Blueberry Wine

So I normally make blueberry wine according to this basic recipe for 5 gallons:

10# Blueberries (per jack keller)
4# Raisins
8-10# Sugar

I have obtained 17 pounds of blueberries. How can I make two 8.5lb batches work? Thoughts?

You could add 1.5lbs of blackberries per batch to make up for the lost blueberries.

Noe said:

You could add 1.5lbs of blackberries per batch to make up for the lost blueberries.

Click to expand...

haha if I was going to do that I'd just get more blueberries.

Ok no ideas that require the purchcase of fruit. The 17#s were free. concentrate, and inexpensive juice could work.

Do one 5-gallon batch and then do a 1-gallon port of blueberry.

You could use a frozen concentrate but you could also get frozen berries from the store for a couple dollars more than the concentrate.

Where do you get blueberry concentrate?

I've never seen it in grocery stores. I have seen it in my LHBS but it is not sold in a small amount and it isn't cheap either.

Blast. I had thought rhubarb might work, but that's pricey too.

I can't comment on Rhubarb because I haven't made anything with it before. If you are going for cheap I'd say concentrate. I would try a port, but that could just be because I've been wanting to make one and haven't got around to it yet. You could maybe try to dial down the recipe to make (1) 5gallon and (1) 4 gallon. Other than that I'm out of suggestions.

How do you make a port?

BLUEBERRY PORT WINE
6 lb. blueberries
1/2 pt. red grape concentrate
1/2 c. light dry malt
1-3/4 lb. granulated sugar
1/2 tsp. pectic enzyme
1-1/2 tsp. acid blend
1/2 tsp. yeast energizer
1/2 tsp. wine stabilizer
4 pt. water
crushed Campden tablet
wine yeast
Wash and crush blueberries in nylon straining bag and strain juice into primary fermentation vessel. Tie top of nylon bag and place in primary fermentation vessel. Stir in all other ingredients except stabilizer, yeast and red grape concentrate. Stir well to dissolve sugar, cover well, and set aside for 24 hours. Add yeast, cover, and daily stir ingredients and press pulp in nylon bag to extract flavor. When specific gravity is 1.030 (about 5 days), strain juice from bag and siphon liquor off sediments into glass secondary fermentation vessel. Fit fermentation trap. Rack in three weeks and again in two months. When wine is clear and stable, add red grape concentrate, wine stabilizer and crushed Campden tablet, rack again and bottle. Allow a year to mature. [Adapted from Raymond Massaccesi's Winemaker's Recipe Handbook]


This is off of Jack Kellers site.

Phenomenal. I'll give it a try and see how we do.

For me i would make a 6gallon batch out of the 17 pds of blueberries in the primary for 7 days which would give it a full flavor then do a second run with them for blueberry lemonade for another 5 days that way you would getr 11 gallon out of them and both would be good maybe. Thats my thoughts ive also made wine with 10 pds of berries for 7 days placed them in another primary with the othe 7 pds for flavor and it did ok but i usually use pds per gallon but this may work

wow. that's a great idea! I may try it next time. I'm going to get another 20lbs this weekend hopefully.

Scaling up the (10lb) recipe to use 17 lbs of blueberries ...

find the factor to use ...
10 divided by 17 = approx .59

so you would *divide* all the other original amounts in the recipe by .59 to get the measurements for 17 lbs.

In other words ...
Raisins ... originally 4 lbs / .59 = 6.77 lbs raisins
sugar ... originally 8 lbs / .59 = 13.55 lbs sugar (assuming that in your original recipe which said 8 to 10 lbs you’d use 8)

Then all you need to do it to make sure your fermenting vessels ... buckets, carboys etc ... are of the right size so that you have enough space in the top of the primary bucket to avoid overflow of the must & cap ..... and in the secondary/carboy/jugs etc that you have a headspace that does not exceed a couple inches from the stopper/airlock.