First Time wine - Quick Blackberry

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Brewkowski

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I wanted to try my hand at winemaking since it's getting pretty cold out for brewing, and I thought a semi-sweet blackberry would be a good start. Never having made wine, I've looked at several recipes and the technique varies, but this is what I was thinking.

3 Gal batch, start off with about 3.5gal to avoid topping off

12lbs of frozen blackberries
6 lbs of sugar
1 tsp pectic enzyme
1/2 tsp acid blend
1 tsp yeast nutrient
Camden to stabilize
3.5 gallons of bottled water
Yeast (Lavlin K1V-1116)

Mix water, berries, and sugar until dissolved and add other ingredients, except yeast and let sit 24 hours. Pitch yeast and watch it go.

Questions:

-Should I heat the water, berry, sugar mixture?

-Do I need to get liquor off fruit in 5-6 days or could it wait until fermentation is over before transferring to secondary?

-How well do I crush the berries, I've seen potato masher up to blender, I'm trying to do it quick and simple just to get some practice, so I was hoping to put it on the fruit and then siphon it off with a grain bag or panty hose on my siphon tip.

-How much would it change the flavor if I added like 64oz of Niagara grape juice (welch's) or maybe did a 4:1 blackberry/blueberry mix?

-I've only had blackberry dessert wine and that's not what I'm going for, but maybe like a semi-sweet riesling.

-How do you gauge residual sugar? Can I just stick to gravity readings?
 
This is a great recipe - just keep in mind that you will not need 3.5 gal of water to make the 3.5 gal of wine. I juss made 6 gal. of raspberry wine, and the added water was only ~ 2 gal. A good approach is to add all ingredients except water, and add water until you hit your desired SG. I would suggest keeping it in the 1.090 - 1.10 range. Waiting a day to pitch is OK - just cover it.

Do not heat! Else I will feel compelled to tell a funny story about a wine-making friend who boiled his blackberries...

Primary, secondary, you have a lot of leeway. You can extract tannins from the blackberry seeds, so don't go too long, but I wouldn't worry about going a couple weeks. I'd go more by the status of the ferment. If it's just winding down, that's the best time to go to secondary.

Yes, mash the berries. I like freeze/thaw. It takes more time, but it's way less work.

Blends? Why don't you do the straight blackberry first?

Residual sugar. Best thing is to ferment dry. FG should be 0.095 +/- a few points. Then stabilize with potassium sorbate to prevent re-fermentation. Finally, add sugar to a sample of measured volume to taste. Scale to get the amount to add to the batch, and bottle.
 
Did the light body sweet blackberry, also the medium body and then blended barbara wine into a medium body and it all tasted good..
 
Thanks for the input so far. Is there much of an affect using brown sugar vs. white?

I've never even thought about using brown sugar in a wine. In small amounts in an ale, I think the molasses flavors can be interesting. I'm not so sure they would work well in a fruit wine. But what the heck, this is a hobby. If it sounds good to you, go for it (maybe you could substitute part of the white sugar for version 1.0).
 
yeah, i think I'll just stick with white sugar for the first time, at least then I'll have a benchmark to work off of. I'm trying to get it with the semi-sweetness of a Spatlese or Auslese, any idea what a good target gravity would be? Somewhere just above 1.000? Also I'm on the fence between the Lalvin Montpellier K1v-1116 and the 71b-1122 Narbonne. According to some sites the Narbonne can retain more fruit character but makes it less acidic.
 
Both of those yeast strains are good - I've used them for many years, and still haven't decided which I like better. To me, the 71b-1122 is softer, sweeter, and maybe retains fruit flavors better. However, these differences are much more subtle in a fruit wine than they would be in a grape wine. As for final gravity, you may need to go a bit higher than 1.000 to get the "equivalent sweetness" of a semi-sweet grape wine, because blackberries are much more acidic than grapes. Using the sweetness adjustment that I described in my first reply is neary fool-proof. Although the flavors will evolve over time, getting the basic acid-sweetness balance is the key, any your palate is a tool far superior to a hydrometer for that.
 
I just made blackberry wine in August. Dont boil anything. The biggest advice I can give, for what its worth, is of course use a fruit bag for your berries. I let mine ferment in the bag, uncrushed for around 5 days. I thought "there is no way the juice will get extracted out of the berry in 4-5 days. Well, to my suprise there was nothing but seeds left in the bag by day 5. Just make sure you punch down the cap at least once a day with a sanitized spoon to get it broke up and keep it moist. Mine was only left in five days and I made the mistake of squeezing the berry bag when done which was full of seeds. Well, my wine has a lot of tannins in it now from the seeds, almost a slight bitterness. I personally wouldn't leave the fruit in the ferment more then 5-7 days and I think you'll find the fruit will be mostly gone by then anyway.
 
With that recipe, a FG of 0.992 or so is possible. Mine started at 1.109 and finished at 0.991. So, if you stop it at 1.000, you'll have about 2% residual sugar. I let mine ferment out and will back-sweeten with white grape juice concentrate.

