Lychee wine

[michael deatherage]

I was wondering if anyone can help me out with a bit of measurement? I have already peeled, de-stoned and bagged a **** ton of lychee (pardon my English). I am hoping that someone can tell me how many lbs-ish of lychee juice and pulp equates to 5lbs of unpeeled lychee?

Also, I already peeled and de-stoned a ridiculous amount of mango. What would be a good weight of mango pulp be for creating mango wine?

FYI, I use 5 gallon plastic buckets.

 

[bernardsmith]

Why is the weight critical? What you want is the juice. No? How much juice have you extracted from the lychees and the mangoes?

 

[michael deatherage]

The only recipe that I have found calls for lbs before peeling and destoning. I'm still looking for a recipe that specifically calls for juice to get an understanding. I was actually wondering if it is very important that I have a certain amount of lbs? Is this something that I can fiddle around with or is having the juice be a certain ratio to the amount of water important? Oh, and I have 3 pints of juice and pulp.

 

[bernardsmith]

I guess I am a contrarian but the only reason I can think of to add water to a fruit to make wine is if the fruit is so acidic (tart) that the fruit absent sugar makes it an unpleasant drink.* However, if you routinely dilute fruit juices (not concentrates) with water then add water when you make wine. But most folk I know who make fruit juices drink those juices "neat" (no added water).

Jack Keller, apparently has a great name amongst home wine makers but whenever I make his recipes they taste like flavored water to me. I don't know any wine maker who makes wines from grapes that would consider adding a drop of water to their must but I may mistaken. I grew up in Europe. It may be very different here... though I don't think so. If you don't have the volume, make less wine. Don't dilute the flavor to make it look more. Wine ain't soup.

Taste the juice. If it tastes as though it needs water then add water. But bench test: take three or four identical volumes of the juice and add increasing volumes of water to each sample. The sample that tastes best is the sample with the ratio of juice to water you want to make...

* There is another reason why you might dilute the juice and that is if you are making a mead and you want the honey flavors to be front and center and the fruit to simply add to the complexity of flavors. So then you might use water to bring the gravity of the honey down to a fermentable level and add the fruit to the secondary (or add say, 1 pint of the juice to each 7 pints of must (honey + water) . But in that case you are not asking the fruit to make a solo performance. Here the fruit is the sidekick, not the hero.

 

[michael deatherage]

Wow! That was very informative and things I had not considered. I just assumed I would need to add water, but hell, if I don't have to then I don't want to either! I appreciate your input. I'm starting this fresh off the boat and unfortunately, there are not many wineries here. To be precise, there's only one out of Volcano and well, it kind of sucks! I'm not trying to make a fortune, but I am trying to start up something that might get out of hand!

 

[Michelle Smith]

Michael are you on BI making Lychee wine?!? I'm on Maui and I'm itching to start my first batch but I'm still researching. I'm going to start with a gallon batch (fruit from this season is waiting in my freezer). I was originally going to make cider but all that I'm reading is telling me that I'm basically making wine... I have never done homebrew past kombucha and kefir and hell if I want to waste a gallon of hard earned lychee juice! I would love to hear your plan of attack!