Is it necessary to use boiling water atop the fruit?

[Bubbles2]

I see recipes that call for Boiling water atop of the diced fruit. I was wondering what is the deal with the boiling water? Needed? I thought Campden does the trick..

 

[RPh_Guy]

Heat pasteurization is the only way to kill all the wild microbes (and you actually have to hit a high enough number of PUs).

Many wild microbes aren't killed by sulfite. Sulfite just knocks them down a little so your pitched yeast can get through fermentation uninhibited ... Then you add sulfite after fermentation to make sure they don't cause problems over the long term.

Or you can let the wild microbes just do their thing because they're actually really good most of the time (in wine).

Cheers

 

[Bubbles2]

Heat pasteurization is the only way to kill all the wild microbes (and you actually have to above a high enough number of PUs).

Many wild microbes aren't killed by sulfite. Sulfite just knocks them down a little so your pitched yeast can get through fermentation uninhibited ... Then you add sulfite after fermentation to make sure they don't cause problems over the long term.

Or you can let the wild microbes just do their thing because they're actually really good most of the time (in wine).

Cheers

PU's ?
Thanks will start using Boil water, been doing it with Campden and Sulphite on the back sweet

 

[RPh_Guy]

Pasteurization Units.

Microbes start to die (slowly) at ~140°F. So you have to hold it above 140 for a certain period of time. There's an equation. Off the top of my head I think 30 PUs is good.

Heating may negatively affect the fruit flavor and/or "set" the pectin, which are the two main reasons why sulfite is commonly used instead.

 

[bernardsmith]

This is simply my opinion but I suspect that those who add boiling water to their fruit come to wine making from brewing and the assumption in brewing is that you must (pun intended) boil your wort. Boiling wort is a "recent" addition since before the use of hops there was no need to boil wort. The temperature (and length of time) at which you extract enzymes from the mash is enough to pasteurize the wort.

The other "rationale" for adding boiling water is that the wine maker is hoping to extract more flavor from the fruit but a) maceration extracts a great deal of flavor from fruit. b) water itself is a solvent and will extract some flavor, and c) the alcohol you produce during fermentation is a far better solvent and will extract more flavor and so you may want to leave the fruit in the wine for a few days after you pitch the yeast, and d) for even more flavor you could add more fruit to the secondary when making country wines.

Boiling water cooks the fruit and while cooked fruit is delicious in compotes and jams, wines tend to taste far better when uncooked fruit is used (although I gotta admit that I sometimes use jams to make my fruit wines especially when the fruit is too exotic for me to find fresh.

 

[Bubbles2]

This is simply my opinion but I suspect that those who add boiling water to their fruit come to wine making from brewing and the assumption in brewing is that you must (pun intended) boil your wort. Boiling wort is a "recent" addition since before the use of hops there was no need to boil wort. The temperature (and length of time) at which you extract enzymes from the mash is enough to pasteurize the wort.

The other "rationale" for adding boiling water is that the wine maker is hoping to extract more flavor from the fruit but a) maceration extracts a great deal of flavor from fruit. b) water itself is a solvent and will extract some flavor, and c) the alcohol you produce during fermentation is a far better solvent and will extract more flavor and so you may want to leave the fruit in the wine for a few days after you pitch the yeast, and d) for even more flavor you could add more fruit to the secondary when making country wines.

Boiling water cooks the fruit and while cooked fruit is delicious in compotes and jams, wines tend to taste far better when uncooked fruit is used (although I gotta admit that I sometimes use jams to make my fruit wines especially when the fruit is too exotic for me to find fresh.

That makes sense as I forget that the abv is at least 12% so not such a great environment for microbes, but Viruses on the other hand.... Maybe a wash in Star san before chopping and masticating?

