Blueberry wine question

My girlfriend got the idea of blueberry wine in my head and now I must do it.

I'm normally a beer brewer but have made a wine kit and a sweet and dry mead.

Looking for recipes it seems like there is always a significant amount of sugar. I'd like to avoid just dumping pounds of sugar in. Is that the normal way to get the gravity up?

I was thinking about buying some blueberry juice that doesn't have preservatives (I'm told Trader Joes has some), probably 5 gallons. Then I was going to take a couple pounds of blueberries and freeze them to add those in, along with some pectic enzyme.

Do you guys think the gravity would still be too low? If so I was thinking about adding blueberry honey to get it up.

I also would like some residual sweetness. It looks like a lot of people back sweeten. I used the sweet mead yeast when I made mead to leave residual sugar and it tasted great, is there a particular yeast that works at these gravity levels or will back sweetening be the only choice?

What ABV level are you looking to ferment to? I would take a SG of the juice, then adjust it as needed with the honey to get your target OG... I would also use a yeast that will ferment fully, but leave a touch of sweetness in the must. If you're looking for more medium, get the FG to hit 1.006-1.015...

The yeast strain you pick will determine how high you need to make the OG... If you use something like Lalvin D47 (14% tolerance), then plan the brew around that. Figure it will either tucker out at ~14% leaving some sweetness left, or plan for it to go dry (.998-.995) at ~14% so that you can back sweeten a little to get it where you want.

Just be careful with back sweetening, to not do too much too soon. Very often if you back sweeten to exactly where you want it now, in 6-12 months it will be too sweet as it ages.

Is there any way to tell what the gravity contribution from the frozen blueberries will be?

You can use the calculation tool from the got mead website... You'll need to enter the weight of the berries you intend to use...

This recipe came from jack kellers website. I made it last summer with fresh blueberries. Bottled it this weekend, and it turned out fantastic!!! I see no reason why you couldn't use frozen berries, just thaw and procede with the recipe once they're room temperature. This is a 1 gallon recipe, but you could easily adapt it up to any size you want.

* 2 lb. blueberries
* 1 lb. raisins
* 2 lb. granulated sugar
* 1/2 tsp. pectic enzyme
* 1-1/2 tsp. acid blend
* 1/2 tsp. yeast energizer
* 1 gallon water
* crushed Campden tablet
* wine yeast

Bring water to boil, then set aside. Wash and crush blueberries and put in primary fermentation vessel with all ingredients except yeast. Add hot water and stir to dissolve sugar. Cover well and allow to cool to 70-75 degrees F., then add yeast. Stir daily for 5-6 days or until specific gravity is 1.040. Strain out fruit pulp and press. Siphon into secondary fermentation vessel and fit fermentation trap. Rack in three weeks and again in three months. When wine is clear and stable, rack again and bottle. Allow a year to mature. Improves with age. [Adapted from Stanley F. Anderson and Raymond Hull's The Art of Making Wine]

The sugars in the berries vary always. Adding sugar to get sg up is not a bad thing, it ferments easier than honey and blueberries ferment hard also. The sugar is not there when done any way, its alcohol now. I make must with frozen berries by pouring boiling water over them after they thaw. add pectic enzymes and allow to set for 24 hours. Some people add K-meta at this point I believe the boiling water does the trick. It is your choice. I then set SG at 1.085 using sugar. It is in reality a little higher because of sugars still in fruit. If you want a little honey taste backsweetin with honey. Blueberries need a little sweetness of they loose their flavor. I usually make an F-Pac with honey. If you are going to backsweetin you need to stabilize with Sorbate and K-Meta. I add F-Pac the day after adding them. and add fining a week later

Well..

I'll try this The dried blueberries have sunflower oil in them, will that mess something up? I saw several people saying they use raisins in wine, do they have oil in them too?

Raisins usually have vegetable oil in them, to get rid of it I usually let them sit in some hot water and then pour it out before I do whatever I need to do with them. In any case, the oil will float to the top and you will be able to rack from under it.

you can skim most oil off as you go BTW I find Keller never uses enough fruit

So I'm planning on using wyeast sweet mead yeast. I had good luck with it making a nice sweet mead with enough residual sweetness that I don't think I'll need to back sweeten. The sweet mead OG was 1.114 though so I don't know how it will do with a lower OG

That yeast maxes out at 11% ABV... So if you use more sugars than will ferment, it will remain sweet. Do you recall the FG of that batch? Chances are, it was around 1.030...

