Slow Fermentation

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weltercat

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I have a question that I hope someone can answer.

I have been making wine for a couple years now and have had mixed results. I have made some pretty good stuff if I do say so myself. I am currently brewing a couple batches of pumpkin wine from leftover pumpkins at Halloween, wild picked huckleberry, grapefruit/kiwi, a batch of peach mead and I just bottled a batch of plum.

I get my recipes from Jack Keller’s website. My question is this.

Should my Huckleberry batch be flattened out by now? Typically my wines brew hard for a month and slow down for another month and are flat in three months or less.

I started Nov 24th 2007 with 15lbs of wild huckleberries and 10lbs of sugar in a five gal batch. The starting SG was 1.100 with a potential alcohol of 13% 24% brix. The SG today 1.040 and is still brewing with 10% residual brix. I am getting a bubble in the airlock at about 20 second intervals. I used Red Star Cote De Blanc wine yeast which is notoriously slow but generally not that slow.

I started two other batches of pumpkin at the same time as well as a batch of peach mead that have all flattened out to .9900 SG weeks ago. I used Red Star Premiere Curvee on the pumpkin and Red Star Cote De Blanc on the mead. I used the same ratio of yeast energizer in all batches and the temperature of the brew goes between 64 and 69 degrees F.

I really have high hopes for this stuff and if anybody knows how hard it is to pick 15lbs of wild huckleberries you'll know why. If anyone has any ideas I’d be much obliged.
 
Three months is a long time fermenting. You could try bringing up the temp. to 75-80F for a couple of days to see if it changes any. One other possibility is that MLF may have started and I don't know enough about that to offer any advice.
 
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