High starting brix - stuck/slow fermentation

[sixdoubleo]

OK, so I decided to try the UV43 ProRestart. How does this look?

I'm doing two separate restart kits. I measured the appropriate amount of yeast beads and put in each nylon sleeve. Then mixed up two batches of 500ml each hot water at 40g Sugar/L. I coiled each sleeve up and stuck them in the beakers. After 4.5 hours, I dumped out the water, and replaced the solution with a mix of 40% stuck wine / 60% 40g/L sugar/water solution. I covered the beakers with a paper towel.




Then I waited overnight (15 hours). I didn't see a whole lot of bubbles in the starter...not sure if you should at this point.

Anyway, today I racked my wine into two 7.9gal primary fermentation buckets. I left 1 inch of airspace in each. I tied each sleeve to itself creating about a 10" diameter ring. Then I tied a bag of sanitized marbles to each ring and placed each of these into the two buckets. The bag of marbles sank to the bottom and is holding each ring submerged at about the middle part of the bucket. I then added 1.5 tsp Fermaid K to each bucket. Then secured the lids and airlocked them.




So a couple questions?

1.) After preparing the starter and waiting over night, I didnt really see any "activity" in the starter. Should I be concerned about this?

2.) Is one inch of airspace enough to give this thing plenty of oxygen? Is it too much, too little? Remember the wine is about 28 days old or so so I'm concerned about oxygen at this point.

As always, thank you for any advice or suggestions!

 

[Wade E]

If you followed the instructions then thats all that can be done. Dont really have the instructions in front of me, do they call for any nutrient to help that yeast out?

 

[sixdoubleo]

Thanks Wade...more or less directed at Rock since he's done one of these specific kits before. But yeah, they have you add GoFerm to the initial sugar/water starter (which I did). Then like I said, I added FermaidK to the wine, which they recommended. They also wanted you to do a yeast hull pretreatment if your final alcohol level was greater than 16%...which I may be. However, I wasn't able to to get ahold of any yeast hulls locally. But I understand that FermaidK does contain yeast hulls (among other things).

Anyway, we're at about 4-5 hours now and no airlock movement yet...but I'll check the SG in a couple days and report back.

 

[Rock]

Darn,late on this post.I did not see any bubbling.Like i said we did a looselid ferment It was a 50 gallon batch.I dont think it should take more than a couple of days to get you to dry great job on this and thanks for the update.I bet you will go dry let us know.

 

[sixdoubleo]

Well, I'm about 50-60 hours into it and the SG hasn't moved one bit. I just added some more FermaidK and stirred well. I also unsealed the lids and let them sit loosely, slightly cracked for a few hours tonight to try and let some oxygen in.

If I dont see any movement by tomorrow I'm thinking I need to pull the plug and just salvage the wine where it's at and use it to blend with other flatter wines.

 

[sixdoubleo]

Update...

Well, 5 days after adding this yeast and no movement in SG. So I think it's officially dead. Either the yeast never started to begin with, there wasn't enough oxygen, or something else related to nutrient or alcohol level. I followed the instructions pretty closely, so I'm not sure what the deal is here.

I think I'm going to rack back to carboys, top off, SO2 and airlock. Then maybe call the company that sells this restart kit and ask them what I might have done wrong, and whether they recommend I try it again and if so what I could do differently this time.

 

[Rock]

I dont think they will recommend to try agian if you add so2 to it.What was your temp.in the wine juice?Did you keep it warm above 70?Sorry to see it not work for you.