Sadly, the Spring was unusually warm and I missed the season. I managed to get some fresh cherries at the store, but I could not find the abundance and price that I hoped for. I settled a mixture of fresh and frozen cherries from GFS Gordon's Food Service. The GFS cherries were whole PITTED sweet cherries without sugar.
Let me say that buying cherries that are PITTED is a million times easier. It took me over an hour to remove the pits from the fresh cherries this year. Last year I gave up after a while, and fermented without removing the pits.
I have a tip on removing pits by hand. Pit removal is easier with a the needle-like prongs from a corncob holder. I could pierce the cherry and push the pit out using the prongs pretty fast. Much easier than last year, when I eventually gave up. This year I had the whole mixture de-pitted, and I could run them through my grape crusher. Ordinarily even one cherry pit would jam the grape crusher. With the grape crusher, I am sure I will get much better extraction of the cherry juice.
I started with the recipe from 2009 with a few changes notably the yeast, the yeast energizer, and the larger 6.5 gallon size.
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| Cherry must with the yeast broadcast on top. After another minute, I stirred it in. |
36lb cherries (30lb frozen + 6 lb fresh)
6 gallons of water
9 bags of Lipton tea
12.5 lb of sugar
1.5 t of metabisulfite
9 g of yeast energizer
6 g of pectin enzyme
1 pack of Red Star Pasteur Champagne yeast
Cherries are not very sweet and not very juicy either. One needs to add more water than you'd think. I added 11 lb of sugar to get to 1.088g/ml which would be 10.5% alcohol. I adjusted it in two steps with 50% sugar syrup to 1.102 which should give 13.5% alcohol. There should be a theoretical way to adjust the sugar content, but I don't know how fast the volume changes with each increment of dissolved sugar. One can make assumptions based on no volume change, but that under represents the addition. Once I had an adjustment, I extrapolated.
The idea of the tea is to add flavor. It seems better to use tea rather than oak chips to get a tannin flavor. The metabisulfite was added Saturday night to keep the natural yeast under control while the juice warmed to room temperature. I put the yeast energizer and yeast in on Sunday morning. I used the Red Star Pasteur Champagne yeast because I had it leftover from last year's apple wine disaster (see below.)
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December 30, 2010 Update
I tasted the wine and was quite disappointed. It did not have the depth of flavor I wanted. It was cherry-like, but not strongly so.
I decided to add more sugar to run the alcohol content up, and to make more of a dessert wine.
I added 2.6% by weight of regular sugar on the 25 liter batch or 660 grams (1.5 lb.) I'll let you know how it turns out.
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This is another recipe that calls for boiling.
1 comment:
I pressed the must, and put it into glass. I had about eight gallons instead of the seven I was aiming for, and that might make the wine weak.
The wine has been fermenting a week. I am a little worried that it is not bubbling hard enough, and I may have a stuck fermentation.
Hope not.
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