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I'm sorta new (just began last year), so my list is short and maybe pedestrian -- mead, blueberry melamel (i.e., mead infused with blueberries), mixed-muscadine wine, Noble muscadine wine, and soon I begin ... paw paw wine.

Yeah -- I didn't clarify in my last post: once I squish out the meat of the paw paw, I toss the peels in the garden mulch. Never tried eating the peels on their own ayhhow .....

OK -- makes sense to me. I have 5 trees (and maybe 100 little volunteers) on my property; about 8-9 years old, and I bought them as 1-ft-tallers from a New Zealander who lived near the NC coast [and said he dug the little trees up from the banks of the Cape Fear River]. Several ~ 20' or more...

wow! Thx, Vines -- exactly what I believe I needed. I dunno if I'm patient enough to wait umpteen years for the mellowing process. Maybe no choice if I'm serious, though. Is there a specific reason you used frozen paw paws? I have no problem with thawing 'em. I have all the ingredients, so that...

I had a nice paw paw harvest this year in eastern NC; what's left is now frozen in my stand-alone freezer. I'm wondering about making paw paw wine. Maybe ~1 gal? Can I thaw and squish out an amount of paw paw meat that would correspond to the weight of grapes I'd use for 1 gallon of wine? Of...

Sure thing: it was easy to use. Per the chart, my values led to a finding of 10.5%. Sounds pretty alcoholy to me, and made more sense than the original 8.5 I had at 1st. Fairly strong stuff, and exactly what I wanted. Thx again ... Mitch

OK, I bottled my 1st batch of musc. grape wine (fermented it last Sept) 2 days ago. I tried a little of it -- tasted somehow ... "raw", although not bad. High alcohol content, little sugar, as far as I can tell. So ... does it improve with age? Do I keep the btls in a cool (or ambient) and dry...

Thx a heap, Barry -- I checked it (had never heard of it, naturally) .... Mitch

Much obliged, Sour; I have to admit, the stuff tastes more like a 10.6 than and 8.5 ... Mitch

OK -- maybe I'm not using correct terminology (since I'm still pretty new), but ... the 0.999 came from when I used a hydrometer on finished wine this a.m. I'm told that's not legit use for the hydrometer. The 1.08 and 1.02 came from the before and after Spec Grav readings of my wine with use...

Obliged, Chuck; yeah, my hydrometer did do the 0.990 reading; made no sense to me, at 1st. The things ya learn .... Mitch PS: I hafta say, the wine really looks beautiful in the btls; I'm eager to give away some 750-ml btls to special friends (most of whom've never had home-made hooch). This...

Hi, Sour -- my SG initially was 1.08; my one for this morning was 1.02. I used a calculator online (a beer-maker's website, I think) and per it, the ABV = 8.15% and the ABW = 6.47%. Tasting the finished product, somehow it seems more "alcoholy" than 8.5, but that's just perception, so I can't...

I just tried using a hydrometer to see what the alcohol % is of my (1st) newly-bottled grape wine. The device, basically, sank! OK - I checked online, generically you might say, and the little blurb said a hydrometer can't be used for finished wine! Is that right? Appears to be, per my...

I'm sure this has been asked umpteen times, but I don't see it right-offhand in posts, so here goes: I'm racking for the 1st [actual] time this weekend; from grapes I fermented last Sept. The btls to-be-used were scrubbed and dried at the time and stored in cardboard and styrofoam boxes. So...

will do, b; I gave up on it pretty quickly .....

Thanks, guys -- I'll try again. I saw a long listing on Keller but there wasn't anything for paw paws. Maybe I was looking at the wrong listing .....

I'm not finding any data anywhere on making paw paw wine (Jack Keller or not). Does anybody have a clue about this? Maybe I should just experiment -- maybe treat the paw paw meat the same as I would pear, or apple? It has a custardy texture, and is a pain to separate from the big seeds, but good...

Much obliged, guys, for the input. I clean my wine-ware pretty thoroughly, so rinsing with StarSan is mostly to "neutralize" anything floating in on dust. At present I don't have anything for checking pH. And while I'm thinking about it ... I believe I used regular ol' City tap water when I...

I asked this a while back, but it was buried amid other questions, so I didn't get a response. I'll go solo with it. If I'm sanitizing btls for racking (or whatever), can I re-use the StarSan I saved? At what point is it no longer robust enough (or viable) to use? Thx for any info on this; I'm...

I decided to go to local wine-tastings as they ended and see if the shops' owners would let me have used btls -- they were glad to. Beats having to go to recycle dumpsters to search for 'em!