You can just track the gravity and start sampling for sweetness around 1.004 and stop the ferment when it's right.
 
Well, I was planning on Blackberries, but I found out that's the one type of berry not on sale at the store and I'm cheap so I'd rather not spend $50 on frozen berries, but if it makes a few bottles of good wine I guess it's worth it. They do have strawberries and blueberries on sale, would any of these make a potentially good semi-sweet wine that you could drink alone or with food?
 
don know how much flavor you'l get out of blueberries for wine? But it could be great too. I like the sounds of strawberry. You could probably get by leaving these in the ferment a lot longer as you dont have to worry as much about the seeds causing tannins and bitterness.
 
Well, I guess the laws of supply and demand determined that I will be making a Blueberry wine, the store had not a single package of frozen Blackberries, but the coolers were stuffed with blueberries. So they either don't stock them or they ran out. So this is where I'm at

10 lbs. Frozen Blueberries
2 lbs Fresh Blackberries (I thought to add a little acidity and some tannins)
32oz Blueberry juice
Added 1.25 gal of water
After stirring and crushing by hand as best I could, SG is 1.030 @ 50 degrees without any added sugar

I'd like to make something between 11%-13% ABV, is there a method for calculating how much sugar to add to get to a certain gravity, I think I would need to get the gravity around 1.10 to start?

--I just did a calculator and it was in Brix and it said to go from 7.84B(1.030 SG) to 34B (1.15) for about 4 gal of must I need to add 9 lbs of sugar, so like some recipes on here have said, about 2 lbs per gallon.
 
if you start off at 1.10 it want be a quick blackberry, itll take at least 8 to 9 months for it to tastes good. the higher the alchol the longer itll have to age i would stert off at about 1.080 and itll probaly be good in about5 months.
 
I tried scaling it back from the 9 lbs and only used 8, but that still put me up at 1.122 OG. After 12 hours I started to see a little airlock activity, but nothing big yet, so I'm thinking I can wait 5 days or so before transferring to secondary?
 
That's a monstrous OG - enough to make a > 17% wine if it ferments dry. Most likely, it won't be something you like for a long time. I think outdoorsmadness is right - better to hit the lower end of the OG range for a quicker, more accessible wine.

You started out right - mixed the must to get the starting point (1.030 in your case). After that, it would be better to add sugar incrementally to hit a target OG rather than adding a prescribed amount of sugar. The effect of sugar on SG is completely predictable. For your 3.5 gal. volume, each lb. of sugar will raise the SG by about 0.013. So ~4 lbs. would have been the amount to get you in the ~1.080 ballpark.

As for when to transfer to the secondary, that should be dictated more by the state of the ferment than time, although if you are concerned about the tannins from the blackberry seeds, that might speed up your timetable.
 
Well, just transferred it yesterday into a secondary. There was still significant airlock activity and the gravity is only down to 1.072 after a week of fermenting at around 60 degrees. Does this seem like a good progression? Is there any real gauge for estimating how well fermentation is going as far as gravity change in a given time period at a certain temperature? I'm nervous the wine will stall out and I'll be stuck with fruit syrup.
After pulling the must off the fruit it looks like I have around 4 gallons or so. I think the yeast is good up to around 14% and it seems like I'm going to have every bit of that and leave a little residual sugar. So this is definitely going to be a next Christmas wine I'm guessing?
 
Going from 1.122 -> 1.072, and still active at 1 week is a good sign that the yeast is up to the task. I'll bet it's going to be a good wine, but perhaps for Christmas, 2010.
 
11 days in fermentation and it's still bopping along with about one bubble every 6 seconds or so. The little yeast that could! I was almost hoping it would poop out so I wouldn't have to wait a year to drink it.
 
Waiting? That's what beer is for... Seriously, though, having the yeast poop out is usually a bad thing (there are some exceptions). Stressed yeast can leave bad flavors, so it's usually better to control the ferment with the amount of fermentables.
 
Waiting? That's what beer is for... Seriously, though, having the yeast poop out is usually a bad thing (there are some exceptions). Stressed yeast can leave bad flavors, so it's usually better to control the ferment with the amount of fermentables.

Good point indeed, I guess I'll have to bide my time some tasty homebrews.

You don't want to taste wine during fermentation right? If I did a reading and it drops down to a gravity that I think is about where I would backsweeten to, would I be able to add sorbate at that point rather than waiting to go full ferment and adding sugars? Any idea what kind of gravity I'm looking at for a level of sweetness similar to a riesling spatlese?
 
I never hesitate to taste wine (or beer or mead) at any step of the process - you just need to keep its youth in mind in judging what you taste. You can get a very good idea of the sweet/acid balance, as long as you can put aside the funky other flavors that will go away with aging. I don't like my fruit wines above ~1.020, no matter how acidic the fruit (black currants can be pretty extreme, blackberries slightly less so).

The answer for the sorbate is probably not. It is advertised as preventing re-fermentation, not stopping active fermentation. I have seen some people refer to stopping fermentation. Perhaps there is a chemical that does that, but it isn't sorbate.
 
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