Rinsing the Must

[cellular]

Hi All,

I'm just in the process of de stalking a big batch of elderberries to make an elderberry wine and I was going to try a labour saving technique which I've used in the past. Am interested to know what peoples thoughts are.

Ingredents to the (uk) gallon or 4.8 litres are 1.5kg elderberries, 1.2kg sugar and 5g tartric acid with UCD522 yeast. Am making 30 litres total. Hoping for a dry strong red with plenty of tannin. Simple.

Plan is to put all the sugar with the frozen berries then mush them up to melt and crush them. Then pour on boiling water to 20 litres so that the must gets up above 70 degrees which should hopefully get rid of unwanted yeast. Leave to cool to around 30C then pitch with dried yeast + go ferm.

Ferment at 25C, knock down the cap every day, and after 5 days run the lot through a colinder then a sieve into a 30 litre tub. Then put another 10 litres cold water back on the pump in the primary and keep at 25C for another day. Repeat the process topping up the 30 litre tub. Then fill primary again with cold water and repeat to top up the 30 litre secondary fermentation.

Basically doing this enables me to get everything out of the berries as by the end they really are spent, it also avoids messing around for ages with pressing or straining them through a muslin. Just slosh through a colander and then back in the bucket.

Thoughts?

Tom

 

[VinesnBines]

If you have done this before with elderberry and are happy with the results, then it works for you. I've never made elderberry so I can't give advice.

Other thoughts: rather than "rinsing the must" have you tried a second run fermentation? You would achieve a similar result but all your liquid will be fermented. Your method sounds like it waters down your finished wine. Are you testing your SG or just going with time? You probably are fermenting the berries halfway and then finishing fermentation in secondary. I would ferment the berries fully and the make a second run to get the rest of the goodness.

 

[cellular]

Yeah it is kind of watering down the fermentation but the second and third rinse is still normally pretty strongly flavoured and i think the total extraction from the fruit is more than if i did the whole 30L lot in one go. I did it before on a cherry wine fermentation where i couldn't be bothered to stone the cherries so pressing was difficult and i wanted the fermentation on the pulp to be quite short so there wasn't too much off flavour from the stones. The second and third rinse do still ferment significantly due to the amount of sugar left in the pulp, but i suppose i could split the sugar that over each fermentation as well to make them go a bit more. My idea is that the main alcohol extraction of flavour and tannin will be on the first run and the others are just to get the last bit of flavour out. No I don't do a OG reading just work out a guess by looking at the water fruit and sugar added.

Thinking about it i may just rack it off the fermenter after 5 days and then top it up with water. Even easier as no straining or anything and it'll leave more sugar in there for the second run.

 

[Rice_Guy]

Haven’t done this with elderberry, but have done similar with low moisture fruit as crab apple.