Volume to start with?

[Chilled]

We are planning to make 10 gallons of Blackberry/Elderberry/Blueberry wine.
We will be using a total of about 8 pounds of fruit per gallon. About 7 pounds Blackberry, 1 pounds Elderberry, 1/4 pound Blueberry per gallon.
I have 2 questions at this time.
1. How much volume should we start with, to allow for the material that will be removed when we take the bag out with seeds and solids? And hopefully end with close to 10 gallons to put into the carboy.

2. Anyone have an idea how much sugar it might take to bring the SG to 1.080. We will check SG before adding, I'm just wondering how much to have on hand.

Thanks for sharing your experience and advice.
Dave

 

[lawrstin]

The Wine Fermenter - 20 Gallon FDA Plastic should work fine. I did 125 lbs of blackberries and all the berries fit fine with room to ferment
.

 

[Turock]

The blackberry flavor will really over-power the flavor of the other fruits. This is why co-fermenting is such a problem---you have no idea of how to figure out how much of each fruit you need. As an example---we make a triple blend of elderberry, blackberry, and concord. We use 3 parts concord, 2 parts elderberry, and only ONE part blackberry because the blackberry flavor is so intense. Of course, this depends also on how strong you make your blackberry. We make it with no water dilution so the flavor is real intense--then we can use less of it in the blends to stretch out how far our blackberry will go. As you know, BB is such a pain to pick in the wild and some years you don't get very much. So we like to be prudent in how much we use to blend with.

Well, the whole idea here is that with the co-ferment you have planned, you might just end up with more blackberry flavor than you anticipate. This is why we like to make the wines seperately, THEN bench test at blending time to get the proportions correct.

It's hard to say how much sugar you need---depends on how sweet the fruits are to begin with. At any one time, we have 50 to 100 pounds of sugar in reserve. We buy sugar thru the year when the prices are lower and we stock up in the off season.

 

[Chilled]

Thanks for the info

In the future we may try fermenting separately and blending the wines after they are finished. Never considered that.
They could then be blended to taste.

Thanks for the suggestion.
Dave