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Wild Berry Wine
mullet:
Trevor, I leave the skins and pulp in mine for the color.
le0n:
there's still a little color in them, so i'm just leaving them in just in case.
i'm stirring them around twice a day to keep things wet.
haven't thought about that. in actuality this recipe should have been done with a one gallon test. but that does sound like a good idea for another batch. haven't heard of Brett but i see they have a few cultures at the shop near me. they cost 8x more than the yeast i got but i'm sure there's a reason for that.
i like that t-shirt trick. i may use this next time if the resulting wine unpalatable.
so far, i have a whopping $12 sunk into this batch. if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. however, if it does work and the result is something that i can enjoy, then it'll be easier to repeat next time. also, i'm going to monitor the berries out there to see how late they are around. maybe i can start another batch a few weeks from now when the cooler weather will be creeping in.
TrevorM:
Fair enough, the first sip is with the eyes as they say.
Yeah Brett is a bit specialized so it costs extra. It's mostly used for lambics, so don't be put off by characteristics like "wet dog" or "horse blanket" it's part of the charm :laugh:
You sure can't complain about $12! As you do more even that'll get less too. I haven't done it since we moved but I used culture my own yeast which can save you a bit and isn't hard at all.
le0n:
--- Quote from: TrevorM on September 14, 2016, 02:37:15 pm ---Fair enough, the first sip is with the eyes as they say.
--- End quote ---
and i'm quite worried that the color will turn on me. based on something i read the other day. i can't seem to pinpoint the article, but when the guy added Potassium Sorbate to his finished beautyberry wine it turned from a nice koolaid color to a dingy yellow. i may leave it out and rely on the campden alone.
edit (found the article snippet): "Racked all my wines the other day including this one. I'm glad I did this one last and wished I had taken before/after pics. When I moved the 3 gallon carboy onto the table initially I swear it was a mouth dropping kool-aid red color !! Racked it, added k-meta, gave a stir and it instantly turned to a yellowish blush. I've read on the forum this happening to others with strawberry but have never seen it personally until now. Depressing to say the least...
No, actually the photo is pretty close to the real color. The inside of the berries is white/cream colored. I was disappointed the color from the skins didn't come through more. The bright red it initally had in the fermenter (primary and secondary) did disappear when I first added kmeta/sorbate though. "
^^ the photos don't work on that article anymore >:(
^^ and i'm not exactly sure what he did, but if i can avoid the color change, i will. at this point, the campden hasn't affected the color at all so i may leave the sorbate out of the wine.
"horse blanket" ;D that would definitely have to be done in a small batch first ;)
TrevorM:
OK so I did a little digging and the first thing I came up with is that anthocyanins which are responsible for most red,purple and blue colors in fruit are very pH sensitive. High Ph will give you the red side and low will be blue. So if the kmeta changed the pH it would mess up your color. But I couldn't find anything that suggested that kmeta would have any effect on the pH (I did find the opposite though). So I kept looking and found this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4325022/ which I think is a more likely cause, even though it the experiments it certainly wasn't instant. I'm no biochemist so there certainly could be other things at play here, but I'd say if you can avoid it that'd be a good idea. Going by your starting gravity I'd think you'd get to at least 8% abv. so I doubt you really need it anyway do you?
Yeah you can get some really strange results that's for sure. I forget the name of it, but there's another one that gives you a huge banana aroma (which is normally considered a bad thing in beer).
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