There are indeed some superstitions to brewing and wine... Like Cork Soakers...LOL Gotta say it with an Italian accent

 

[RPh_Guy]

1. Pathogenic viruses on fruit? Nah!
2. Star San is not known to be effective against viruses.

In my opinion, washing the fruit with anything but water is overkill. The surface is very porous and there are microbes inside the fruit, so a surface sanitizer won't be entirely effective. And as I mentioned, wild microbes aren't really anything to be feared in winemaking. Standard precautions like protecting from oxygen and adding sulfite for aging is all you need.
My 100% wild fermentations have all been very tasty so far.

RDWHAHB!
Cheers

 

[Bubbles2]

I am going to share what I found, how valid? However it goes along with the thread and since these are here for as long as the Server is...WTH

Star San will not kill wild yeast. I rotate the use of StarSan and iodophor, since iodophor kills wild yeast. Here's the reply I got from a chemist when I asked about it...

Broad-spectrum Germicides.

The term “Broad Spectrum” when applied to a sanitizer means that it will attack a wide variety of different types of microorganisms, including gram-positive bacteria (Listeria and Staphylococcus), gram negative bacteria (E. coli and Salmonella), viruses, fungi (both yeasts and molds), as well as many parasites. Broad-spectrum germicides act on microbial membranes, cellular enzymes, DNA, and protein. Iodine-based sanitizers have been used as antimicrobial agents since the 1800s and have a broad spectrum of activity They are a powerful sanitizer in strong acidic aqueous solutions. They are generally used at 12.5 to 25 ppm available iodine, and can cause staining on some surfaces, especially plastics.

Acid-anionic sanitizers are surface-active sanitizers, but negatively charged. Formulations include inorganic and organic acids plus a surfactant. Carboxylic acids (fatty acids) are some times incorporated as well. They are unaffected by hard water or organic soils. The dual function of acid is that it can be used for rinsing and sanitizing in one step. These sanitizers must be used at low pH. Activity above pH 3.5–4.0 is minimal. Acidity, detergency, stability, and noncorrosiveness makes them highly effective. Acid-anionic sanitizers are broad spectrum against bacteria and viruses, but not very effective against yeasts and molds.

Iodophors are considered broad spectrum anti microbial vs. Star San being a being anti bacterial. The actual label for Star San lists what it is registered to kill: E Coli and Staph A – the minimum baseline for allowing a claim of being a sanitizer with the EPA. Iodophor has proven effectiveness against not only gram positive and negative bacteria, but yeast, mold, fungi and viruses and is also a sporicidal agent

 

[RPh_Guy]

Star San will not kill wild yeast.

That's a myth. Star San does kill wild yeast.
More info here:
http://www.milkthefunk.com/wiki/Quality_Assurance
There is also an unpublished study I saw from a scientist in the MTF group finding that Star San is effective at killing up to 100 cells/mL (this is much less than iodophor for example, but still plenty adequate for use as a surface sanitizer).

Maybe Star San kills viruses too. I haven't seen anything about this and haven't researched it since viruses are completely unconcerning for our purposes.

For what it's worth, myself and many others that deal with wild yeast effectively avoid contamination while using Star San as our sanitizer.
For example I bottle Brett mixed fermentations and wild fementations on the same bottling equipment as my clean beers.
If there were any actual evidence to back up claims that it's ineffective, I wouldn't be using it.

Still, there's nothing wrong with using iodophor, bleach/vinegar, or other effective options.

The hydrogen peroxide in any percarbonate-based cleaner like PBW or Oxiclean is also antimicrobial, which adds another layer of protection against cross-contamination.

Hope this makes sense. Cheers!

 

[Bubbles2]

That's a myth. Star San does kill wild yeast.
More info here:
http://www.milkthefunk.com/wiki/Quality_Assurance
There is also an unpublished study I saw from a scientist in the MTF group finding that Star San is effective at killing up to 100 cells/mL (this is much less than iodophor for example, but still plenty adequate for use as a surface sanitizer).

Maybe Star San kills viruses too. I haven't seen anything about this and haven't researched it since viruses are completely unconcerning for our purposes.

