So Many Plums...

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DocGrimes

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So, I have had the wonderful luck of 30lbs of ripe plums that are available, so what else could I do, I had enough preserves from last year. I have 5 gallons of plum wine in the first fermentation, but had several pounds of honey laying around form a bee keeper friend and so I decided on plum mead. I made two batches using light and dark honey. I did not add any yeast, and the SG for the light was 1.121 and the dark 1.081. They fermented away nicely and today was the first racking. THe light had dropped to 1.022 and the dark to 1.038. They are both quite sharp, but have a lovely nose of plums an honey. I will be curious how they turn out. Here is a photo....

Plum Mead First Racking Oct 3 2012.jpg
 
No yeast ?

If it does ferment, you may get something wonderful, but equally it could end up hideous.

The whole point is control, for specific outcome......

How did you process the plums ? What weight of fruit to the gallon ? Did you use any pectic enzyme ? etc etc........
 
Yes, I'm interested in finding out how it turns out if you relied on wild yeast. A real crap shoot I'm sure, but I tried starting a hard cider with organic sultanas and got lucky. The results were excellent, so good luck to you.
 
Sorry to have left out details.

I went with wild fermentation as a lark. The yeast that I had on hand was Coopers Ale and Lavlin K1V1116 whic I used for the plum wine. i used 1.5 kg of plums per gallon and did add pectinace and yeast nutrient. As for the processing of the plums, pitted and crushed (most of the more or less crushed during the pitting process).
 
I have another 3 kg of plums in the freezer and will order yeast specific for mead to ferment those......having said that, which yeast do you think would be best?
 
I made a plum melomel with D-47 a few years ago, it took a while, I was concerned it would never taste good, but time worked it's magic & a few years later it was fantastic. The thing about D47 is temp control. don't let it ferment on the warm end, it really throws a lot of fusels. Keep it on the cool side & feed it well, it can do a great job. I think you might do even better with 71-B:
http://www.lalvinyeast.com/71B.asp
Regards, GF.
 
I made a plum melomel with D-47 a few years ago, it took a while, I was concerned it would never taste good, but time worked it's magic & a few years later it was fantastic. The thing about D47 is temp control. don't let it ferment on the warm end, it really throws a lot of fusels. Keep it on the cool side & feed it well, it can do a great job. I think you might do even better with 71-B:
http://www.lalvinyeast.com/71B.asp
Regards, GF.
+1 on the 71B idea. It only has one downside, that's it's not good for ageing on the lees (which I like because I'm lazy), but if the batch is racked off within about 2 months of the end of fermentation it's a "non-issue". I've used it a number of times and it produces very good results.
 
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