I tend to fully support turning fruit into booze.
I thought it would be better to follow up on Proinsias thread here
For most fruit I use the following ratios when winemaking. With these you can scale accordingly and I have found works for practically any fruit wine.
3lb fruit (minced, pulped, chopped finely or whatever)
2lb sugar
1 Lemon, (simply cut in half, squeeze and chuck the lot including skin into the brew)
1 Gallon boiling water
Plus I use a packet of yeast for the whole lot. In theory any yeast will do but I tend to favour a champagne yeast which is cheap enough from the local homebrew shop. Having said that if I am making Elderberry wine, a port yeast is excellent.
Finally, as I really do like to make my wine clear if I am making wine from a fruit high in pectin such as apples, sloes or strawberrys I would buy some pectolase enzyme which will precipitate the pectin based cloudyness out.
Add the fruit to a fermentation bin, add the sugar, lemons and boiling water. Stir and when cool add the yeast. I will then leave this for two weeks stirring daily.
After two weeks I would usually strain this out into demijohns however there is no reason why you couldnt straing and return to the same bin. I would then leave this to finish fermenting (can be months from here on)
After this has finished I would taste for sweetness. If necessary I would add more sugar here. I would then leave it to see if it ferments further. Once it has finished fermenting (it might not start if alcohol density is already sufficiently high) I would again taste for sweetness and repeat as necessary
When it is finished I would filter the wine although this is purely fur cosmetic affect, it doesnt really affect the taste. I would then bottle.
Fruit wines are usually drinkable when young so dont leave these for years, however there are exceptions to this like elderberry which improve with age. Having said that some elderberry I made last autumn is very drinkable now.
I've just made some strawberry wine yesterday in fact which I heartily recommend. Last years batch came very strong and tasty (although its best to decant to help the aromatics open out). I have learned not to go anywhere near internet shopping after a bottle of this 
Reading back up thread I also remember we discussed the need to add raisins to the wine. Leaving these out has resulted in the ratio at the top of this reply and I think country wine is better without raisins.
Generally it makes all wine a brown colours and also adds tannin. I now suspect that apart from adding body the idea is to make add the mouth-tightening sharpness like regular grape wines have. I prefer to make an alcoholic fruity drink nowadays which tastes good without trying to be like a grape wine. |
