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Bottle Bombed!!
Well it was bound to happen. I've been brewing beer for 2 years and started on wine and i have never had a bottle bomb until today. Heres what i did wrong. I got 6 gallons of fresh cider from a local orcherd here by the house. Up'ed the gravity to about 1.082 and pitched 1118 on top. Well i let i set for about a two weeks in primary and it had already reached .0996. Then in secondary to clear for about 3 weeks. Great looking wine at this point. So here is my mistake! I wanted a sweeter wine so i went to the store an got 5 cans of apple juice concentrate. I let them warm up and thaw out and pored them in the bottleing bucket. Put in 5 campden tablets thinking that it would kill off any remaning yeast in the wine. Boy was i wrong!!! It was all gravy i corked them and let them set uprite for 3 days then put them in the wine fridge for cellering then a week passes and my wife call me and said hey the computer room smells funny and a cork is out of 2 of your bottles (CRAP) i said. well i get home to a big sticky dried up mess so lesson learned the hard and expencive way Campdon Tabs dont kill off yeast or at least not the agressive 1118 i used. I could use some feed back i want to do this again but the wine store guy told me that Campdon tabs kill off all yeast to it was cool to back sweeten. What would you guys do different?
I would have let the wine sit in secondary a couple days with the campden tablets.
Biology isn't like flipping a light switch. The campden tablets need time to work. You got some fresh fermentation from the yeast that was still alive while others were being killed.
I am not sure either, but there very well could have been some off gasing created during the campden treatment from the cell death or from the dissolved CO2 in the wine already.
My understanding is that Campden tablets are quite mild & short acting, used in wine primarily to kill off wild yeasts, prior to adding your fermenting yeast of choice. If you want to prevent any fermentation, use potassium sorbate, or something similar. Then it is safe to backsweeten.
Another, trickier method, if you want both sweet & carbonated (without kegging), is to backsweeten, bottle, wait until you have achieved the carbonation you want, and then pasteurize the bottles. I have some mead on which I used this process last spring, still good.
Brewski wrote:
Then it is safe to backsweeten.
Another, trickier method, if you want both sweet & carbonated (without kegging), is to backsweeten, bottle, wait until you have achieved the carbonation you want, and then pasteurize the bottles. I have some mead on which I used this process last spring, still good.
what method did you use for pasteurizing?
You can backsweeten with a nonfermentable sugar. I've heard that people have good luck with Splenda.
You need at least one campden tablet per gallon of wine. you also could have added potassium sorbate to the bottling bucket then after combining the wine and jusice let it sit for a half hour to hour before bottling to allow the sorbate to nutralize the yeast. I do both.
Also 5 cans of of frozen juice is a lot. that's concentrate and used to make a half gallon a can. I've used grape concentrate to sweeten and 2 cans gave plenty of sweetness to 5 gallons of wine so you could have just had way too much sugar and fermentation actually restarted even before you got the cider bottled.
A note on potassium sorbate, it won't stop fermentation that is already in progress. so the sorbate is added to prevent restart of fermentation. the campden tablets will kill the yeast but you need to use 1 tablet per gallon.
adding that much jusice (sugar) I would have added t he tablets and waited a day to ensure they killed the yeast before adding the juice. when you add campden tablets in the beginning of making wine you wait 12 hours before adding the yeast to be sure it doesn't kill your yeast. Doing it the same way before addign sugar will make sure the yeast gets killed before any fermentation can restart.
DC
To pastuerize, I put 12oz bottles in my 5gal wort pot, covered with warm water, brought it slowly to 170F, and let it cool off.
Caution, weaker bottles sometimes break. I know. Try to use the thicker ones designed for re-capping, instead of just anything that has a pry off top.
I've heard of guys doing the same in the oven, at the lowest setting, usually 160-175. But, I prefer to dump glass out of a pot, than clean up a scorched oven.
This is a great resource for study and review materials to pass the CPA exam. http://cpaarmy.com/study-materials/
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