grape fruit wine - Question on yeast?

[astebbi1]

It was referring to an escort ad. Was pointing out something inappropriate. But ya I see how it's misleading now

Ooooh that makes a lot of sense now, sorry i didnt realize what was going on.. Hah kind of a funny mistake on my part..

 

[Coldone]

My guess is that if you need an "Escort Service", this is not the forum you'd be looking at. Maybe C's history shows promise for winemaking, however, his promotion of an Escort Service in not appropriate here. Maybe he was sniffing his must, or pre-sampling his fermenter and looking for a cab.

Overall, I forgive him.........

Aaahh!!!! Lmao!! I wasn't promoting an escort service!! I was pointing it out!! Err.. Oh boy.. To funny!

Thanks for the forgiveness

 

[ckassotis]

There are a lot of C's being thrown around here! Was the escort post also by a "C" guy? Can't say as I recall. What a bundle of fun this has created, haha.

 

[RCGoodin]

Escort Guy

Yeah, it was someone's name that started with a "C". They deleted it already.

It was a huge post that repeated promotions of an Escort Service. The Escort Service text was in blue, which was a link to somewhere. I'm a simple wine guy so I didn't go there.

 

[ckassotis]

Sorry I've been kind of crazy busy here this week. What's the progress on this? Did you end up getting it going? Did you throw yourself in and drink your way out?

 

[RCGoodin]

Sorry I've been kind of crazy busy here this week. What's the progress on this? Did you end up getting it going? Did you throw yourself in and drink your way out?

Hey CK, how are you? I finally gave up and let it go. I've been reading a lot and will try again. I'd rather try something and fail, than to have never tried it.

I need a bigger bucket to be able to jump in and I'm a diabetic, so that much sugar would have put me over the top. I'm afraid I would have pooped a sugar free candy bar while in a coma.

I surely appreciated your feedback and please join me on my next post. I am going to try grapefruit again and blackberry in the near future.

Right now I have a Choc Orang Port in a carboy, ready to bottle next week. I have three primaries going; an ice wine, a Cab and a Malbec. They are all cheap Amazon buys that look like they have potential. Adding oak to the reds when they quit perculating.

Thanks again..

 

[tonyandkory]

Haha, that is always a possibility! So high acid is sometimes the problem when you have pure fruit musts. However, with the addition of a decent amount of water, that is rarely the issue. The issue should pretty much always be low acid in this case. So if you get a pH meter, you might see high values (should be ~3.2-3.5) but you might have a value up towards 4 or 5. Acid would bring it back down to the right place. Calcium carbonate can be used to do the reverse, but that shouldn't be a problem.

I am not sure that is entirely accurate either.
I just finished a batch of water base wine.

here were the ingredients
4 pounds of sugar.
yeast nutrient.
Lalvin-E118
water to one gallon.

Fermented to 18% in just a couple days.
I wouldn't think there would be any acid in this at all.

 

[Espoir]

Not sure if this helps, but when I made my grapefruit juice, I made a yeast starter using apple juice probably around 1 Liter of starter. Now its turned out pretty good

Maybe you should have done a starter with the grapefruit juice but add some calcium carbonate. I think grapefruit is almost as acidic as orange juice.

 

[ckassotis]

Sorry that it didn't work out! Wish I could have helped more. I like the comment below about the apple juice starter. It's little comments like that that prove super useful in some of these fruit wines, in my experience. Like I said previously, definitely go with a starter in the future if you didn't over the course of this attempt. It will universally help get fermentation started in hard-to-ferment musts.

Hmm.. interesting. Didn't realize it was so acidic. So a really high pH would definitely inhibit fermentation starting, which is why it is important to test pH/TA as you can. As for tony, that is somewhat correct. High acid will inhibit the start of fermentation, but you won't see the same with low acid. A must that is low in acid will ferment fine very likely, but is much more prone to spoilage than a normally acidic must. So your water wine will have started up fine, but will not have the shelf life of a normal wine, unless you really loaded it up with sulfites to account for the lack of any acid. At that level I can't say the sulfites necessary would not provide an off-taste either.

 

[tonyandkory]

ckassotis I totally agree about the spoilage problem..... after fermentation I added lemon juice.... Kinda a reverse skeeter pee.
now the acid is in acceptable range and I didn't have any problems with fermentation. we'll see how this turns out after it clears again.

 

[RCGoodin]

Thanks guys. I will use a starter next time and I have the acid testing kit. Your comments add to my knowledge and makes more since now than it did when I first tried.

I am starting a blackberry port this weekend and then back to the grapefruit. I bought a cute little 2 gallon fermenting bucket. It will work great for my future 1 gallon batches. I can buy apple cider in a one gallon glass jug, so I'm cool on the equipment, it's the chemical maze I need the most help. I'll keep you posted and thanks again.