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Brewlog - Red Currrant Wine 2013, 6 gal

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Chevette Girl

Chevette Girl

All around BAD EXAMPLE
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Apr 27, 2010
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Ottawa, ON
So I was invited to pick red currants at a friend's place and can't fit what I picked in the freezer. Which means it's time to make wine!

For reference, last time I did a batch this size it was 22 lb red currants and 18 lb sugar... this time it'll be about 19 lb red currants, a mixture of fresh and frozen, and about 18 lb sugar (probably 8 kg, maybe a bit more)... and that batch used 71B, this time it'll be RC-212 so I'll need more nutrients. And I don't think I'm going to need to bother with the campden tabs this time either since I sanitized everything coming out of the freezer and have a towel to keep the fruit flies off while things thaw.

Planned procedure: thaw frozen berries (took them out of the freezer tonight and sanitized the outside of the bags, they're all under a towel in a sanitized bowl), run 'em all through the food mill and into my new nylon mesh bag if I'm not happy about how clean the muslin bag is by tomorrow...

Boil sugar with two gallons of water, pour over bagged fruit to set colour, separate some of the juice into a second fermentor for extra room.

Add 3 gallons cold water split between the two so that the SG matches. I'll also check the pH and adjust with calcium carbonate.

When temp is reasonable, add 3 tsp pectic enzyme (1 to juice bucket, 2 to fruit bucket), allow to do its thing for 24 hours, then pitch rehydrated RC-212, one packet split between the two buckets.

Total nutrients last time was 6 tsp DAP and 3 tsp energizer as per standard lazy SNA, so since it's going to be with whiny-pants RC-212, I will budget for half again for a total 9 tsp DAP and 4.5 tsp energizer, will add 1.5 tsp (split) of energizer at pitch, 3 tsp DAP (split) once there's some activity, then hopefully I will get in three aerations before the 1/3 break where each bucket gets 1 tsp DAP and 1/2 tsp energizer, and if it gets stinky after that it can have more energizer or if it's past 1/2, some nuked bread yeast...

Let it ferment on the fruit for a week, then remove the fruit bag and I'm going to make something with the second run, maybe two gallons of something carbonated involving some malt and some honey...

 
My food mill is effectively a colander with paddles that are held down by a spring (like this one), you turn the handle and it mashes the food up against the colander without breaking the seeds. It's great for soft fruits like blueberries and currants but not a lot of use for anything very firm or large, no good for a grape or raw apple or pear. It's a whole lot more effective than a potato masher on something smaller than a pea though! :)
 
Chevette Girl said:
My food mill is effectively a colander with paddles that are held down by a spring (like this one), you turn the handle and it mashes the food up against the colander without breaking the seeds. It's great for soft fruits like blueberries and currants but not a lot of use for anything very firm or large, no good for a grape or raw apple or pear. It's a whole lot more effective than a potato masher on something smaller than a pea though! :)
Click to expand...
As far as I'm aware, the "chefy" term was "mouli". Designed to puree things down to a medium coarse soup sort of grade (some had changable mesh pieces), yet they can crack or shred bits off the seeds.

Probably just me being a bit pedantic, but I prefer just to freeze and thaw, then as an arse covering thing, to sulphite the fruit and stand it for a couple of days mixed as a must, before pitching......

Still, if the mill trick works, then that's great.

Does the pulped flesh settle out ok or is it a bit on the fluffy side ?
 
I'm not really sure, I always bag it so I end up with very little racking loss due to fluffy fruit lees. I would imagine it would be pretty fluffy for some time, the few mashed berries and bits that inevitably escape don't settle out for a while.

About half these berries are frozen but not all berries pop when frozen, I've played this game before and then when I opened the bag to empty it after I was done fermenting it, a lot of the berries were still whole and relatively firm despite having been frozen for months or even years, so I always mash everything... it's just a bit more difficult when the berries are smaller than the holes on the finest potato masher I could find... And my mill has a very rounded grille, so I don't worry at all about it shredding seeds, and the spring on it isn't strong enough to mash a cooked chickpea (garbanzo bean) so it's not going to mash the seeds either... and it certainly did not act like a grater during the great hummus experiment (some jobs really are best left to a food processor). Now, something soft like thoroughly cooked carrots? Maybe it would manage a purée. But if I want puréed carrot soup, that's what I use my blender (liquidiser) for... a lot less effort and significantly easier to clean! :)

And now, onwards with the berries... getting out the stock pot and the bags of solidified sugar :)
 
So it took me an hour to put all those red currants through the mill... got 8 kg of sugar boiled in 2 gallons of water (the biggest stock pot I own just barely contained it all), now to get my husband to haul the bucket of bagged currants and hot sugar water downstairs so I can divide and dilute it...
 
