Blueberry and Sugar Wine recipe

[GrandmaR]

I've made some really great wine with blueberries, and sugar water... I'm very new to this... how do I make it sweeter? I've read many recipes with numerous extra ingredients; my wine definitely has alcohol, but I want a really sweet wine. Can I accomplish this without adding sugar and potassium sorbate before bottling? Thank you in advance

 

[Kent88]

Pick a variety of yeast with a low alcohol tolerance and just add way too many blueberries and go over the top with sugar.

It will ferment until the yeast stop, so it will end up strong, so you will have to add lots of blueberries and sugar to get it to be sweet enough to balance that.

 

[GrandmaR]

Pick a variety of yeast with a low alcohol tolerance and just add way too many blueberries and go over the top with sugar.

It will ferment until the yeast stop, so it will end up strong, so you will have to add lots of blueberries and sugar to

Pick a variety of yeast with a low alcohol tolerance and just add way too many blueberries and go over the top with sugar.

It will ferment until the yeast stop, so it will end up strong, so you will have to add lots of blueberries and sugar to get it to be sweet enough to balance that.

I like the ease of how I make it.... but if I add more blueberries AND more sugar.... will it just continue to ferment? Or stop fermenting? The sugar is all used up with the fermenting process. This is the first batch of anything alcoholic I've ever made and my family is impressed with the alcohol content... haha (I did it!) However, I wanted it much sweeter.... my mom and I were stirring in sugar because it wasn't sweet at all!

 

[Kent88]

Yeast will continue to ferment sugar until the wine's level of alcohol exceeds what that strain can handle. When the wine becomes too alcoholic, they'll stop.

Yeast producers typically include the yeasts' tolerance in the strain information available on their website, the packaging, or from the seller, but that can vary a bit.

 

[jgmillr1]

Since the wine is not sweet enough for you now, you will need to backsweeten the wine. You will absolutely need to add sorbate and sulfites to protect the wine and guard against refermentation & exploding bottles.

I suggest you draw off a measured sample and weigh an amount of sugar that makes it sufficiently sweet for your tastes. You'll then scale up that amount and add it to your entire batch along with the sorbate (1 gram / gallon) and sulfites (1 campden tablet / gallon).

I like the ease of how I make it.... but if I add more blueberries AND more sugar.... will it just continue to ferment?

It will probably continue to ferment, depending on how old the yeast is in your wine, the yeast strain and the level of alcohol. Wine yeasts will ferment most of the sugar to alcohol. So if you want it sweet, you'll need to backsweeten and prevent re-fermentation with sorbate&sulfites.

There is an upper limit to each yeast strain's alcohol tolerance and you can add enough sugar to top it out and get a sweet, alcoholic wine when you are done. But you would still want to add sorbate and sulfites since there are other strains that could keep that fermentation going. And the wine will be subject oxidation regardless of alcohol content.

 

[Jako]

i made a cyser a few months back i put in enough honey to make it to about 13-14% the yeast tolerance of the yeast was about 11-12% i ended up with a semi sweet cyser. my wife liked it but said it was very strong. if you don't like a very strong drink i would look into sorbate and other means of killing off the yeast and add sugar to taste.

my final gravity was about 1.010 its semi sweet.

 

[Kent88]

You might also consider bottling in heavy-duty champaign bottles in case renewed fermentation occurs.

 

[bernardsmith]

hi GrandmaR and welcome. Fruit wines are more or less balanced when the amount of sugar at the beginning of fermentation creates a juice with the specific gravity of about 1.090. That is equivalent to about 2.25 lbs of sugar - total (including sugar from the fruit) in every gallon of juice. That is a wine with about 12% alcohol by volume.

I would suggest that aiming to add so much sugar that the yeast simply quit because they cannot tolerate the amount of alcohol - about 17% alcohol by volume - will result in a wine that tastes like rocket fuel rather than anything enjoyable. If the wine tastes too "dry" (not sweet enough) then really you have two options - the first is to stabilize the wine by adding K-meta and K-sorbate and then adding sugar (or concentrated fruit juice) . The chemicals will - when there are few yeast cells left in the wine - prevent the yeast from fermenting this added sugar and the sugar will add to the sweetness of the wine. This is what is known as "back sweetening".
The second method is to add a sweetener that the yeast cannot ferment. Many artificial sweeteners have a flavor that they add to the wine that is really awful, but some natural sugars add sweetness that yeast simply cannot ferment. Stevia, I think is one such sugar. But there are others.
But all that said, to back sweeten you really need to know what the yeast is doing and how much of the fruit /sugars have been fermented. That means you should get hold of an hydrometer (about $7.00). This is a tool that enables you to monitor what the yeast is doing by allowing you to measure the density of the wine (the more sugar in a liquid the more dense the liquid - Water has a nominal density of 1.000. Alcohol is less dense than water and my guess is that juice pressed from your berries will have a density of about 1.040 - 1.045 (or about 1 lb of sugar in every gallon of pressed juice).