I wouldn't go that high on the OG since the FG is far into the 'Desert' range. My current traditional batches were approaching 1.020 when I last checked on them. I'd be very happy if they went just a little lower. Chances are, they won't. They'll be at/above 18% at that point, so the yeast is pretty much done.

I would suggest planning the OG based on what the yeast tolerance is. You can always age it some, or add a bit more honey to back sweeten it. It's far more difficult to get it to ferment beyond the yeast's tolerance level. Yeast CAN go beyond their stated tolerance, but usually not by a large amount. It does depend on things like nutrients added to the must, plus temperature the must ferments at. I'd rather plan on the yeast hitting the listed ABV cap, making the GO to allow for a little sweetness. Of course, it does help to have good calculations on what the OG will be before you make the batch, plus good measurements of the amount of honey going in. I have a feeling I went a hair heavy on my first two traditional batches. That's why they're finishing a bit sweeter than I had planned. I won't let that happen next time.

Ok, I'm getting ready to do this.

I have 3 gallons a blueberry juice 1.041 SG
4 pounds of frozen blueberries
2 pounds of dried blueberries
6 pounds of blueberry honey


I want to make a 6 gallon batch with a 1.1 OG

I looked around for calculators but can't find something that will tell me what the above will come out to, does anyone know any good resources?

I just used the calculator tool from the Got Mead? site... Using orange juice to get a baseline for the sugar level of the blueberry juice, then adding the frozen berries and honey amount, you're going to come up short of the OG goal by a good amount, at 6 gallons total volume. Without knowing the sugar content of the dried berries that is... If they're anything like the dried cherries I have here, they're 1.5oz per serving, with 26g of sugar per serving. Gives you 1248g of sugar, which comes out to being 44oz of sugar... Adding that to the tool, as sugar #4, would get your OG up to ~1.080... To hit your goal of 1.100, you'll want to increase the honey amount (or a sugar) to 9.25#... If you're planning on fermenting just the juice and honey first, that means you'll want an OG of that solution to be about 1.076. I would add the frozen berries later, as well as the dried. That way you'll get more layers of flavor.

If you have access to a refractometer, test the solution after adding the first 6 pounds to see where it's at. Just be sure to give it enough time to mix completely. If you reduce the total must volume to 5 gallons, you should only need a little more honey (6.25#)... Amazing how much difference that extra gallon of must makes...

What yeast are you planning to use with the batch??

Wow. right now I'm sitting at 1.070 and not sure what to do.

I have:
2 gallons water
3 gallons juice
6 pounds honey
1 pound sugar

And it looks like there is about 5.5 gallons in the fermenter currently.

I haven't added the fruit but the dried blueberries have about 120g per pound, so they are not nearly as sweet as your cherries.

I'm going to use Wyeast sweet mead yeast. I had good luck with it on a mead (SG on that was 1.114 and the yeast stopped at 1.023 which made for some very sweet mead).

That's dead on what the mead calculator gives for a gravity value for those ingredients.

If you added another pound of honey, your OG would go up to 1.076, putting you at ~10.25% ABV for the finished product... Since that yeast will probably tucker out at 11% ABV, I wouldn't go much higher than that. Unless you want a REALLY sweet wine. You can always add a bit more honey to it once things are complete... Just be careful, since if you add too much when it's young, by the time it's had a chance to age a little, it will be REALLY sweet.

I wouldn't make the OG more than 1.090 on that batch... At least initially. You can always add a bit more sweet at the end, if you want. You can't get it to finish lower than what the yeast's tolerance is (sometimes they can finish higher, but the vast majority of the time, you won't get beyond the stated tolerance). Especially when they don't state "approximately" when listing the ABV tolerance.

If you added 1.5 more pounds of sugar (with no extra honey), combining that with the ~1/2# of sugar you'll get from the dried fruit, that will put you up to 1.087 for an OG.

Thanks for all the help, I think this will turn out well. Just waiting on my smack pack to inflate and I'll get this going. Should I wait a week to add the berries or less/more time?

