Mustum

Good afternoon,

New member here with a question. I am wondering if anyone has had any experience making Mustum.

I am a pastor of a congregation that wants to make its own Communion Wine, and my preference is to make Mustum, which is permitted by our Church's rules but will allow us to take the Sacrament into hospitals, prisons, and other public locations (for example, an outdoor Eucharist at the park) without facing any kind of problems. (A few years back, when we were getting started at my last Church plant assignment, the park refused to rent the community center to us or even allow us on to the grounds to worship because we used real wine instead of grape juice.)

Essentially, it is my understanding that Mustum is fresh squeezed, unpastuerized grape juice in which fermentation is halted at a very early point by freezing it, then bottling it airtight. We could buy the stuff, but I prefer to have parishoners make our bread and wine themselves. Welch's cannot be used because pastuerization is considered an 'alteration' of the grape juice, removing the natural alcohols present in it. I have seen several recipies on how to make fruit juice from grapes, but it calls for boiling the stuff several times and I am not sure at what point the alcohol would evaporate and constitute what church law calls "invalid matter" (in the end, Mustum has to have some alcohol in it).

Any suggestions or guidance that could be provided would be helpful.

Thanks,
Rob+

Hmmm - non-alcoholic wine from pressed fresh grapes. Sorry, Padre, but I doubt there are many people on this board with that kind of experience. Try this forum - you might have better luck:

winepress.com

Sorry we couldn't help you more but Welcome to HBT! Good luck on your project.

I'm not really up on this, but couldn't you make a very lightly alcoholized wine by using a normal wine recipe and just carefully monitoring with a hydrometer and cold-crashing when the ABV reached the target level? Legally anything under half a percent is considered non-alcoholic, so if you work toward that you'd be OK. Since the yeast would be just getting started I'm not sure whether you'd get a lot of yeasty flavors in there or not. Maybe chill it to make the yeast go dormant and let it rest in the fridge until it settles. Then rack off the lees and chill or freeze until needed. Since it's for Communion I assume you're not getting a big swallow anyway so maybe a bit of yeast flavor isn't a problem. (If you are getting big swallows, tell me where your church meets )