Hi Guys,
Ok so today was the big day. We went to pick up the grapes today and came back with 33 legs. We did 11 of cab sav, 11 of merlot and 11 of zin. We had them crushed and destemed at the store and then combined them into 3 large primary fermenters once we brought them home. First thing I did was check the sugar content with my refractometer. It read 23.6% brix. That works out to 12.3% alcohol. We were fine with that so we carried on. Now the problem came. Next we checked the TA. I did the TA test and it came up at 0.2. From what I read we need to be at 0.6-0.9 so we were well short. Obviously we need to make an adjustment with tartaric acid. I just want to check the dosage cause it seems like a lot! If I aim to increase by 0.5 to have a total TA of 0.7 I believe I need quite a bit of TA. I used the forumla 1g/L adjust TA 0.1%. I have 3 primaries that are filled to 165L each. Based on that forumla I need 825g of TA for each primary. Thats almost 3kg of TA!!!! That seems like a crazy amount. Can someone check and make sure I'm doing this correctly. I've dont the TA test twice now and came up with the same results both times.
Matt
Ok so today was the big day. We went to pick up the grapes today and came back with 33 legs. We did 11 of cab sav, 11 of merlot and 11 of zin. We had them crushed and destemed at the store and then combined them into 3 large primary fermenters once we brought them home. First thing I did was check the sugar content with my refractometer. It read 23.6% brix. That works out to 12.3% alcohol. We were fine with that so we carried on. Now the problem came. Next we checked the TA. I did the TA test and it came up at 0.2. From what I read we need to be at 0.6-0.9 so we were well short. Obviously we need to make an adjustment with tartaric acid. I just want to check the dosage cause it seems like a lot! If I aim to increase by 0.5 to have a total TA of 0.7 I believe I need quite a bit of TA. I used the forumla 1g/L adjust TA 0.1%. I have 3 primaries that are filled to 165L each. Based on that forumla I need 825g of TA for each primary. Thats almost 3kg of TA!!!! That seems like a crazy amount. Can someone check and make sure I'm doing this correctly. I've dont the TA test twice now and came up with the same results both times.
Matt