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Home made plum wine
Started a batch of homemade plum wine today. tastes pretty good. Had 13 pounds of frozen plums. Thawed them out. took out the pits, used a juicer to make juice out of half of them to see what it would be like. It was thick and pulpy. Squeezed the other half by hand to get as much juice as possibe. Heated up some water, put 7 1/2 pds of sugar in it, put the juice and pulp in carboy, poured water on it, added yeast nutriunt,, pepict enzyme, acid blend, and campden tablets. It's currently cooling down with airlock on it. OG was 1.084 with apprx 4 gallons of liquid in carboy.
Will add yeast Monday when I get home from work. Using plain old bread yeast.
DC
I would personally use wine yeast if you can get ahold of it by tomorrow. At 50 cents per pack red star wine yeast wont break the bank but always seems to do a great job on my wines.
Deafcone,
Made a plum wine with dark plums about 2 years ago. I Started out with an S.G. of about 1.105 used a champagne yeast. A suggestion that I might make is to try syrup feeding the wine during secondary fermentation. Make a simple syrup using 2 cups of sugar to 1 cup of water. Heat/boil the solution to ensure all the sugar dissolves. Let it cool and then add it to the fermenting wine. Try to keep the secondary close to 65 F. By adding the syrup and using champagne yeast, you can obtain an higher alcohol yield. My plum wine turned out to be 17.5 % alcohol! When sweetened correctly to cut the harshness of the alcohol, it can make a very good desssert wine. The champagne yeast I used was EC-118 and can tolerate over 18% alcohol without dying off. When the S.G. gets to about 1.005 add the syrup to increase the S.G. to about 1.015. You may have to do this a few times to get to the desired alcohol percetage. Also, it may take a while. Another rule of thumb is the colder the fementation, the more alcohol it can tolerate. If it gets to cold it will stop the fermentation all together. Do not go lower than about 62 F. This is just a suggestion, but it made a great plum wine.
One item that i forgot to address is that the Ec-118 yeast will take over from the baker's yeast if you add it later. The EC-118 is a stroger strain of yeast than baker's yeast and will kill off the other yeast and take over...Even if they co-exist the baker's yeast will survive to an alcohol of 13% and the Ec-118 will take you well above that so syrup feeding will still work...Also, (Lavin) EC-118 is great for starting a stuck fermentation.
Good Luck
I ended up using Lavin 116 yeast. I put half the plums in a juicer and it came out pretty thick and pulpy. It also sank to bottom of fermentor. Next time I will just chop up the plums. I did add 3 pds of chopped plums, put a few campden tablets in, waited another 24 hrs before adding yeast. Chugging along slowly but surely.
When I made the elderberry/grape wine I used just the bread yeast and it came out excellent. I added sugar to sweeten it a little as it came out dry but it was the best wine I've made to date. Will do the same if needed to the plum wine by adding some sugar, tasting, and then putting in campden tablets to stop yeast from easting the sugar, then bottle.
DC
DC
Camden tablets are great but sulfites can where off after a long period of time and fermentation has a possiblity(slight) of beginning again. Potassium sorbate will totally kill off the yeast instead of stunting its growth. When sweetening wines it is great to use after fermentation. (but do not use it if malo-lactic fermentation taken place). Another great way to sweeten wine is to make extra must before hand and save it to sweeten. This way the natural sugars from the fruit you were using is sweetening the wine not just plain granulated sugar. You can stabilize your wine with potassium sorbate and the you the saved juice. Then a fining agent (bentonite for fruit is good) can be used to totally clarify. Again, these are all suggestions.
One question? did you use white plums or dark plums?
acensing wrote:
DC
Camden tablets are great but sulfites can where off after a long period of time and fermentation has a possiblity(slight) of beginning again. Potassium sorbate will totally kill off the yeast instead of stunting its growth. When sweetening wines it is great to use after fermentation. (but do not use it if malo-lactic fermentation taken place). Another great way to sweeten wine is to make extra must before hand and save it to sweeten. This way the natural sugars from the fruit you were using is sweetening the wine not just plain granulated sugar. You can stabilize your wine with potassium sorbate and the you the saved juice. Then a fining agent (bentonite for fruit is good) can be used to totally clarify. Again, these are all suggestions.
One question? did you use white plums or dark plums?
White plums? I used plums from a tree we have on our property. They turn partially red when ripe so I assume that's what you mean by white plums. We did add 3 pounds of dark plums as the recipe called for 15 pds and we only had 13 and added the 3 pounds of dark.
I did buy some potassium sorbate so I probably wil lstabilize it with that before bottling.
One question, what is malo-lactic fermentation?
DC
DC
There are white plums that have very light skin and can be used to make a very good plum wine(I never have used them)...Malo-lactic fermentation is a fermentation that is created by bacteria instead of yeast. Yeast fermentation as you probably know consist of yeast converting sugar to alcohol. In Malo-lactic fermentation the bacteria converts malic acid which has an harsh acidic flavor to lactic acid which drops your total acid and also smooths out the flavor in red wines and some whites. It is very useful to cut down your acid level in grapes because typically higher acid levels of american hybrid grape varieties have higher malic acid contents to tartaric acid. Almost all commercial dry red wine on the market go through malo-lactic fermentation. The bacteria cultures can cost alot of money for the home wine maker and i have not successfully got the chap ones(liquid ones in vials) to work right. The sulfites have to be low as well as the pH not too low. Also you must add it just before your yeast fermentation stops. THats just a brief about it. If you google it you can find out more.
Wine has cleared, fruit is floating on top, no activity in airlock. Took gravity reading and it was .0990
Wil ltransfer to another carboy tomorrow and let sit a couple weeks. It definately tastes like plums but there is a bitter skin flavor and the tart plum flavor. After it sits a couple weeks in 2nd carbly I will add sugar to taste and then stabilize and bottle. Good stuff.
DC
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