So, I'm living in a SE Asian country with plentiful fresh mangos but very minimal access to good brewing equipment. What homebrewer is going to let that stand between him and good drink, though? :rockin:
I bought 4 kilos of fresh mangos at the market today, along with more white sugar than I could ever possibly know what to do with all for $7. My wife and I peeled, scored, put in plastic bags, and squashed (to the best of our ability) all 4 kilos, which came out to 2.5 kilos (or about 90 ounces) taking in to account the loss of the peels and seeds.
Meanwhile, we sanitized a 5 gallon #1 (PET) plastic drinking water vessel with three feet of 1 cm diameter blow off hose rammed through a hole in its lid with 3 gallons of a 1 tbl/gal concentration bleach solution. Made sure to get the spigot, all the nooks and crannies, and the hose itself nice and clean. 20 minutes later, I dumped and rinsed it thoroughly with sanitized water I'd just boiled in our new 50L aluminum pot to get a nice oxide layer on it.
While that cooled down in the bathroom, we brought 24 cups of water, the 2.5 kilos of mashed, purred mango, and 17.5 cups of white sugar to a slight boil. I wanted to hold back on the sugar even more for fear that my admittedly weak ass strain of yeast likely couldn't handle the OG (and expected final abv%) of this wine, but nothing ventured nothing gained, right?
Currently, the creation is cooling in my covered aluminum pot in the tub, and once it's down to room temperature I'll pour and pitch. I have no access to yeast nutrient (which I hope won't be a problem, given the mineral content of mangos), no pectinase (which I know won't help things), and no tannin addition (which doesn't really make too much of a difference), but did add 3 tablespoons of a combination of lemon and lime juice to give it a little acidity before we started to cool it. No tartaric/malic acid presence, but then again, you brew with what you have ...
Oh, and without access to a hydrometer, I rubberbanded a straw in an odd shape, weighted it down with a screw, and calibrated it against three sugar solutions of known density. I estimate my OG at 1.110
Update: Pitched 1.5 teaspoons, twisty-tied the blow off tube in to a pot of bleach water, and 7 hours later I had a steady stream of bubbles, about one every second. Looking to rack to secondary after three weeks hopefully ...