Hi everyone,
I'm not new to wine making but I am new to making it straight from the fruit as compared to a store bought kit. I am looking for some advice if anyone has any ideas.
We made up our recipe from looking at several online that I found. One thing we didn't want, though, was to use chemicals so we are winging it and so far...not too bad. The following is our recipe and where we are after 24 days of it sitting in the primary fermenter. We are not sure what we should do next.
3 - 4 litres of pear juice (approx 15 lbs before juicing)
3 gal water
6 lb sugar
lemon juice from a bottle to the equivalent of 5 lemons
Yeast (Bourgovin RC212)
Starting specific gravity 1.090
after 24 days, specific gravity 1.040
When we opened the lid tonight we were relieve to find no mold! And it has had some activity thus the change in SG. Whew! But it needs to get down below 1.0 to something like 0.88 (or 12% alcohol or less).
We also found a layer of what looked like yeast on the top and it appeared puffed up (there had also been chunks of floating pear must when we started). I skimmed out some of the yeast so we could measure the SG and it appeared that there was activity from below as “bubbles” came up (they weren’t quite bubbles).
Do we:
a. rack it to a new primary fermenter and add more yeast (Lalvin EC 1118 is what we have to put in it) and let it stand another week or two
b. leave it in the current bucket and add the yeast
c. (leave it or move it and…) do something else like add raisins, more sugar, more lemon, some tea …along with more yeast?
d. Other?
Thanks in advance for any help with our experiment!!
Cheers,
Deanna
I'm not new to wine making but I am new to making it straight from the fruit as compared to a store bought kit. I am looking for some advice if anyone has any ideas.
We made up our recipe from looking at several online that I found. One thing we didn't want, though, was to use chemicals so we are winging it and so far...not too bad. The following is our recipe and where we are after 24 days of it sitting in the primary fermenter. We are not sure what we should do next.
3 - 4 litres of pear juice (approx 15 lbs before juicing)
3 gal water
6 lb sugar
lemon juice from a bottle to the equivalent of 5 lemons
Yeast (Bourgovin RC212)
Starting specific gravity 1.090
after 24 days, specific gravity 1.040
When we opened the lid tonight we were relieve to find no mold! And it has had some activity thus the change in SG. Whew! But it needs to get down below 1.0 to something like 0.88 (or 12% alcohol or less).
We also found a layer of what looked like yeast on the top and it appeared puffed up (there had also been chunks of floating pear must when we started). I skimmed out some of the yeast so we could measure the SG and it appeared that there was activity from below as “bubbles” came up (they weren’t quite bubbles).
Do we:
a. rack it to a new primary fermenter and add more yeast (Lalvin EC 1118 is what we have to put in it) and let it stand another week or two
b. leave it in the current bucket and add the yeast
c. (leave it or move it and…) do something else like add raisins, more sugar, more lemon, some tea …along with more yeast?
d. Other?
Thanks in advance for any help with our experiment!!
Cheers,
Deanna