valdelocc
love my wine&cigars
- Joined
- Dec 14, 2009
- Messages
- 22
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About 3 weeks ago I made 12 gallons of cranberry wine using fresh cranberries from Sams club and everything went as planned (so far). I racked the wine into 2 carboys and later decided to combine it into 15 gallons demijohn but didn’t have enough wine to close the gap well from there I got the idea of start a second batch, bought more of the same base adjusted PH to 3.5, Brix to 26 basically the same thing as the first batch, the exception was the crushing, I didn’t feel like using the big grape crusher for such small 5 gallons batch so I used a meat grinder and ran all the fruit through it and straight to the primary, that was the only deviation!!! I let all the ingredients seat for 12 hours, retested PH and Brix it was good to go, activated the pasteur champagne and poured in, 2 days later and nothing, added more Fermax nutrient let it seat for another day and nothing, re-hydrated another pack of pasteur champagne put it in and 24 hours later still nothing, added more yeast nutrient and no change, added 2oz of calcium carbonate PH went up the 4.5 and a day later still no fermentation, bought a pack of Lalvin 1118 and dropped it in and finally 6 days into this ordeal the must took off yesterday, today I tried to lower the PH with acid blend and got it down to 3.5 also added more Fermax , it seems to be fermenting well, I was wondering what happened here? I think it has something to do with grinding the fruit instead of crushing them, I truly appreciate your help, thanks.