This is awesome. I really want to recreate something like this. Which wholesaler Sid you use? Something like VHS, Costco, Sam's club or something else?
Do you put any additives in (pectin, campden, etc?)
I've not found too many things my wife is happy about me putting sticky things on.
Thanks dor posting this
I bought the concentrate at "Real Canadian Wholesale Club" which I'm assuming is only in Canada? I checked out Walmart and found that they mostly only sell mixes like fruit punch. I also checked sobeys and found more verity than walmart but the prices were almost doubled. I went to Costco and found that they don't sell any concentrate (maybe its not cost effective for them to ship it?). You'd have to shop around, see what stores in your area sell them. Almost every grocery store sells this stuff for $0.68-1.20 per can, which is still incredibly cheap overall.
I don't add any additives.
Just to satisfy the PM's I got about this I'll try to explain the process here, its very basic. I'm not saying this is the right way to do it, but this is how I do it.
-Buy 20 (12 oz) cans of frozen concentrate.
-sanitize your primary fermenter then add about 1 gallon of water
-add your bentonite and stir well
-add 17 cans of the frozen concentrate
***tip it helps to place the cans in a sink with some hot water, the concentrate will melt along the inside edge of the can making it slide out easily***
-top up with water to the 6gal mark
-check "SG" it should be around 1.04-1.06 if its not within this range I'll add a bit of corn sugar. This will give 6-8% alcohol. I keep the alcohol a little on the low side because this is suppose to be a cooler style drink.
-place the fermenter somewhere warm and wait for the ice to melt
-take about 1 cup of lukewarm water with a teaspoon of sugar and add your yeast.
-wait 15min for the yeast to hydrate
-once the concentrate is at room temperature, you can pitch the yeast.
-after the fermentation settles down in a few days, you can transfer into your secondary. I don't know if there's a sg reading for this, I just do it when the fermentation slows down. <-- hack job approach lol
-let it ferment until the SG is under 1.000
-transfer again to remove most of the pulp, as your doing this add about a half a teaspoon of potassium metabisulphite as well as your other 3 cans of concentrate, stir well.
-wait about 2 days to make sure the fermentation has stopped (I had a bad experience with this once and ended up with champagne lol.
-add kieselsol and stir aggressively for about 10 min to degas the wine. If you're really lazy like me, you can rack back and forth a few times and achieve the same effect.
-after your satisfied that the wine is degassed add Chitosan and stir well
-wait 3-7 days until its cleared
-time to bottle. Transfer the wine one last time through a coffee filter or other filtration device leaving behind the sediment. Try not to agitate the wine while doing this, I find it can pick up strange flavors if you do.
Note *if you like your wine more or less sweet you can change the amount of cans you add for sweetening. I find 3 cans for sweetening compares to some of those fruity wine coolers you can buy in stores.*
Enjoy! Best Served chilled.
This is the way I've done wine successfully in the past. I'm sure its probably not the proper way so feel free to post methods that may work better.
