Blackberry Wine help please

So on my vacation we drank some awesome blackberry wine at a winery. Picked up a few bottles. Which poped the question from my wife, If you can make beer, can you make wine?

So....
Since the blackberry bush's in my neighborhood are getting close to put on fruit...What better time to make a batch of wine.

I have been brewing beer for over a year and doing quite well at it...
So i guess my question here is, How much blackberry's do i need and then after i get the blackberry's in hand, Whats the next step?

First guess to add some water and bring crushed blackberry's up to a boil to sanitize everything. After that add sugar to get some more sweetness and a higher gravity. Cool then pitch yeast.... Since its a fruit wine and i want to keep it sweet...A big slurry of us-05 is handy but i am guessing really the wrong choice.

Am i anywhere close to doing the right thing?

Thanks for all your help.

Look at the recipe section.

In a nutshell:

Blackberrys
water
sugar
campdon tabs


ferment


sit


bottle


sit


drink.

3 1/2 to 4 lbs. of berries, 1 1/2 to 2 1/4 lbs sugar per gallon

My recipe (in the database, or under my avatar) is really good. If you want to make more than 1 gallon, you just multiply all the ingredients except for the yeast.

After it finishes, and clears, you can sweeten to taste by adding a combination of campden/sorbate and adding a simple syrup, or using honey, etc.

YooperBrew said:

My recipe (in the database, or under my avatar) is really good. If you want to make more than 1 gallon, you just multiply all the ingredients except for the yeast.

After it finishes, and clears, you can sweeten to taste by adding a combination of campden/sorbate and adding a simple syrup, or using honey, etc.

Click to expand...

I looked at your recipe, Looks simple.
Only question is, You say its a dry wine? The wife wants it as sweet as a wine cooler if you know what i mean. Desert wine with no bitterness or at least not much.

Is this achieved by just the back sweeten after its done?

Dumb question here, again from a complete noob wine maker.
What is the quickest turn around from making to drinking possible?
If a person makes like 5 gallons...does a person have to bottle every one of them, Or can you keg it and push it with c02 like beer?

Thanks for all your help.
I really appreciate it

yoop will correct me if I am wrong, and I may very well be but. I think the sweeter wines can be drank faster than dryer ones. They don't seem to need the time to take the "edge" off. My wife is like your wife, I want wines almost dry ,she wants almost syrup. I know guys who make "wine" that they drink after a week or two. NASTY NASTY stuff but they get drunk on it so they don't care. As for time... each one is different. I have made a couple batches of blackberry and about 6 mos total I think but I cheat and use gelatin to clear em faster lol.... if you want something sweet AND fast try yoops WELCHES GRAPE JUICE WINE recipe. I LIKE IT and it is drinkable pretty quick.
OH YEAH you sweeten it after the ferment is done.. add potassium sorbate and potassium metabisulphite to kill the yeast then pull out a measured sample and add some simple syrup until it is as sweet as you want it. Then calculate how much it will take to get the entire batch that sweet. I suggest adding less than you calculate as it gets sweeter as it ages IMO.

Here's a good trick for making a sweet blackberry wine. After freezing your berries, let them thaw in a colander and catch the juice. Freeze a quart of juice and once the wine is done fermenting, stabilize it and add the juice back in. This gives a very different final flavor than using sugar in any form. Much more of the berry comes through. You may still need some sugar to hit dessert wine levels. Got that trick from a pro, except they use the next year's crop for juice.

Kegging works fine. I've got 5 gallons in the cabinet waiting to be tapped.

Just took 292 lbs of blackberries and turned them into about 100 gal of wine. Great thing about blackberry wine is it mixes well with other reds, such as Melot and Barbera. I buy Alexander's Sun Country Concentrate. This year I mixed four can of Barbera to about 30 lbs of blackberries and then used American Oak powder. Mixed Barbera to blackberry last year and it really came out good. Hope this helps.

I'll just pop in and say, you might need to add pectic enzyme before you start fermenting, or it could end up cloudy. I might be wrong on that though, I've never used fresh blackberries in a wine.

Also, many people don't like to boil the juice before fermenting. It gives the wine a "cooked fruit" flavor. If you add potassium metabisulphite, that should be sufficient to disinfect it prior to fermenting.

I do not boil the blackberries, I do pour hot water on them (140 degs) then allow them to sit until the temp is 75-78 degrees. Prior to that I put sulfite to the crushed berries and let it sit overnight. I do not use pectic enzyme and the finished product is clear. I also backweeten the wine as some of it goes to the church I attend and for a communion wine they like it sweet...

I agree about backsweetening to get it where you want it. I have been doing the same thing for a few years. Just make sure your fermentation is complete. Sorbate will only keep a fermentation that has stopped from restarting, it will not stop an active fermentation. u dont want bottle bombs, believe me (experience). I have always used 3 lbs berries to 2 1/2 lbs sugar. Make sure your berries are very ripe to eliminate a sour wine, and dont boil your berries, i have found that it increases the bitterness when you do. I just boil my sugar and water, let cool for a little bit, enough that you can put your finger in without cursing, then pour over crushed berries. You can easily keg and it will be a nice sparkling if you increase pressure to about 20psi. Hope this helps.

david_42 said:

Here's a good trick for making a sweet blackberry wine. After freezing your berries, let them thaw in a colander and catch the juice. Freeze a quart of juice and once the wine is done fermenting, stabilize it and add the juice back in. This gives a very different final flavor than using sugar in any form. Much more of the berry comes through. You may still need some sugar to hit dessert wine levels. Got that trick from a pro, except they use the next year's crop for juice.

Click to expand...

This is interesting! I can see how this would contribute to a more natural berry flavor coming through, something I'm often disappointed in with blackberry wines.
So what does freezing the berries then thawing them to extract the juice versus just crushing and straining them do?