Beginner: Tropical fruit wine fermentation

[Leon bali]

Hello everyone,

I am new here but I hope you can help me with some Infos.
So, I live in the tropics. Its humid, hot and not overly sterile.

I started my 1st home brew experiment a few days ago (5 days).

This is what I have done :

Glass fermenter (approx 10 liter)
I chopped up a good 2kg of tropical fruits (apples, starfruit, mango, grapes, watermelon).
After copping them up I gently crushed them a bit with my hands, so that grapes popped open und seeds were not damages, same goes for apple and so on. Then I boiled water and once it was hot I poured it over the fruits in the fermenter. Then I added 1kg of normal crystal sugar.
Then I set it all aside for a few hours to cool down.

Meanwhile I put one bag (8g) of regular supermarket bread yeast into a bowl of lukewarm water, mixed some sugar in there and waited until it foamed.

After the fermenter ind fruits cooled down, I mixed the yeas in the fermenter, stirred all up and closed the lid (with home made air lock)..

After a few hours all inside was bubbling, moving.. The action was on!

Now after 5 days (I was stirring all up twice a day), it all calmed down a lot. Less action, less bubbles. The fruit chops kinda float on the top and there is a other layer on the bottom (the years I assume)?

It smells, well.. A bit like old socks I guess. But somewhat ok hehe.

The wine is pink, the room it is stored in is 26 degree celsiolus.

What do I do now?
Do I add sugar?
Do I stir?
Do intake out the fruit chops that refuse to sink?
Do I do nothing?

I bought a hydrometer, put it in the fermenter and it almost sunk completely. Only like 1cm was sticking out.

Thanks for all the info and help. Love hear some feedback.

Cheers!

 

[bernardsmith]

Hiya, Leon Bali and welcome. Great that you purchased an hydrometer. It should have at least one if not three different scales on it. One scale is called specific gravity and that you can use to measure the density of a liquid. This is really very useful in wine making because when you extract fruit juice what you have is essentially sugar dissolved in water. The nominal density of water is 1.000 and when there is sugar dissolved in the water the water becomes more dense. One pound of sugar (a very scant 0.5 kg) when dissolved in water will raise the density (or specific gravity) of the water by about 40 points (1.040) and so if you measure the gravity or density of the liquid you want to ferment that figure tells you how much sugar is in solution. Stay with me, here.
Knowing how much sugar is in solution can give you a really good idea how much alcohol will be in the wine you make. The second scale indicates the potential alcohol by volume (ABV) of your solution (the solution is known as a "must" to wine makers) . So, before you add any yeast, if the specific gravity was say, 1.090, then the potential ABV would be about 12%. That scale is only useful before you add any yeast because shortly after you pitch (add) the yeast the yeast will begin to eat the sugar and the specific gravity will begin to fall as the dissolved sugar is converted into alcohol (and carbon dioxide).
The third scale is typically a metric called Brix which rather than measure the density of the liquid is in fact a measure of the percentage of sugar to water in the must or juice. Brix is the measure preferred by grape growers because this in fact informs them when wine grapes are optimally ripe. They want to see something like 20- 25% of the juice from the grape being sugar.
So , bottom line ... the height of the hydrometer above your wine is less important than the numbered line where the surface of liquid sits. Your wine will be more or less finished active fermentation when the line is at or above 1.000 (and the numbers are larger the lower you look on the glass tube) - , say .998 or 996 or even ,994 (alcohol being less dense than water...).
A wine may stop fermenting when there is still some sugar left in solution perhaps because the sugars that are left cannot be fermented by the yeast or perhaps because the yeast do not have the ability to continue fermenting in a solution with as much alcohol as there is in solution: alcohol being toxic for yeast... or there can be other reasons ..