OK, so I picked up just over 11 pounds of fresh "organic" cranberries. According to the Polish farm guy some old guy in the area "with nothing better to do" grows a small crop of them organically.... Personally I think it was just a sales pitch but who am I to argue.
So I got home and dumped them into my handy steam juice extractor and began the process of pulling out the juice. I guess it shouldn't really be that much of a surprise, but that 11 some odd pounds of Cranberries resulted in only about 2 litres of juice (Including pulp). Typically the steam juicer is great at leaving the pulp behind, but after about 2 hours of waiting for only a small amount of juice I got impatient and started to crush the berries. Must be the results driven Kraut in me.
You might be wondering why the long background story, well that is to explain why this is sort of a cranberry Mead. You see, with only 2 litres of juice and 2 litres of honey already in the pot I needed to make up the space with something other than 4 litres of water.... Ah blackberry juice. So here is the recipe
2 Litres Honey
2 Litres Cranberry juice & pulp
1/2 Litre Apple Juice (Pure reconstituted no sugar added stuff)
1 Litre steam extracted Blackberry juice
2 1/4 Litres Spring Water
1 Cup Mushed up cranberries
2 Packs of 1118 Yeast
2 Teaspoons Nutrient
Measurements:
Specific Gravity: 1.112
Pot Alcohol : 15% Approx
Innoculated at 8PM on November 5th @ 80 F
This should be interesting as the juice is nice and sweet with a bit more tart than the Blackberry on its own.
As a side note, although the 11 lbs of Cranberries only yeilded about 2 litres of juice and pulp all was not a waste. I divided up the remaining pulp and berries and froze them for future cranberry chutney. At some point I need to get the recipe from my brother and post it on here.
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Table of Contents
- Agave (4)
- almond (1)
- Apple (3)
- banana (1)
- belinni (1)
- black berry (9)
- blackberry (9)
- blueberry (2)
- blush wine (1)
- chemical free wine (8)
- cherry (1)
- cider (1)
- clarifying (1)
- coconut wine (1)
- cork (3)
- corks (3)
- cranberry (1)
- cranberry mead (3)
- cranberry wine (1)
- dandelion (1)
- ethiopian honey wine (3)
- flavour of wine (3)
- flower wine (2)
- fruit wine (17)
- gesho bark (1)
- Gesho leaves (1)
- goji berries (2)
- goji berry (2)
- history of wine (1)
- honey wine (18)
- hops (1)
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- lapin cherry (1)
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- making wine (25)
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- Strawberry (1)
- sulfites (9)
- Tej (1)
- tequila (2)
- water melon (1)
- watermelon (1)
- wine (2)
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- wine from flowers (3)
- wine terminology (6)
- wine-making (28)
- Winemaking (28)
- wolf berries (2)
- wolf berry (2)
- yeast test (1)
9AM Nov 7, 2007
ReplyDeleteThe mead is really starting to ferment now, it seemed to get a slow start. I took the measurements and came up with a specific gravity of 1.078
At 7AM this morning, the Specific Gravity was at 1.046. I was starting to notice the tartness coming out a bit more so I figured it was about time to stop the fermentation.
ReplyDeleteOnce again, I put the Mead into a large heavy bottomed pot and heated it up. Since I had a few issues with previous batches of Brown sugar Blackberry wine starting to ferment after a month or so, I figured I would do things slightly differently. This time, I brought the temperature up to 160F (10 above previous). I really had to stir vigourously towards the end because I needed to keep the alcohol evaporation down. Once I hit the 160F mark, I turned the heat down to min, put the lid on and let it sit for 10 minutes.
At this point, there was quite abit of alcohol steam when I lifted the lid. So not to waste any, I put the pot into a sink full of cold water. Although not overly effective at bringing the temperature down, it did bring it down enough so the steam reduced enough to pour the stopped Mead into the secondary without getting a face full of hot alcohol.
I covered the jug hole with tinfoil. I didn't want to use the airlocks yet, because the vacuum created by the cooling mead would have sucked the brandy into the bottle. If you have been watching previous posts, you will know I use Brandy in my Airlocks instead of Metabisulfate. This way I can be assured my wine or mead is as natural as possible.
i like that you use brandy in your airlocks... if I don't want to add sulphite to the airlocks, I'll sometimes drip some tequila :-)
ReplyDeleteOnce again, awesome blog!
-Nico
Ya mon, it works well. Now we just have to wean you off the Campden and Soldium Metabisulfite :P. With these last few batched I realised pasturization alone was not enough to ensure all the yeasty beasties we dead. The pump filter has been working great. You only have to make sure the wine has been racked a number of times before you run it through, otherwise you will end up with wine all over the place. About the same as your first racking experience.
ReplyDeleteCheers,
Heinz
I noticed clarification was abit slow so I added some gelatin to help the process along.
ReplyDeleteWithin a day or 2 tha clarification was moving along quite nicely. Just yesterday, I decided to rack the batch.
ReplyDeleteThis batch has been really quite wierd. Basically, I have just under 2 jugs of mead sitting in secondary. One of the jugs has been clearing up wuite nicely, while the other has been staying kinda muggy looking. I tried several things to no avail.
ReplyDeleteJust the other day, I decided to pick up some sparkeloid, which is pretty much mud. Well OK, clay but mud has a better ring to it.
I was quite amazed, by the next day claification was almost done. The mud had sunk to the bottom taking the crap with it. In fact, sparkeloid seems to have worked better than gelatin.