Shayne Edwards
Senior Member
- Joined
- Apr 27, 2018
- Messages
- 139
- Reaction score
- 68
Finishing off my attempt at Tea Wine, as usual made a few mistakes along the way. Mainly misjudged sugar quantity and had to split the batch and add more tea solution to the must to bring it down to something manageable.
10 litres of it had rosella and Granny Smith apple juice added and was under control, finished dry and tasted great, in a few more months I will decide whether to back sweeten or not.
The remaining 26 litres still had way too much sugar and the poor little EC-1118 struggled a bit. I was fairly certain that I would finish with residual sugar and it tasted like some more acid would be needed to balance it, after advice from here I added tartaric acid to taste.
Then in a moment of absolute madness or brilliance, you decide, I cranked up the acid some more until it was a little “mouth puckering”.
Why? I hear you ask. The answer is, because i don’t know any better and I was staring at the mango tree, covered in flowers, in my back yard thinking I would make a heap of mango syrup to add back to the wine when completed.
Yesterday, I racked off the secondary after giving it a bentonite treatment. With the little bit of tea wine left over I added an ice cube and some commercial mango nectar juice. It bought the alcohol back down to a manageable level and balanced with the extra acid perfectly leaving just a hint of tanin on the palate after swallowing.
To say it was delicious is an understatement, this stuff on a warm summer’s afternoon will be absolutely dangerous, stopping at one glass or even one bottle is going to be a bloody challenge.
Now I’m wondering if I should try adding mango syrup to a couple of bottles at bottling time and see how it goes in terms of drinkability?
10 litres of it had rosella and Granny Smith apple juice added and was under control, finished dry and tasted great, in a few more months I will decide whether to back sweeten or not.
The remaining 26 litres still had way too much sugar and the poor little EC-1118 struggled a bit. I was fairly certain that I would finish with residual sugar and it tasted like some more acid would be needed to balance it, after advice from here I added tartaric acid to taste.
Then in a moment of absolute madness or brilliance, you decide, I cranked up the acid some more until it was a little “mouth puckering”.
Why? I hear you ask. The answer is, because i don’t know any better and I was staring at the mango tree, covered in flowers, in my back yard thinking I would make a heap of mango syrup to add back to the wine when completed.
Yesterday, I racked off the secondary after giving it a bentonite treatment. With the little bit of tea wine left over I added an ice cube and some commercial mango nectar juice. It bought the alcohol back down to a manageable level and balanced with the extra acid perfectly leaving just a hint of tanin on the palate after swallowing.
To say it was delicious is an understatement, this stuff on a warm summer’s afternoon will be absolutely dangerous, stopping at one glass or even one bottle is going to be a bloody challenge.
Now I’m wondering if I should try adding mango syrup to a couple of bottles at bottling time and see how it goes in terms of drinkability?
