How To Make Watermelon Wine

all right YouTube it's the middle of summer it is hot down here in Mississippi the end of watermelon season is upon us and every year we get a few watermelons from whoever's got them in town and we make a couple gallons of watermelon wine we came across a deal that we just couldn't resist on these watermelons we wind up getting 10 watermelons for under 20 bucks so we're going to go ahead and make a big batch of watermelon one and we're going to show you how we do that so basically what you need for this is you're going to need your watermelons we usually get half a gallon at 3/4 of a gallon per melon depending on the size we're trying to get about six or seven gallons of wine here we're going to do two different kinds and I'll talk about that in a minute so basically what we're going to do is we're going to chunk these watermelons and we're going to put them in here and we're going to juice them strain it and put them in our fermenter bucket we're going to check the specific gravity see how much sugar is actually in the watermelon juice itself and we're going to add sugar to bring it up to our desired alcohol level the recipe that I've used for years it's awesome wine it calls for sugar but this year I really want to try to make it with honey too so we're going to doing a little experiment in a one gallon jug we're going to do the exact same alcohol content exact same yeast exact same watermelon juice and when they're finished we're going to compare between the tried-and-true sugar one and some honey wine so stay tuned that we're going to get to juicing these watermelons all right sort of juice these melons is is going to kind of do a quick demonstration of how we do it I quarter the melon take my knife kind of cut off that side cut off that side take my spoon we don't want to really leave any of that red in there because that's the basis of our wine that's where the flavor is at toss that to the chickens get as much as you can okay when there's mickey's here okay and then what we got here is basically just Trump watermelon in this bucket and we'll sit here and mash it and juice it and we'll strain it into this other bucket we just want the juice really we don't want all this pulp okay then once you've crushed up your watermelon and gotten a good bit of juice out of it we're going to take and string the pulp into another bucket set them up over to the finger kind of press the piece out a little bit we're going to run it a second time now we've gotten those 10 watermelons juice we wound up with a six gallon bucket of juice and a 1 gallon bucket of juice I'm going to make a 6 gallon bucket of wine with the sugar and we're going to make a 1 gallon with the honey I have it in this container so that we can take our measurements pretty easily here so the next thing we're going to do is we're going to take a specific gravity reading of this watermelon juice and I've already taken it and it came out to about 10:30 one point zero three zero what I want it to be is I want to be probably around 18% alcohol by volume potential which is probably 11:30 one point one three zero so we're going to add enough sugar in here to bring our specific gravity up to what we want basically be fermented just like this it would be a very weak alcoholic drink less than a beer maybe three or four or five percent let's say 10:30 is about 4% alcohol by volume so we definitely want to kick this up way higher than that because we're going to use a champagne yeast which has a tolerance of about 15% or so I believe so I'm going to try to get this up to about 18% potential so that when all the yeasts do their thing and burn off that they're still going to be a little bit of sugar left in this one so we're going to take some sugar and we're going to start adding sugar in here and guessing is probably going to take us between 15 and 20 pounds of sugar to get to this I'm just going to go ahead and I'll dump in half a bag I'll go ahead and dump in a whole bag because I'm sure that we're going to take at least that much okay I'm gonna kind of stir it around this is just pure watermelon juice no water the sugar added to bring out the whole content it looks really thick and red right now that's going to kind of dissipate this will turn out to look a lot more like a white wine and stir this up real good we're gonna make sure that is all all the sugar into this solution we're going to take another beating and we had so much juice once we added this 30 pounds of sugar into here that we actually run it with two more gallons of wine these these wines are at 12% potential alcohol by volume this is sitting right about 18% potential and the yeast that we're going to use for this one is got a 15% potential so there's gonna be about 3% sugars left over it'll be a little sweet which is what we want these will be more like a regular red wine around 12% we can back speed them later to make them a little sweeter if we want to so we've got here 8 gallons of watermelon why made with the sugar we're going to go ahead and basically add some yeast nutrients to this and then we're going to add a Camden tablet per gallon to all these we're going to let it sit for 24 hours so it kills all the natural yeasts that would be inside those watermelons so that tomorrow we can add the yeast of our choice and you'll be a more controlled fermentation so right now I'm going to go ahead and mix up the honey batch okay so I'm adding the third pound of honey here to this mixture I've been checking the gravity and by my calculations this should bring us right about to 18% it's going to be close we're not going to be exact but it will be close enough for us to get a comparison of how it tastes was finding versus sugar okay stir this up real good and make sure all the honey is is all you gotta hurry the best take a reading here real quick we were right between 17 18 percent so it's going to be a real close comparison with the sugar so we just this has got just a little bit less sugar in it so I take this and get it into our job there should be all right the watermelon wine has a tendency to bubble up real bad so we're going to go ahead our half a teaspoon of yeast nutrients to this and then we're ready to put camped and tablets and everything and let it sit till tomorrow nicely won it with a little bit more wine and we really intended on having which is never a problem really we've got our six gallons made with sugar here about 18 percent alcohol by longer tential when we have the same alcohol by volume potential here but this is with honey instead of sugar didn't quite make a gallon and that jug said it with a gallon I don't know what's up with that and we also want up with two gallons of watermelon wine maybe sugar that are at a 12 percent potential alcohol by volume everybody's been given yeast nutrient there's been a Campden tablet crushed and put into each one one for each gallon here so one in each of these and six in this one I'm going to let that sit for 24 hours and kill all the natural yeasts that are present in this fruit and then tomorrow at this time we're going to come and pitch in east in each one of these these two are going to get champagne east these ones here are going to get white wine east mostly because that's what I have on hand to you so tomorrow we're going to pitch the east stay tuned alright so we've let all of our stuff sit here for 24 hours on any some cannon tablets to kill all the natural yeast in it and we're going to add our yeast straight into the must here and we said that we were going to do white wine on these two that have sugar in them and we're going to do champagne yeast on these other two basically just pour the yeast in there on top of it each packets enough to do five gallons so I should have used one packet for both of those I suppose and then we're going to cover these myth interlocks we're going to put them in a cool dry place about seventy-five degrees or so and they should be fermenting by tomorrow and done within the week or so okay just pack a champagne East in here this is our watermelon mellow mellow and then we have our six gallon batch here what's made with sugar I'm just going to sprinkle the yeast on top and they know what to do from there in here steal this now there's watermelon wine has a tendency to fill up these airlocks and kind of overflow just something that happens with the fruit so you'll have to take off these airlocks and clean them off a couple times over the next few days after that it shouldn't do that anymore just at the very initial reaction so be on the lookout for these filling up with red you can see it's already starting to happen here just pull them off clean them out and keep this stuck in a cold dry spot a cool dry spot not cold and we're going to check on these in about a week or so so thanks for watching all right the yeast has been pitched for about 24 hours and as you can see the airlocks are steadily working this is what you want to see this is active fermentation this means that the process is working

Channel: Hawthorn Farms

Views: 561,898

Keywords: Winemaking, Wine, homebrew, home brew, watermelon crawl, watermelon wine, watermelon, meade, melomel, watermelon melomel, wine, diy, do it yourself, homestead, farm, country wine, homemade wine, honey, bees, beekeeping, mead, yeast, yeast nutrient, campden, bottles, brew, brewing

Id: fTSTXpgcx58

Length: 14min 46sec (886 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 04 2016