For what it's worth, myself and many others that deal with wild yeast effectively avoid contamination while using Star San as our sanitizer.
For example I bottle Brett mixed fermentations and wild fementations on the same bottling equipment as my clean beers.
If there were any actual evidence to back up claims that it's ineffective, I wouldn't be using it.

Still, there's nothing wrong with using iodophor, bleach/vinegar, or other effective options.

The hydrogen peroxide in any percarbonate-based cleaner like PBW or Oxiclean is also antimicrobial, which adds another layer of protection against cross-contamination.

Hope this makes sense. Cheers!

Its always good to practice safe kitchen. However as we meander down this path, it was the boiling water and why, and of course deviations. I prob will not bother with boiled water, considering the blanch or PU's.
ABV, and good cleaning of fruit. I remove most of the skins thus far anyhow coupled with k meta and sorbate, sealed...
I am new to making wine so I thought to ask about the boiling which I have not done in the last
batches

 

[jonereb]

As for adding fruit flavor to country wines, last year I made 2 gallons of muscadine wine. I saved some pure muscadine juice to top the wine after the first racking. I don't know if my experiment will work since I tasted only a sip at bottling. I'll age the wine 2 years before opening.

 

[bernardsmith]

1. Pathogenic viruses on fruit? Nah!
RDWHAHB!
Cheers

Pathogenic viruses? I cannot speak to but you cannot sell, say apple juice in NYS unless the apples have been UV pasteurized because of problems with e-coli and listeria - and those problems are caused by fruit being harvested from the ground that has been subject to animal spoor. So viruses? I don't know, but bacteria - no question. You are okay buying fruit that the seller tells you has been harvested from the ground? More power to ya but e-coli is not a joke

 

[RPh_Guy]

Blaaaahhhh ok fine. Let's explore this.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1365-2672.2001.01427.x
Here you'll see that the rate of foodborne virus outbreaks from "fruit and vegetables" is very low (12 cases out of 4602 studied).
All of them are Norovirus.

Aaaand what kills Norovirus?
https://web.archive.org/web/20120111053716/http://www.epa.gov/oppad001/list_g_norovirus.pdf
Everything.
For example, citric acid 0.6% is registered with the EPA as effective at killing Norovirus. The acidity alone in the wine will kill it!

Human viruses will not grow in wine. Period. And virus particles are are introduced would probably be too low of a count to infect you. And even if they were high enough, then the combination of factors in the wine will destroy the virus.

you cannot sell, say apple juice in NYS unless the apples have been UV pasteurized because of problems with e-coli and listeria - and those problems are caused by fruit being harvested from the ground that has been subject to animal spoor.

Pathogenic BACTERIA are also killed by the combination of ethanol and acid. Sulfite is an additional layer of protection.
Wine ain't fruit juice and fruit juice ain't wine.

There's no monster under the bed.

 

[Blacksmith1]

ethanol and acid. Sulfite

So by staying under this blanket we are safe?

 

[RPh_Guy]

Yup

 

[Seamonkey84]

Just until you get a good sniff of the sulfites! Then it’s air out the blanket lol.

 

[Yooper]

PU's ?
Thanks will start using Boil water, been doing it with Campden and Sulphite on the back sweet

I know I'm way too late to this party- but DON'T boil the fruit. Only use boiling water in certain cases. for example, in my banana wine recipe, I boil the peels. In my dandelion wine, I do boil those petals.

I think of it this way. I love apple pie, and the texture of those cooked apples are perfect in there. But in wine, a "cooked fruit" taste is undesirable in most cases. I'm certain that before home winemakers had potassium metabisulfite in their cupboard that boiling many things was a great idea- but no longer. Sulfite will do the trick, and do it well. You will also avoid setting the pectins in things like apples, if you avoid boiling or adding boiling water.

 

[bernardsmith]

Pathogenic BACTERIA are also killed by the combination of ethanol and acid. Sulfite is an additional layer of protection.
Wine ain't fruit juice and fruit juice ain't wine.

