftovers
Montrachet yeast. Slightly expired but life is short.

Click to expand...

This sounds like it's going to be pretty interesting. I'm not very familiar with using actual grape skins. What do you think that will add to your wine?
I googled fresh elderberry wine recipes and one of the pages I visited said that elderberry does mimic some of the deeper red wines, such as petit verdot, so it sounds like you have a good palate for flavor there.

I really need to get off my duff and see about either finding some elderberries around here, or growing my own.
Supposedly they are hardy to zone 4, but I have never seen them around here anywhere.
And I go a bit nuts with dried elderberries, so I can only imagine what I would do with fresh.
I use them in all manner of beverages, I make a cold syrup with them, add them to wine, add them to cooking meats, etc.

I've been interested in making Pontak sauce as well, though I haven't done it yet.

Skins add a lot to reds. Body, tannin, etc. I had saved the skins from a few PV kits. In the past using skins of various grapes I had saved them after pressing to make a lighter version by adding water and sugar.. I thought I would add the used PV skins to a new kit to see if it helped any but never got around to it so I decided to throw them in with the elderberries. Oh, my yeast is 30 months out of date but I store them in the fridge. Another experiment!

Second-run on skins is going to be a theme for me this year.

Last year I made a first-run batch of blueberry, and then a second run hibiscus-blueberry using the blueberry skins. At this point the second-run is better than the original. My second run elderberry at 1 year is my wife's new favorite wine.

So this year I'm going to try second run wines using combinations of blueberry, elderberry, blackberry, maybe others.

Stressbaby said:

So this year I'm going to try second run wines using combinations of blueberry, elderberry, blackberry, maybe others.

Click to expand...

Oh man, we may have to work out a trade on one of these!

I'm doing ginger
3lbs fresh ginger root
4 bananas
~10lbs brown sugar
2 oranges
3 limes

Chop the ginger and slice the bananas and add to 3 gallon stock pot. Add peel and juice from oranges and lime to this mixture. Simmer on low for 25 mins. Add 7 lbs of sugar to ginger banana mixture to dissolve. Once dissolved turn off stove and let sit overnight. Create yeast starter (or don't, I get better results when I do) and pitch yeast in morning after you transfer to primary and top up to roughly 4 gallons. When the SG drops below 1.030 transfer to secondary. Invert remaining sugar and top up to 5 gallon.

@Jordania ,

Hi and welcome to our group!

Brown sugar and ginger is going to be an interesting flavor profile. Yum!
That's a lot of ginger though...are you worried about it having too much zing? Or is that what you are going for?
Will you strain your mixture after the boil, or ferment along with everything?

You may want to consider adding zest and juice from the citrus in secondary, just so it doesn't get completely covered up/lost in the ferment with ginger. Just a suggestion of course, as I haven't done it either way.

I can't wait to hear how this one turns out.

@Jericurl
I kept seeing this thread and I kept saying to myself -WOW Jericurl got the Women Of The Month again !
Took me another couple of minutes to figure it was WINE.

But if it was Women - I'm sure you would win

When I tried it the ginger wasnt very harsh more citrusy than anything that's why I added so much. I strained it before transferring to secondary. I think I might add some more orange zest per your recommendation and maybe a few cinnamon sticks. My mother loves cinnamon and ginger together, it reminds her of a candy she used to eat growing up.