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Wine Making

Musicians can have hobbies too, one of mine is making country wines, read about my experiments, succsessful or otherwise.

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Wednesday 26th February 2020 22:24:00

Orange Wine From Juice

One of my previous successes was an orange wine, fermented in the bucket from real oranges, I didn't feel quite ready to recreate that one but thought I'd go the 'easy route'and make up a batch from juice.

The upside of this is it's easy to get going, the downside I will quite a bit to sediment as the orange particles settle out of the liquid juice.

Demijohn with fermenting orange wine

So off to LIDL to buy 5 litres of "simple" Orange juice, of which I used 4.

From my previous experiences I know that orange doesn't take well to a dry flavour, without the sweetness it's really quite bitter! So I would need to add enough sugar to make it sweet, but not too much, so I decided to go with adding the sugar in gradually.

So to start I poured 4 litres into the demijohn and pitched in the yeast (half a teaspoon died yeast plus half of yeast nutrient) with no added sugar and let it go until it started to slow down, five days or so.

Then I added 1/2 pound of sugar in buy pouring out a litre or so into a measuring jar and stirring in the sugar then returning it to the demijohn. The fermentation really started to shift then, in fact it blasted straight through the airlock, which is why the demijohn is on a tray in the photo above.

Once that had settled ( another five days or so ) I cleaned out the airlock, mixed in another 1/2 pound of sugar. Repeat once more so that the total sugar is at 1 1/2 pounds.

I let this slow right down till it was bubbling less than once a minute and then gave it tiny (and I mean tiny!) taste to check the sugar level then added a 1/4 pound.

Another quarter after that and it's up to 2 lbs sugar.

This the stage the fermentation is at as I write this, and I'll let that ferment right out before adding any more sugar. Assuming it's needed.

Based on info on the packet the juice contained 92g of sugar per litre so with the added sugar that makes 1275 total. So when made up to a full gallon it's likely to produce 1275 / 4.5 / 19 = 14.9 % alcohol by volume. Potentially quite strong but we'll see how it goes...

This will take quite a while to mature


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