After 4 hours of searching and picking i came home with about 26 lbs of grapes and stems. Beautiful day to be in the woods.
Here's my recipe so far
;
26 lbs grapes
1 gal of spring water
2 tsp tannin
2 tbsp pectinase
1 tsp amalyze
1 gram of K-meta
3 lbs sugar
some medium american oak
3 tsp nutirent
30 grams of calcium carbonate
1 pack of 71b-1122 and one of EC 1118
I mashed all the grapes on the stems in a bucket using a 2x4. Then put the pulp in paint strainer bags and used the yellow mop bucket to squeeze the pulp. This yielded 1.5 gallons of thick almost black juice with SG of 1.085 and PH of 2.8. I added the gal of water and all the chemicals at this point, waited four hours and filtered some juice and got an SG of 1.050. Then added the sugar. The juice really smelled bad very herbaceous or foxy i guess, i mean really strong. However after 24 hours it was almost all gone and now 48 hours later it's pretty much gone, hopefully it all disappears. The ph is now 3.3. I plan on adding more sugar to get to 18% alcohol if possible so i can make port out of it. . Right now the juice looks pretty black. I pressed the frapes and fermented off the skins to keep the acid and tannin levels down.
I also made sure i wasn't picking any moonberries which look like grapes but are poisonous. that's about it, if anyone has any ideas to make it better let me know.
Here's my recipe so far
;
26 lbs grapes
1 gal of spring water
2 tsp tannin
2 tbsp pectinase
1 tsp amalyze
1 gram of K-meta
3 lbs sugar
some medium american oak
3 tsp nutirent
30 grams of calcium carbonate
1 pack of 71b-1122 and one of EC 1118
I mashed all the grapes on the stems in a bucket using a 2x4. Then put the pulp in paint strainer bags and used the yellow mop bucket to squeeze the pulp. This yielded 1.5 gallons of thick almost black juice with SG of 1.085 and PH of 2.8. I added the gal of water and all the chemicals at this point, waited four hours and filtered some juice and got an SG of 1.050. Then added the sugar. The juice really smelled bad very herbaceous or foxy i guess, i mean really strong. However after 24 hours it was almost all gone and now 48 hours later it's pretty much gone, hopefully it all disappears. The ph is now 3.3. I plan on adding more sugar to get to 18% alcohol if possible so i can make port out of it. . Right now the juice looks pretty black. I pressed the frapes and fermented off the skins to keep the acid and tannin levels down.
I also made sure i wasn't picking any moonberries which look like grapes but are poisonous. that's about it, if anyone has any ideas to make it better let me know.