Homemade Hunchpunch Experiment

[Jenne]

Sounds like you be gettin the sweeter wine, then.

[Triple Zero]

Last night I siphoned the wine off of the yeast and into 1 gallon milk jugs. I'm a little worried that fermentation seems to be dragging along slowly while there is still sugar left unfermented.

if you refridgerate it to about 5 C (41 F) (or even lower, but not freezing), the yeast will go dormant, and sink to the bottom so you can siphon it off (called "racking") even easier. doing it 2 or 3 times should yield a very clear wine, and helps stopping the fermentation.

another thing you can try, is closing off the containers real tight (though if the milk jugs are made of soft plastic this might not be a good idea--neither is glass btw), that way the CO2 cannot get out, which means it'll dissolve in the liquid, giving a sparkling or fizzing wine. the nice thing about that is that it tends to mask any "off" flavours that may be present
a problem with making sparkly wine is that you need to take care of not generating too much pressure (exploding bottles do not only give a mess but are also quite dangerous) and if there's yeast sediment on the bottom of the container, opening up the bottle with start the fizzing, and the sediment will twirl up in thin ribbons and end up clouding the wine again, so be careful when racking.

just some of my empirical advice

good luck!

[Bruno]

I'll definitely be doing the refrigerator trick soon. It's still going, though, so I'm going to wait a little longer.

I'm afraid it may have already done that "autolysis" thing mentioned in the directions as a bad thing. It has a fairly strong fermented smell, but it's still drinkable.

I had about 20 oz of it the other day after racking, and thought I might have felt a light flush from it, but no noticeable effects of drunkenness. If it were anywhere near 15%, I'm sure I would have felt more. That would be like 6 shots of vodka or more.

I think next time I'll get better grape juice concentrate, better nutrients, and keep it warmer.

I need to find some Fermaid. My local store just sells some generic nutrients and yeast energizer.

[Jenne]

You can order stuff online, too, Jerry.

[Bruno]

Yeah, I know. I'm sure I'll find some, I just haven't looked.

[Triple Zero]

what's autolysis?

[Bruno]

Apparently, it's when the yeast cells start performing harri karri by digesting themselves with their own enzymes. If the cells are weak and malnourished, they can't handle the higher alcohol content and, I guess, kill themselves off to provide more nutrition for the healthier cells.

[Triple Zero]

and i suppsoe that produces off-flavours, no?

mine's in the fridge now, the yeast is sinking slowly. will rack it in a day or two.

[Bruno]

Yes. I think part of the complication is that the recipe is meant for distillation. That's the only reason you would want that high an alcohol content, which requires more stringent conditions than a lower alcohol brew.

Since I don't plan on distilling, 8-10% is plenty.

[Triple Zero]

just racked the wine, it's in a 1L glass bottle now, separate from the bottom inch in the plastic bottle which is an opaque caramel-brown layer of yeast cemetary

the wine itself is still a bit cloudy, but i figure it'll sink and clear further now that it's separated from most of the yeast. i also put one of those vacu-vin rubber caps on the bottle and sucked out all of the air, if it decides to produce more CO₂, that's fine with me, but oxygen's bad mhkay?

i smelled it a bit, didn't really like the smell, but there's nothing wrong with that, i just tend not to like the smell at this stage because of bad memories from my first attempt at brewing, which turned rotten and of which the slightest wetting of the lips from just a tea-spoon truly made me gag and wanna wash my mouth (it was, and most probably will continue to be, the very worst thing i ever tasted).

but this time, it didnt smell rotten and that's good enough for me to know things are going okay

[Bruno]

Final update for this experiment. I did the refrigerator trick to see if taking out all the yeast would improve the flavor. It did, but not enough. It has a strong yeasty flavor, and surprisingly little alcohol. I got nothing from drinking a pint, and after drinking that, really didn't want any more.

So, I'm pouring the whole thing down the drain. I'll be starting a new batch with higher quality ingredients soon.

