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You are all brilliant! What a great bunch of winemakers!

I love this question! It strikes at the very heart of the DB phenomenon. Lol To put it simply, we’re cheating! Follow me on this. Young wines are universally tart. This tartness mellows over time as they age into maturity, allowing the background flavors to come forward. You guys know this! So...

Yes, it should come with a warning ⚠️ It will improve over time. Particularly in the first couple of months. Mine rarely lasts that long.

I add my tannin to the primary but it can also go in the secondary just as well. Like jumby says. Do the dining and the clear on the same day. Best of luck rca!

Keep us appraised!

Those floral tastes/smells usually come from too much sorbate. I’ve done that before. My thoughts have always been that the acid from the lemon juice plays a significant part in extracting flavor from the fruit, particularly the skins. Experimentation early on with the DB recipe showed two other...

I know some who like DB dry. Not my thing. I like my red wines dry and my fruit wines sweet/semi-sweet. I use oak powder in my DB nowadays. I just love oak in all my wines. Your Bourbon Barrel variation sounds interesting. Please let us know how it turns out.

One of the first lessons I learned in wine making is that nearly every case of cloudy wine is due to pectin haze. Rack it again, make sure it is properly degassed, and dose it again with pectic enzyme. Let it sit for a week. It should be much clearer. I have also given up on sparkoloid long...

The government allows me to make 100 gallons of wine a year per adult in our household. So I make 200 gallons for Johnna and I, mostly Dragon Blood, each year. That’s 1000 bottles. We drink a bottle each most nights. The rest either continues to age, gets drank at gatherings or gets given away.

I have tried both high end and low end temps with the Dragon Blood recipe, repeatedly. Invariably, the high end batches have a deep rich color and full tart, fruit flavor, while the low end batches produced a smoother, paler blush with more floral hints. This was with EC-1118 all around. I...

I still make mine with just one pound of fruit per gallon. You can easily adapt the recipe to your liking. Since it was originally designed to please my lovely wife, Johnna, it was born as a nice blush. My own version ended up with lots of extra tannin and some powdered oak. We still drink some...

I stir mine once a day with a cordless drill and agitator.

I Brute.

The weights are a great idea, but not for me. Do what works for you. Since we’re on the topic, I use cheap ladies nylon stockings for my fruit bags. Full figure, knee high. Buy them by the box from Walmart. Tie them off, drop them in, squeeze them carefully, and toss them when they’re done...

The weed wacker tool is indeed the better option. The fizzing will continue until it’s dry. Wack it daily as the recipe instructs. Glad to hear it’s gojng well!

You are right! I believe that was corrected in a later version of the recipe. “Top up to six gallon mark” should be the last bullet in the first step. Unfortunately, the website won’t let us change old posts.

Following the steps in the OP recipe, you should have only had four gallons of liquid in the fermented before you added the fruit. Lemon juice and then “water to four gallons”. I made the same mistake as you early on. If you have six gallons in a seven gallon bucket then try to add your fruit...

I did my best to include the answers to the most common questions in the OP recipe. The great people here are wonderful at following up on the rest. They helped me immensely in my first years as a wine maker, and many who made DB became the sounding board for refining the recipe. But I...

That’s a food grade Brute trash can, 32 gallon capacity. I got tired of making so many single batches that now I stir them up three (18 gallons) at a time with nearly the same effort. Per the DB recipe, I let it go dry in the primary, then transfer-degass-fine-clear all in the final step. Did...

This is my x3 Batch operation going on this morning. The first batches I made, I simply tossed the fruit into the primary. It was quite “messy. When I started shooting for more flavor, I decided to use the bags and squeeze daily. Definitely, if I had a press, I would squash the fruit, then add...