Help! Can I save this mess?

[Old Philosopher]

Don't rush into bottling, give it a chance to clear. After the sediment has dropped out and the wine is clear rack off of the sediment into another carboy. Allow this to settle for a month or so. Again rack off the sediment (there will be a little) into a bucket then add one crushed camden tablet per gallon of wine. If you're going to sweeten it up then also add 1/2tsp of potassium sorbate per gallon to prevent it from fermenting again and then bottle it.

Thanks! I knew I came to the right forum!
Now, do you mean literally to siphon out the sediment, or to rack off the wine, leaving the sediment behind?

 

[Old Philosopher]

Can you hear it sizzling like a soda pop or anything to say its fermenting, any foam or anything.

Day 2, and it's bubbling away like a freshly poured glass of champagne. We'll see how the rest of the process goes.

 

[Sacalait]

Rack off the sediment leaving it behind. In racking you always siphon off the good stuff and discard the bad.

 

[Old Philosopher]

Rack off the sediment leaving it behind. In racking you always siphon off the good stuff and discard the bad.

My ignorance.... I need to learn the lingo. I would have racked off the wine (from the sediment).

Why is it rack, and not siphon?
Why is it must, and not...wait! I figured that one out! With everything mixed together, it's not juice, it's not berries, it's not mash, so it MUST be all three!

Why is the grass green and why am I still typing?

 

[Wade E]

M ust is when it is all mixed up and not fermenting. Once it has made some alc it is then called wine. Siphoning is the act of withdrawing a liquid while racking is the act of withdrawing and transferring into another veesel.

 

[Old Philosopher]

No need to worry about the lost week, just treat it as a new beginning. Without a hydrometer you're shooting in the dark. Depending on the temp. of the must it could be ready to transfer in as little as 3 days to as many as 7. With a hydrometer the transfer would take place when it reaches the 1.010 mark. If you don't get the hydrometer transfer to the secondary when the sizzling has died down to "almost" nothing.

Being the impatient sort, I tried the weight-to-volume approach to see if I could guess at the SG. I had to use very small quantities due to the size of my scale. I used a 1 Tbs measurement (14.787 ml). The crap that comes out of my faucet weighed in at 120 grains. The "wine" weighed 199.62 gr. Doing it this way says my SG is 1.6635!!! Then it dawned upon me that the whole process is flawed, because I'm also weighing whatever is in suspension at this time. Oh, well....I tried.

 

[Old Philosopher]

Is this Fleishmans yeast? Did it start to ferment? We treally need more info. You can read a hydrometer no problem, you can read a thermometer right, its that easy. Where ever it floats is the reading and if you plan on making wine you should get one or you are playing darts in the dark! Heres a what a hydro looks like and the specific gravity(sg) of this wine or must would be 1.072

Whoopee! Dionysus was smilin' on ME tonight! I decided to go out and dig through the shed where stuff has been stored for about 12 years. I was led to a little box that said, "Wine Making". It was a hand-me-down from my brother-in-law. Inside this little treasure box was about 3' of tubing, a mess of corks, 4 air-locks and.....a HYDROMETER!!!
This hydrometer has 3 different scales on it, but the SG scale reads differently from yours, Wade.
Mine goes:
999
1,000
10
20 (each numbered division has 5 tic marks, increments of 2)
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
1,100
10
etc...
Right now, my "brew" reads dead on 1010.
What is this really telling me, as far as where I am in the 1st fermentation? Is this the 1.01 reading Sacalait was talking about?

 

[Wade E]

make sure to put the decimal point where it should be as sometimes that can confuse us and lead us to give you the wrong info. Im pretty sure you mean 1.010 as its almost finished right? This one is pretty easy but others.

 

[Old Philosopher]

make sure to put the decimal point where it should be as sometimes that can confuse us and lead us to give you the wrong info. Im pretty sure you mean 1.010 as its almost finished right? This one is pretty easy but others.

No decimal places. It starts out at 990 and goes up. The must is sitting at that first big "10". (1010 must translate into 1.01, right?) BTW: the pH is around 4, if my papers are working.

 

[St Allie]

yes that translates as 1.010..

Allie

 

[Wade E]

Correct, that translates to 1.010 and a ph of 4 is a little high, do you have an acid tester as thats probably low and needs to go up which in turn will lower your ph.

 

[St Allie]

hehehe Wade

Snap!

 

[Old Philosopher]

Correct, that translates to 1.010 and a ph of 4 is a little high, do you have an acid tester as thats probably low and needs to go up which in turn will lower your ph.

No acid tester. But I have a volt meter. If I stick a couple electrodes in it, and it lights a flashlight bulb, is it ready?
Seriously though, it should be ready to rack into the 2nd fermenter and put on the air lock, right? And what sort of pH should I be looking for?

 

[Old Philosopher]

Disregard the question about the pH, I got my answer.
But I do have a couple other questions about chemistry. Do pH papers ever expire/loose their quality? How about Campden tablets? The reason I ask is the wine making supplies I dug out of storage have Campden tablets and some White Tannin powder that are probably pushing 20 years old, as well as the pH papers.

 

[Midwest Vintner]

yeah, they are probably all bad by now. i wouldn't want to risk a batch for old supplies. you can order new stuff on the net for pretty cheap.

 

[Old Philosopher]

This mess went into the 2nd fermenter yesterday. The air-lock says it's still working. The SG was about .999-1.000 when I racked it.
At what point do I re-rack, and consider filtering?

 

[Sacalait]

Wait until there is no longer any activity in the air lock. Degas it and then give it at least a month, the longer the better. The longer it sits the more compressed the sediment will be which will yield more wine.

 

[Old Philosopher]

Once the activity in the air-lock ceases, I figured I'd splash rack it into a bucket where I could degas it. Would it be a good plan to filter it during this splash racking? After degassing, I'd put it back in the carboy with an air-lock for further settling and bulk aging. Does all that sound reasonable?

 

[Sacalait]

Avoid splash racking, that will allow more air into the wine which you don't want at this point. Siphon off into another carboy or bucket if that's what you've got but then go back to the carboy and attach air lock. Then splash or agitate to degas. Filtering is the last step in the process when it will seem unnecessary to filter cause it will be so clear.

 

[Old Philosopher]

...Siphon off into another carboy or bucket if that's what you've got but then go back to the carboy and attach air lock. Then splash or agitate to degas. ....

Gotcha! But now I'm over-thinking this and confusing myself again. So all the talk about degassing by stirring or agitating with a drill attachment is actually done IN THE CARBOY? I had visions of folks doing this in a bucket, or such, and now I'm scratching my head on the degassing issue. <sigh>