This is what I ended up with:

2 gallons purified water
3 gallons blueberry juice (SG 1.041)
6 pounds blueberry honey
2.5 pounds sugar

1.080 5.5 gallons

I would wait at least until fermentation has slowed down, or you're closer to the FG before adding the fruit. If you want to add some of the frozen fruit now, you can. I would just reserve a good amount for adding after about 2-3 weeks. Keep in mind, you'll only want the fruit in the must for 5-7 days before racking off of it. If you want to give it a week or two, then add the dried fruit, give it another week, then rack onto the frozen fruit, that could work well... I've only used fresh fruit in my melomel so far...

This is one slow fermenter.

I put the juice, sugar and honey in the fermenter on 3/13 @ 1.080 SG

Today it is at 1.042. I suspect fermentation is stuck but I've tried twice (3/16 and 3/22) to put booster and some extra oxygen in.

I put in the dried berries and some pectic to see if it would start back up. I hope there are some viable yeast in there somewhere.

I would only aerate until you hit the 1/3 break... So with an OG of 1.080, that would put it to a SG of 1.053... After that, it's hands off until finished. If you didn't give it any more oxygen from when you started the batch, until it hit ~1.053, then that could be part of it. If you didn't give it any extra food, that could be part too.

I will say that my blackberry melomel hit close to it's FG after 10-11 days... I did tend to it until it hit the 1/3 break though... After that, I left it alone except to add more fruit as needed (after racking off the first batch)...

Ok, I oxygenated yesterday at 1.042 so I won't do that any more. Hopefully it'll be fine being that I'm still planning on adding a few pounds of fruit.

Blueberry is known to cause stuck fermentations. Is it warm enough?

Debbie

68F in my basement, within the 65-75F of the yeast. I'm not sure it is stuck, just very slow. I've added nutrient and booster and it hasn't really helped. I think I'm just going to have to wait it out. I haven't added the frozen blueberries yet, just the dried ones.

Added the frozen blueberries today, with a healthy dose of pectic (I've read that it doesn't survive alcohol well).

Interestingly last week before the dried blueberries went in the SG was 1.042 and today when I racked off the dried it was 1.052. I went ahead and added a bit of sugar and nutrient with the fruit to hopefully get it going again, not sure what else to do, should I repitch? The LHBS doesn't have wyeast but does have WLP720

Since the SG went only from 1.080 to 1.042 (before you added more sugars and such) you've only hit 5.1% ABV... If the yeast doesn't do anything more, then you'll need to either add more yeast, or change to something else... Since you're trying to keep it on the more sweet side, I would try some Lalvin D47 or 71B-1122 if it was me. 71B might be a better choice since you're using a darker berry... Look at the characteristics on the Lalvin site and pick... BTW, both those strains max out at 14% ABV, so it won't ferment too hot on you...

What's the SG now? Since you added more frozen fruit, that's more sugar being added. Did you take a SG shortly after adding the dried fruit? The yeast might have eaten some of the sugars, but it's hard to say, without knowing the amount of sugar in the dried fruit.

IF the SG continues to go up, I would say that the yeast you started with isn't going to do anything more... Before spending money on White Labs yeast, I would go with Lalvin (it's wine yeast, and less expensive than either White Labs or Wyeast strains)... Just rehydrate it per the instructions on the packet and go from there...

If nothing else, while you wait, you can order up the other yeast (I would still advise the Lalvin, since it has a storage life span of at least a year). Never hurts to have some dried yeast on hand, in case you come upon something really good to ferment.

You can make a new starter... once it is roaring... feed it a cup of your wine every hour or so... get it used to the environment... when a bunch of it is roaring along... pitch the whole thing in the wine... leave it on top for a while where it can "breathe".

Debbie

Blueberry with honey is a hard combo. Both alone can get stuck. Warm it up to high 70's and add nutrient if you haven't already. once it gets going you can lower it down but keep it in 70's. I use an aquarium heater in bottom of fermenter on meads and BLUEBERRY. Also check PH. I run it at 3.6

I always have trouble with honey in fermentations. If it makes up more than about 20% of the fermentables then things get sloooooooowwww....

I just racked this to secondary tonight at 1.017 SG. Damn tasty. The first time I did mead I left it in secondary a month and bottled it (planning on aging in the bottles for a year) but from what I've read I'm better off letting it bulk age (I mostly homebrew so bulk aging had never even occurred to me). Hence, I'll be letting this sit for a while.