Watermelon wine

[Truckerdad]

I'm trying to make watermelon wine but it says I have to have campen tablets and acid blend is there a recipe I can use that doesn't require these two ingredients?

 

[HollywoodTK]

Both are super cheap. Any reason you don't want to buy them?

There's wine and there's good wine...you can tailor your process to either.

 

[Yooper]

You can definitely leave out the acid blend, as acid can be added to taste later if needed.

Campden tablets are used to sanitize the watermelon/juice to get rid of wild yeast and bacteria, so they really can't be left out unless you have another way to do that, and boiling isn't a great way to kill microbes because it sets the pectin (think jelly) and also changes the flavor of the juice (like the difference between a fresh apple and a baked apple).

 

[mrchaos101]

Melons are hard to do You dont see many Watermelon wines for sale in the store.

If this is your first wine....I would recommend you do like a Welch's Grape to start out with..... I fear if you try Watermelon on your first go it may turn you off from a fun hobby.

 

[Truckerdad]

Thanks guys. The only reason I didn't want to use all the stuff was I'm broke and wanted to try to make wine like a gentleman did when I was a kid. I think I will wait and try grapes first.

 

[bernardsmith]

Hi Truckerdad, I would think that making reasonable wine from grapes is likely to be very expensive, - eating grapes are not really the kind of grapes that produce good wine, but you have all kinds of prepared fruit juices (check to make sure that they are preservative free!) that your supermarket stocks - from mango to apple, from pineapple to pomegranate.
That said, it is hard to imagine that if you are fermenting watermelon juice your juice will have been exposed to wild yeasts in an intact fruit. I have never tried this (watermelon wine would seem to me to be incredibly difficult to make given the thin flavor the juice has and the speed at which the juice deteriorates) but I would think that you might simply punch a 1/2 inch hole in a melon, pour in some pectic enzyme, pour in some sugar , pitch your yeast and plug the hole with either an airlock or a blow-off tube. You would normally delay pitching the yeast after adding the enzyme by about 12 hours but I think that you might find that the melon juice has started to deteriorate by then so I might reduce the delay to 3 or 4 hours to give the enzyme a few hours to work.

 

[Texconsinite]

TruckerDad, I justg attempted watermelon wine last weekend, and after an explosive start, it is now happily bubbling away. Making wine with whole fruit of any kind poses several extra challenges, namely:
-Sanitation of the fruit itself
-Processing the fruit, and getting an accurate hydrometer reading with the fruit goop in your fermenter, hence not knowing how much sugar to add to hit ideal OG. Also because sugar content will vary between individual fruits of the same type
-Fruit goop WILL tend to clog airlock or blowoff tubes, leading to a fruit geyser painted up your wall/ceiling and usually an angry spouse, which can hurt your chances of being able to make more wine in the future.
-Cost: It takes about 3-5lbs of fruit per gallon of wine, so if you are trying to do this on the cheap, unless you know someone who has a tree/bush/patch of it, costs add up quick
-Loss of volume, whole fruit will expand in wine, and displace alot of liquid. Blended fruit will form a cake on the top and bottom. So in either case, you will lose significant volume once you rack off the goop ( over 1 gallon out of a 5 gallon batch) which makes it even less efficient.

According Wine guru Jack Keller, who knows much more than I do about such things, Watermelon juice specifically poses several additional challenges:
-It spoils quickly, so you run the risk of some other organism taking off before your yeast can get established.
-Its flavor is relatively weak, making a bland wine lacking in taste if you use much water in the recipe, so you will need ALOT of watermelon to make 5 gallons of juice. For my Watermelon wine, it took three MONSTER melons to get 6 gallons worth of juice, at $6 each, and was time consuming fairly expensive and quite messy to blend them all up.

Im not trying to say don't make wine from Watermelons, or any other whole fruit, just perhaps not for your first batch. Fortunately, there is a VERY easy and inexpensive way to get that first batch under your belt (and make some VERY tasty wine:

Use this recipe http://skeeterpee.com/recipe

This is for Lemon wine, and you can buy the raw ingredients at the grocery store.

Great way to get started
Only thing Id add to the recipe is also buy a half gallon of any 100% juice (pick a flavor that you like) at the store, and some larger balloons (to fit over the mouth of half gallon)

Create a starter 2-3 days before you mix up the skeeter pee:
-Open the juice. Pour yourself a glass of it and drink it.
-Put your EC-1118 yeast and a little bit (1/2 tsp or so) yeast nutrient into the juice jug, recap tightly, and shake vigorously. Remove cap and put one of the balloons over the mouth of the jug. The balloon will inflate when your starter takes off.

Pitch that starter onto the wine after it sits for 2 days (so starter will have been going for 4-5 days by this time)

you can make a 6 gallon batch of skeeter pee for under $30 all in, and it will get you used to the steps in the winemaking process. Its how I started, and I HIGHLY recommend it to anybody else trying winemaking for the first time, especially on a budget. Take notes and record your hydrometer readings.

Provided you let it clear and follow the directions, this will be ready to drink the day you bottle it (most wines need to age for months to be optimally drinkable). I regularly can do a batch of Skeeter Pee in 6 weeks from brew day to bottling, so fast turnaround

Even with all the whole fruit wines and meads that I make, my Wife's favorite wine (commerical or homemade) is still the mixed berry skeeter pee i make for her. You will love this stuff! Let me know if you have any questions, I am all about making wines on the cheap from grocery store ingredients