Guava and Lemongrass-Ginger Wines

We have two new, promising wines going on this New Year's Day.  My first-every wine was from guava, a blend of strawberry guava (Psidum littorale v. Longipes), lemon guava (Psidum littorale v. Littorale), and dwarf guava (Psidium guajava nana).  Although difficult to clear, it was wonderful wine.

Since then, the dwarf guava died, and the lemon guava tree was dug up and removed from the greenhouse.  The strawberry guava has continued happily on, leaving me with 23# of frozen fruit.  As before, we used a sketchy online recipe, only this time with about 60 other batches of  winemaking experience.  Per the recipe, and violating convention, we boiled the fruit, tweaking the fruit up to 5#/gallon.

Bagged fruit

We drip-drained the bagged fruit, added water to 3 gallons, added tannin, citric acid, and sugar.  Once cooled, we added pectic enzyme, followed by Booster Blanc; we want to preserve the fruit aromas and color as much as possible. Then it got covered with Saran Wrap and into the fridge for a 3 day cold soak.

Last night I pulled it out to warm up.  We nailed the pH at 3.31.  SG was a bit low at 1.081 so we added another 9 ounces of sugar.  Then we hit it with bentonite and a good starter of QA 23.

After cold soak, with the yeast starter on top.

Strawberry guava could turn out to be a very nice rose style wine.

At the same time we started Lemongrass-Ginger batch number three.  The lemongrass for all of my wines comes from a start given to me by my greenhouse friend and fellow Puerto Rico fruit hunter Jay Cotterman.  It grows like crazy in the greenhouse.  The original online recipe is pretty good, but not lemony enough for me.  With my last batch I doubled the lemongrass, which helped, but this was offset by some super-potent candied ginger.  The second batch, if carbonated, could pass for ginger ale.

Missouri-grown lemongrass

So this batch doubled the lemongrass again.  We're now up to 500g of lemongrass for a 3 gallon batch.  We dropped the fresh ginger, threw in a greenhouse Meyer lemon (juice and rind), and cut back the candied ginger to only 50g.  The grass was twice boiled, strained, bagged.

Lemongrass-ginger wine must

We nailed the SG at 1.089 and the pH was fine at 3.27.  We added pectic, tannin, and acid (citric and tartaric), and then a starter of K1-V1116.  Today, after 4 days, we're at 1.040.  I added the bentonite and the last of the nutrient.  It is pretty cold here, and the draft out of the crawl space is keeping this fermentation temp down nicely at 16.9C.  Good stuff.

We've got some additional wine planning to do today while watching football.  After seven tries, we've yet to make what I think is a really good batch of persimmon wine.  We have two bags left in the freezer from 2014.  Drawing inspiration from one Gary Weaver, we may try a small 1 gallon batch using boiled fruit, possibly with oak in the primary, using some of the remaining elderberries.  We've got more starfruit on the way, and the next batch of carambola will see some acid tweaks.  Finally, we're excited to try the QA 23 on a batch of passionfruit wine.  So much to do!