There's no monster under the bed.

At what concentration of alcohol is listeria killed? At what pH do you kill e-coli? I am not being snarky. I am seriously asking. I am not disagreeing with you but does every wine kill these microbes or only very acidic and very alcoholic wines, and if one makes cider (5% abv?) how likely is it that there will be sufficient ethanol and a low enough pH to do the job?

 

[Yooper]

At what concentration of alcohol is listeria killed? At what pH do you kill e-coli? I am not being snarky. I am seriously asking. I am not disagreeing with you but does every wine kill these microbes or only very acidic and very alcoholic wines, and if one makes cider (5% abv?) how likely is it that there will be sufficient ethanol and a low enough pH to do the job?

I don't know about wines under 12%, but I have never heard of any no-boil ales with ABV of 5% having e-coli or listeria, or any other pathogen so I would assume it's the same for cider.

Of course, grain doesn't tend to have e-coli, and apples might if you pick them up off of the ground with animal feces on it I guess. I know that when we make cider, we don't use apples from the ground the deer have been grazing (and defecating), and I doubt many people would make deer poop apple cider, but you can't really assume that I guess.

 

[bernardsmith]

But when you mash the grains at about 150 F or higher for - what? an hour? that is enough heat to pasteurize the wort. Boiling wort is historically speaking, a late addition, caused by the use of hops and the need to extract bitterness. When gruit was made in parts of Europe ale wasn't boiled (see for example, Susan Verberg's Medieval Gerbal Ale: Gruit Demystified - https://www.academia.edu/37346911/Medieval_Herbal_Ale_Gruit_Demystified

 

[balrog]

Great, @Yooper , now you've done it; you've gone and said "deer poop apple cider" out loud. I shudder at the consequences.

 

[RPh_Guy]

But in wine, a "cooked fruit" taste is undesirable in most cases.

Have you made wines with cooked fruit? There are plenty of threads here where people do heat-pasteurize fruit, boil the juice, make wine from jam/jelly/preserves, etc. LOTS of ciders are made from pasteurized juice. Plenty of people also further pasteurize the cider after fermentation.
Why is ok to only boil sometimes? Does boiling the bananas people add in undesirable "cooked" banana taste? (I have baked bananas and they're good.)

Not arguing, just asking questions. I don't boil or pasteurize my fruit; I use sulfite for "clean" fermentations, or nothing for my spontaneous fermentations.

At what concentration of alcohol is listeria killed? At what pH do you kill e-coli? I am not being snarky. I am seriously asking. I am not disagreeing with you but does every wine kill these microbes or only very acidic and very alcoholic wines, and if one makes cider (5% abv?) how likely is it that there will be sufficient ethanol and a low enough pH to do the job?

Assigning a particular ABV level would be pretty arbitrary. A 70% ethanol solution kills these bacteria in seconds. A 5% ethanol solution kills these bacteria in days-weeks. Lower ABV may take months.

Many many people make fruit, vegetable, and herb wine, beer, and cider without pasteurizing the ingredients. Wild beer with fruit or herbs (gruit) is generally in the 5-6% ABV range and it doesn't contain the added protection of sulfite, and yet history shows us people don't get sick from it. Fruit lambics and spontaneously fermented beer have been around since the age of modern microbiology and medicine. Do we know of any cases of foodborne illness from these? Nope!

Contrast that with something like raw milk. People get sick and die from that all the time.
Raw fruit juice is less risky than milk because it's not directly from a source of fecal contamination, but as you already pointed out, people do get sick from that.
This is to make the point that there's not a lack of cases of foodborne illness from alcoholic beverages simply from underreporting.

Cheers

 

[Blacksmith1]

Used to be people didn't drink straight water. It was made into beer/ale, or mixed with wine to make it safe(er) to drink..... I was born to
late.....

