Hi all, I’m about to pitch the yeast tomorrow on my first batch of red wine from fresh grapes. I picked up a load of what turned out to be 110 lbs of Marquette grapes, crushed, destemmed and sulfited them, and other than tweaking with sugar and acid levels I am almost ready to pitch the yeast.
It’s the tweaking of acid levels that concerns me. At the moment, for ease of making adjustments, I have the batch split between two 7 gallon fermenters, each filled to the 5.5ish gallon mark.
I’ll check at the LHBS tomorrow but it doesn’t look like I’ll have any way of monitoring pH this time so I’m probably stuck simply looking at just TA levels with the cheap acid testing kit I bought.
I’m fully expecting, if any aberrant readings, that TA may be too high. Any great tips for adjusting this? It seems like adding a sugar/water solution is the simplest way to go about it.
I’ll add that what makes all of this more confusing, is that while I have 11 gallons of must total, obviously I’ll only get 6ish gallons of wine from this after pressing, but I really don’t actually know how much wine I’ll get, so making adjustments based on total gallons of wine gets a little confusing to me.
Obviously I want to make the very best wine I can with the tools I have readily available to me, just curious if you all may have any tips or tricks for acid levels or any other aspect of making red wines.
It’s the tweaking of acid levels that concerns me. At the moment, for ease of making adjustments, I have the batch split between two 7 gallon fermenters, each filled to the 5.5ish gallon mark.
I’ll check at the LHBS tomorrow but it doesn’t look like I’ll have any way of monitoring pH this time so I’m probably stuck simply looking at just TA levels with the cheap acid testing kit I bought.
I’m fully expecting, if any aberrant readings, that TA may be too high. Any great tips for adjusting this? It seems like adding a sugar/water solution is the simplest way to go about it.
I’ll add that what makes all of this more confusing, is that while I have 11 gallons of must total, obviously I’ll only get 6ish gallons of wine from this after pressing, but I really don’t actually know how much wine I’ll get, so making adjustments based on total gallons of wine gets a little confusing to me.
Obviously I want to make the very best wine I can with the tools I have readily available to me, just curious if you all may have any tips or tricks for acid levels or any other aspect of making red wines.
