Saturday, February 10, 2018

2017 Wines - Chapter 10 - Elderberry

With an eye toward fermenting everything in the freezer, I went with a 6 gallon batch of elderberry this year.

  • 29# 3oz elderberry
  • 10# 4oz sugar
  • 21 quarts water
  • 6t pectic enzyme
  • 80g tartaric acid
  • 6g Opti Red
  • 7g Booster Rouge
  • 1g Lallzyme EX

The berries were simmered in the usual fashion.


This year I adjusted to target TA instead of pH. Starting TA was 1.95 and I adjusted to 6.5. The pH dropped from 4.95 to 3.4 range. I added the sugar, water, enzymes, and gave it a 4 day cold soak. The volume was too great for a standard fermentation bucket so I used the larger one, and it barely fit in the temperature control setup. I warmed it up, made the final adjustments, and pitched K1-V1116. 


The temperature curve on this wine was very steady. I started off at 70F but soon turned it down to 68F. The last couple of days I bumped it up to 72F to help it finish up.


At 1.004 I racked most of this wine off to 5, 1, and 1/2 gallon carboys. The extra gallon is going toward a port. For this port, I added sugar back to raise the SG back up to 1.030. I fermented it down again to 1.004 and repeated this process. The fermentation slowed up at 1.014 the second time, so I did my math and came up with an ABV of 16.14% and 3.6% RS. So I stabilized at 19% with 7.5 ounces of Everclear, added KMS, and racked it off to a 1 gallon carboy. I anticipate using a little oak on this wine.


Meanwhile the regular batch got racked again after a week and I moved 10l to the oak barrel. The remainder went into a 3 + 1 gallon carboys. 


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