 

[Seamonkey84]

Used to be people didn't drink straight water. It was made into beer/ale, or mixed with wine to make it safe(er) to drink..... I was born to
late.....

But you had to get you’re drink from the church, as it was monks that did the brewing. It was a tonic and medicinal too since they usually added spices and herbs to add some nutrients for the masses.

 

[Yooper]

Have you made wines with cooked fruit? There are plenty of threads here where people do heat-pasteurize fruit, boil the juice, make wine from jam/jelly/preserves, etc. LOTS of ciders are made from pasteurized juice. Plenty of people also further pasteurize the cider after fermentation.
Why is ok to only boil sometimes? Does boiling the bananas people add in undesirable "cooked" banana taste? (I have baked bananas and they're good.)

Sure I have. I've made wine from cranberry sauce.
Pasteurization isn't always done at high temperatures, like a boiling temperature, so it's not actually cooked. You can pasteurize milk at 145 degrees for 30 minutes- a long way from boiling!

Here's an example. I have a friend who bought a new juicer from Norway. It used heat to do it, and it made great juice they thought. They brought me 3 gallons of chokecherry juice made that way. I made 3 gallons of chokecherry wine of my own at the same time, done by fermenting the fruit (with sulfites and pectic enzyme), pressing it out after 5-7 days by squeezing the bags, and then finished them both.

The wines were very very different. The one from the heated process was good- but the one done without heat was brighter, richer, more flavorful. It could be because I didn't have the whole fruit to ferment with the skins and tannins, but the juice also tasted different from the start. Not bad- just different.

I love cooked fruit, like rhubarb. But my rhubarb wine (that just one a blue ribbon yesterday at the fair!) is made from the raw fruit. Cooked fruit isn't bad- it's just different. In my opinion, it doesn't usually make the best wine.

 

[bernardsmith]

and the pasteurization of the wort was done "accidentally" at low temperatures because the mash was never heated beyond about 168 F. This would have the desired effect of halting the enzymatic activity and so providing the yeast with either more of the simpler sugars to ferment or more of the more complex sugars that they would leave unfermented and so add body to the beer. But cooking the mash would unintentionally pasteurize the wort killing all lactobacteria that came for the ride. The idea of boiling the wort came later and indeed had nothing to do with pasteurization and everything to do with the realization that to extract the best bitter flavors from hops to counterbalance the sweetness of the beer you needed to boil those hops
...

 

[casebrew]

I wish I had done something besides a Camden tablet in my fig wine attempt. It did make an excellent wine vinegar though. Next bucket of figs is going to get boiled... or maybe just Pasteurized, 145? 30 minutes?

 

[bernardsmith]

Curious... why? Aceto bacter work ONLY in alcohol so prior to fermentation they are no problem and after you've made the wine they can only work in aerobic conditions so normally you ferment and age the wine under anaerobic conditions so again, they have no luck. You can create vinegar with the most perfect sanitation protocol in the world if you invite the bacterium into your wine... deliberately or accidentally that is what you need to do but I cannot see how boiling or pasteurizing the fruit will do anything to prevent any action that takes place after you have made the wine.You will reduce the number of competing indigenous yeast but if you pitch billions of lab cultivated yeast cells in one fell swoop they are going to dominate the territory and make it their own.

 

[casebrew]

Dunno, but the fruit flies all over the house from the figs got in to a case of plums, making them smell of vinegar too. I was dumping that case into the trash when I realized I had made vinegar. Also the batch of plum wine I had started at the same time. So I mixed the plum wine vinegar with the fig wine vinegar, and eventually used it all up. Good flavor, still a bit sweet.

That was 2011, no more infections since.

Way I see it, the yeasties and the acetos both got started at the same time.

But also things like the dish rag in your sink can get sour without any alcohol around. So I think acateos eat more than alcohol...

 

[bernardsmith]

Possibly , but possibly your plums were quietly fermenting before you touched them and so were susceptible to acetobacter: alcohol + O2 > vinegar...