HELP! Advise please. how old of freezer fruit can I use to make wine? What's the olde

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mrbeachroach

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Hello hbc,

I need some advise here. A wile ago about 2 years or so I froze a bunch of grapes, persimmons, apples, and mulberrys. Well fast forward to now and I have about 30 pounds of ice buildup around everything and it's time to defrost my freezer. Much of this will be likely freezer burnt, but I hate to throw it out without trying to make some wine with it. What's the oldest fruit you have used and still gotten the wine to come out good? Also I hate to wast the time, sugar, and yeast if its indefinitely going to come out bad. Please advise from experience what should I do?
 
1. I have no idea, have never done this before.

2. My gut says while the fruit may be freezer burnt, it still has sugar in it and that is what you are after in the long run.

3. The few fruit wines I have done were made with frozen fruits....plums...prickly pears..and it seemed like the freezing actually helped "juice" the fruit.

4. Water, sugar, and yeast are cheap.

I say go for it! make something out of it....beats just throwing it away!

As a side note....I am headed out for the family Thanksgiving. My step-mother is an avid canner, jam and jelly maker. She has shelves full of old jam and jelly that she says is "old". I want it. I'm gonna make wine out whatever it is!
 
Why not thaw some fruit out and taste it? If it tastes okay (which it probably will) then you are good to go. I don't know what freezer burn really is, but I suspect the elements that you need to taste fruit will all still be there even after being freezer burnt.
 
I've used fruit that had been frozen for nearly 2 years for wine/mead, worked just fine. Huckleberries, cherries, crabapples, plums, all worked just fine. A bit of freezer burn doesn't mean diddly squat to the yeast. You'll likely be crushing that fruit anyway, just give it a dose of pectic enzyme & you'll be good to go.
Regards, GF.
 
Well time has worked its magic - my blueberry wine has lost the freezer burn taste and is tasting really good now. I can't remember, it's either 5 or 6 years old. I'm about to run out!

Thanks for coming back to add this info! That makes all the difference.

I just started my own batch of back-of-the-freezer wine. Decided it was time to clean out the freezer and found a bunch of different fruit, all thoroughly freezer burned and of varying ages. If I recall correctly, I threw in various quantities of:

Strawberry
Banana
Mango
Peach
Pineapple
Apple
Pear
Avocado (I know...)
Probably something else I'm forgetting

And for good measure, the remaining 1/3 of a bottle of slightly old Trader Joe's Power Berry juice blend and most of a bottle of their Green Juice blend (with spirulina!). Whizzed it up with the stick blender and had over 1G of slurry. Boiled that (Pectin haze, schmectin haze. This is dumpster diving afterall...) and split it up into a 1G batch with no extra water and a 1/2 G batch thinned out with water and 1 cup of sugar added.

This is my most random "wine" yet and completely free (it was either wine or the trash can). I didn't even have to spend money on the yeast because I'm reusing yeast from my last batch of cyser.

Yes, I'm sure it'll taste horrible. I wonder what a year or two in the bottle will do for it. Fun regardless.
 
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