2017 Wines - Chapter 9 - Guava

I have a love-hate relationship with this fruit when it comes to wine. The first batch of wine I ever made was guava and purely by accident it was delightful. Then a couple of years ago I made a strawberry guava wine which I cold-soaked. Though the color is nice, too much time on the seeds left it bitter. I've been saving guava for a couple of years now, ready to try again. I'm pretentiously calling this one Psidium Sauvignon. Ingredients:

• 18.5# guava, mostly strawberry, some lemon and purple
• 46oz Sauvignon Blanc concentrate
• 1720g sugar
• 8.5 quarts water
• 6t pectic enzyme
• 0.5g Lallzyme EX
• 1t Fermaid K step fed
• 1t GoFerm
• 10g citric acid
• 10g tartaric acid
• 5g bentonite in primary
• 6g Opti White
• 3g Booster Blanc

I simmered the guava and assembled the wine. This was my first chance to use the new temperature control system. QA 23 was the yeast, and the lower limit was 15C/59F so I set it there and off she went.

The temp was very steady around 15C/59F. It oscillated a little bit but I tweaked some setting and by the end it was very stable. It didn't slow the ferment very much however and it still ripped through in about 7 days.

Wine Temp Control System: Update 1

I kicked off guava wine this weekend and it gave me an opportunity to test the Arduino temperature control system Adam and I built.

I acknowledge this is completely over-engineered. Let us have our fun, OK?

I secured the pump under the spigot.

I ran the thermometer through the hole in the lid and directly into the wine.

And this is probably the cause of my temperature fluctuations. I'm set at 15c/59F, the lower tolerance of my qa23 yeast. The Fi hangs around too long and overdrives the Fp, all of which means it continues to heat for a little while when it should have switched back to cooling.

The fluctuations seem to be getting smaller so I'm going to let it ride and see.

Deep Freeze of 2017-2018

The holidays are winding down. Most of the family has returned home, only Jake and Allie remain for another couple of days. We had a White Christmas, and one of my recurring nightmares became a reality on Christmas Eve Day.

Kingston, Adam, and I ran him back down the driveway and up the road without anyone getting injured. The deer on the other hand...

The greenhouse is a challenge. We haven't gotten much precipitation and the rain barrels are about empty. The deep well has frozen, and so now we have little water remaining in the greenhouse. I squeezed out enough today, and hoping for enough rain/snow that the rain barrels get recharged soon.

The other challenge in the greenhouse is temperature. We left the south side uncovered this year, and as luck would have it we're seeing some of the coldest temps of the past few years. Last night we hit -9F and it took both propane heaters plus three electric ones to keep the temps up.

We're through the worst of the cold, but the forecast doesn't show a day above freezing in the next 5, and no precipitation until Saturday.