[Triple Zero]

little alcohol? that's odd. how sweet was its taste?

mine is sort of kind of done. after a few days of sediment sinking, i poured myself a small glass. i didn't like the taste at first, but it wasn't rotten or anything. so i gave my flatmate a taste as well, warning him that i wasn't sure if it turned out allright but it wasn't rotten. he tasted it and remarked "tastes like dry white wine to me, didn't know you used grapes?" (i didn't, it was just apple juice). when i tasted it again myself, i noticed, hey yeah, it's actually just like dry white wine.

possible explanation: before i poured it, the wine was vacuum sealed with the vacu-vin rubber cap, and i heard once that wine needs a little while to "breathe" to get its proper flavour. in addition, my phobia for any sort of off flavour in homebrewn stuff. which is why i gave it to my flatmate, cause he's a bit more objective judge.

i'll probably rack it one more time and then store it away somewhere. cause it also needs to age before it's compeltely proper.

my experiment was a (reasonable) success, with the cheapest ingredients of ever. why wasn't yours?

[Bruno]

It was really sweet. Sickly sweet even.

Next time I really need to take an original gravity so I can measure the alcohol content.

my experiment was a (reasonable) success, with the cheapest ingredients of ever. why wasn't yours? 

Probably because you used pure juice, and I used a tiny amount of juice, a bunch of water, and cheap fertilizer.

[Triple Zero]

hey yeah *reading back* i didnt even add water this time that's why keeping lab notes has been so super-useful in my wine experimenting. i always forget exactly *how* i made it, after a few weeks. especially how much juice/water/sugar/honey i used is stuff i tend to forget (the amount of yeast doesnt matter cause it grows anyway).

i didn't use any fertilizer btw. oh and next time if you want to go "organic" on the fertilizer, mash up some raisins. like 5-10 of them or so (cut them to bits or something). ... at least, i read this, and i tried it myself. but i just realized that cheap brands of raisins contain sulphur, right? maybe not a good idea (might explain why i got rotten smell a couple of times).
or maybe just some apple peelings in it (give the chunks to your kid), but then it'd have to be organic apples, the others have wax and insect-poison on the peelings. organic ones just have wild yeast on them. which will fight with your packaged yeast.. to the DEATH. which is AWESOME.
so, for fertilizer you can just use any kind of organic matter that you'd think would fit.
just, if you have made it from fruit pulp (which has loads of nutrients in it, because of nature--it works, bitches), or have anything floating in the liquid, you really want to coursely filter (or press) the chunky bits out about halfway through the yeasting, because non-yeast thingies might also start growing on it. don't worry about the yeast itself, the alive ones are small enough to get through nearly any filter. the dead yeast gunk you want to get rid of anyway.

but eh, if yours was sickly sweet, you shouldnt have tried to stop the fermentation by putting it in the fridge. sorry that i suggested it, i thought it might have been done by then (since mine was), but not all yeasts and must/wort/gunk they grow in are created equal.

i really suggest you try again, stick with the cheap ingredients (fruit juice from concentrated fruit juice, just stay away from any conservatives cause they kill the yeast too), until you get something reasonably satisfactory. once you get the hang of it, you can try more fancy stuff.

but but for starts, i found simple=better, look at my recipe. and write down what you do (say, in this thread) and improve!

[Bruno]

i just made booze.

1L of apple juice + 2 cups of sugar + activated yeast, in a 1.5L plastic coke bottle with the cap screwed on slightly loose. (everything properly desinfected and rinsed, of course)

hope it'll turn out allright

I just started a batch of apple cider. I added 1 cup of sugar to 3 quarts of apple juice which brought the gravity up to 10% potential alcohol. I have 5 batches going, four using Lalvin EC-1118 champagne yeast and one using bakers yeast. They've been going since Sunday and seem to be doing well.

I just looked at your recipe and was shocked at how much sugar you used. 2 cups to a liter. That's almost six times what I used.

One cup brought the %PA up from 7% to 10%. Yours should have been close to 25% except that no yeast can ferment that high, especially not baker's yeast. Yet you said it tasted like dry white wine which I'm guessing would mean that all the sugar was fermented.

The only explanation I can think of is that baker's yeast converts more of the sugar to CO2 rather than alcohol.

Was it pretty strong stuff?