Pectic enzyme added, SG's are approximately 1.110 with must still a bit warm.

So 20 lb of red currants plus 18 lb of sugar plus 2 gal water fills a bucket :) looks like the currants gave a gallon, gallon and a half of juice as with the fruit bag removed, there was almost 4 gal before I separated and diluted.

Will confirm SG's when I pitch yeast tomorrow night.
 
SG bucket = 1.100, SG juice = 1.110

pH was 3.2 so I added 1 tsp of calcium carbonate to each bucket, pitched rehydrated RC-212 this evening.
 
CG, a clean magnum bottle works when a tater masher fails. We need to get you a proper big bucket. The seeds on the red currants are so small, like tomato seeds, that your normal food mill isnt going to grind them to pieces. Our poor currants never really liked the heat and humidity in our Wineyard and have been ravaged by blights every year, they always stayed so extremely acidic and never seemed to get ripe before they either shriveled away or turned watery and fell off. Maybe chokeberries can replace them. Good luck, WVMJ
 
I'm really lucky to have three different sources for red currants right now, and the last couple of years have been really good crops, for me the crop that's not always so good is the wild grapes, some years they explode in fruit, some years they shrivel and fall off the vines still green... and black currants, I get a handful off my balcony, another two handfuls at the farm, so I'm just saving them up till I have enough!
 
So I fed each batch 2 tsp of DAP now that there's some bubbling going on (moreso in the juice bucket than the fruit bucket), aerated it, checked the pH (3.2 again) and added another teaspoon of CACO3 to each bucket. SG's haven't changed since yesterday. Will aerate in the morning and if the SG's have finally started dropping, I'll start adding more DAP and energizer.
 
Was in a hurry this morning so each batch got 1/2 tsp energizer, 1 tsp DAP and 1 tsp calcium carbonate. SG was starting to drop on the fruit bucket but the juice bucket was showing more visible activity, both of them had pH down at 3.2 again.

In retrospect I probably underpitched, I suspect I should have gone with two packages of yeast instead of splitting one. Oh well, it's going, at least.
 
left the house before 5:30 this morning and didn't get home till after six. Gaah. Hubby's birthday tomorrow so had to make cake... Finally got to the wine stuff around eleven tonight and the fruit bucket's at its 1/3 break so I gave it two teaspoons of DAP and one of energizer and its last aeration. The juice bucket is now down to 1.085 or so, so it only got 1 tsp DAP and 1/2 tsp energizer and I'll be aerating and feeding it one more time, will check pH on both tomorrow. Bed now.
 
It'll be time to pull the fruit bag soon... but I'll have to wait till the visitors are out of the basement, my hubby's convinced that nobody can stand the smell of fermentation except me :p
 
Out comes the fruit bag, will report later with SG's pH's and stuff, most likely I'll let it settle out a bit and then rack to a 6 gal carboy.
 
pH was around 3.0 and taste was bitter as well as acidic so I dosed it with calcium carbonate once more, two teaspoons this time, right in the carboy. SG of the blended mess was 1.000, I am about half a gallon short to fill the carboy because the lees got really fluffy at the bottom so I mixed the lees from the two buckets together and am letting them settle out for a few hours before I rack to top up. It was all so nice and clear before I went and touched it :)

The colour from the fruit bucket was far more intense than the juice bucket. Didn't check the individual SG's or pH's since it's the blended batch that matters anyway. And I'm lazy. So there.

If this bitterness persists, I may have to backsweeten this batch a little. Oh, well.
 
So there was a little mishap, presumably while I was pouring one bucket into the other, I banged an airlock and it fell over and then I couldn't find the lid (which was cracked and didn't fit well anyway and mostly served to keep the plastic wrap ACTUALLY serving to keep airlock liquid in and greblies out)... So I figured it'd fallen behind the freezer I use as my racking platform. Whatever, it was busted anyway, right?

So I let the bucket settle out so I could rack into the carboy to top it off with that last gallon... and where do I find the lid? The lid that has been collecting dust and serving as a landing platform for a squadron of fruit flies for probably two batches before this?

Yep. You guessed it.

In the must.

Found it halfway through siphoning it.

So I thought about it for a while, decided 1.000 was good enough and fed the carboy six campden tablets. It'll sort itself out.
 
Aside from Chevette parts? Fruit flies. And a pot lid once, when my roommate knocked it over while I was trying to get out of his way in the kitchen... one guy had his ferrets go through a must and it was fine. I'm sure this will be too.
 
Wow. Ferrets.

I guess when I become a mead-yoda, like yourself, I too would take such things with calm. I'd have seen bad things happen to good batches, and I would have a good sense of what spells disaster, and what doesn't.

But, if some cap with dust and fruit fly crap had fallen into my current batch, I'd really be frustrated and pissed.

Kudos.
 
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