Pear Wine - Larger Batch

I'm getting ready to make some pear wine and have collected about 27 pounds of pears which are ripening up now. I intend to follow the Jack Keller recipe and use Lavlin EC-1118.

How big does the fermenter need to be for Jack Keller's recipe?
Alternately, how many pounds of pears can I fit in a 7.9 gallon wine fermenting bucket?
How many packets of yeast would be needed for this scaled up batch?
How many bottles of pear wine will this yield?

Well EC-1118 is a strong yeast and will ferment pretty dry. I wouldn't recommend it if you want to preserve the pear flavor (71B-1122 or Montrachet work much better).
As far as how much will fit in your fermenter... it depends on whether you are going to add then whole or juice them. When I've used pears I get about 1 1/2 - 2 cups juice per pound. If you only use juice and no extra sugar you may use close to all pears.
As yeast goes 1 pack for 5 gallon should be good... so 2 packs should work good.
And finally, you would get approx 6 gallons of wine after racking so about 28-30 750 ml bottles.

Good luck. Let us know how things go.

Use them when hard.but ripe too - this is when you'll get the most juice apparently!

2ndGenBrewer said:

it depends on whether you are going to add then whole or juice them.

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I am going to use whole fruit, chopped, per the Jack Keller pear recipe. I will probably end up adding the fruit 6 pounds at a time with the recommended water and see how full I can get the fermenter bucket. I'll report back with the results.

My pears ended up yielding about 18 lbs. after discarding rotten fruit and cores - so I tripled the Jack Keller recipe. My fermenting bucket reads about 5.5 gallons full of fruit and liquid. I wouldn't want any more than that.