Easy Homemade Strawberry Wine from Whole Fruit

for a while people have been asking for strawberry Brews now we did a strawberry cider but let's do a strawberry wine now why are we doing wine instead of mead well here's the thing honey's getting kind of expensive so we thought we'd make something that's a little bit less expensive to make granted I know that strawberries themselves are not cheap so a strawberry Mead would be like double dosing on the expense whereas just strawberries and sugar is a little bit easier on the old wallet so to keep that in mind if you decide to make this beverage plan ahead and do it when strawberries are in season because it'll be less expensive that way also if you happen to be lucky enough to have a you pick place nearby go pick them yourself and that way you can have the best strawberries for the best price right I think we paid about what like almost 30 bucks for all these strawberries it's about five and a half pounds once we remove all the green stems we'll have about five pounds I estimate so 30 bucks for that for five bottles it's about six dollars a bottle still not too bad but all these are still in the packages we need to get them into a colander get them washed off and get all the green tops off now comes the labor intensive part of the show where you take the strawberry and you peel off the green thing in the end so I'm just twisting it off I don't care that there's a little bit of stem in there it's it's done gonna matter it's nutrients this may take a while see when we're done my fingers are sore and our strawberries are de-stemmed and Derek will rinsed them off too so next we want to crush these up now there's a couple ways you could do it you can freeze these and then you can do the mashing which that's certainly a viable way to do it you can also just throw them into the fermenter and mash them up with a potato masher or you can use Machinery like we're gonna do see here's the thing we are equal opportunity offenders so no matter what method we use someone always says hey can you try this method hey can you try this method so we've never tried blitzing up strawberries before so we're gonna try it why not so I'm just going to dump a bunch of the strawberries into the food processor you could use a blender why am I using the food processor because it's easier and I got it for Christmas so I like this food process I find the food processor is easier to clean out we have the Vitamix food processor I find it's easier to clean out than the Vitamix blender that's just me there's a lot of strawberries it's going to take a couple batches and all I'm going to do is Blitz them up into a puree chunky you know and then pour it into a little big mouth fermenter probably going to be two two batches I think what do you think looks like two maybe I wouldn't feel that much more okay it's full now we blend and now we have our little big mouth fermenter and um what was this sanitized in the red button [Music] you have to excuse our dark is not feeling too great today so the excitement level is probably a little bit low but now I'm just gonna dump these in doesn't that look great okay and now the rest into the food processor but I'm gonna do it over there because it's a lot easier back inside batch two of the strawberry Mash I want to get it all out this time you know every strawberry is sacred enough almost every strawberry sacred how's that now I realize this takes up a significant portion of the fermenter and that's okay we're probably going to end up putting this in a bag but there is something that we need to do first all right since we're working with whole fruit two things that we can do here the first is I want to get as much out of those as I can so I'm going to add a little bit of pectic enzyme right now this will help with clearing later on down the road but what it also does is it helps to dissolve some more of the sugars that are in the fruit itself thereby giving us a little bit more sugar in the final product so one teaspoon right on top then something you've never seen us do before because we don't generally work with whole fresh fruits we're going to use a Camden tablet just one which is potassium metabisulfite because here's the thing we got these strawberries from the store we don't know what kid walked up and sneezed on these strawberries before we bought them we don't know what wild geese are going to town on these strawberries sure we rinsed them but did you really get everything off are you sure no so one Camden tablet and I'm just gonna crush it they crushed pretty easy and explode I got a piece here and then I'm just going to add a touch of water foreign try to dissolve it as much as possible it looks pretty good I'm going to dump that right in now it's not much water just a couple tablespoons and I want to mix all of that through thoroughly the directions say one camera tablet per gallon of stuff so we don't have quite a gallon so I used one just to be on the safe side this is going to kill off any bacteria any nasties any wild yeast anything that could be on those berries that we don't want in our final wine or when we start fermentation it takes 24 to 36 hours so if you pitch your yeast now they're going to die they're not going to be able to build a colony it's not going to work so what we're going to do we're going to put a lid on this with an airlock let it sit for about two days and then we'll be back to add our yeast and continue the process foreign all right so this was super weird when we first put the stuff in there it turned everything white yep it bleached it that's what it does and then it started to do this really interesting separation like pretty quick yeah at this point it's been sitting for two days and just for curiosity's sake there's some juice in the bottom here where it's separated I want to get a reading on that so I'm going to punch through the goop and try to get as little of that as possible still got some it's gonna happen because we have an interesting option and that is to just use the juice or to use all the solids I think I want to use all the solids because that's where your tannins are there's extra nutrients in there I think I want to use everything but I'm just curious what is this juice what kind of gravity are we getting from the stories now remember berries don't have a lot of sugar so probably not a lot of sugar in here I didn't get too much of the solid so we should be able to get a pretty accurate reading okay we have a 1.032 with just the juice so if I mix the the goop in there I think we're I think we're okay um but that gives me an idea of where to go so 1.032 from juice we did use five and a half pounds of strawberries so I'm not surprised that's like three quarters of a pound of sugar in total so what I want to do now because while we were talking about that I made up my mind we're going to use all the solids I was unsure but now I'm pretty sure and we're putting it into a bag as you can see we have a bag over another fermenter and this is still primary fermentation we haven't started fermentation yet so you know what it's actually pre-pre-primary fermentation so I'm just going to pour the whole thing all the goop and everything into that bag that worked way better than I thought I was going to going to we were expecting huge mess problems what not yeah but it worked out well so now what I want to do is just tie this off and the reason why I did that is see I want to keep all the mess away from the wine okay so I'm just going to tie this literally tie it because that's how this bag works I don't like this bag but it's the one that we had that fit the size of what we need so it's what we do now I didn't get a weight we normally put a weight in our bag because the solids were already fully saturated so yeah I feel like they are not going to float however if they do we're just going to get one of our fermentation weights sanitize it and put it in the back I'm squeezing all the air out that'll help too I squeeze the bag and now you gotta wash your hands now I gotta wash my hand I gotta get rid of this anyway I'll be right back okay so since we had a 1.032 already what I need to do is calculate how much sugar to add to get this to like a 1.100 which is pretty much our standard Target starting gravity why because it makes like a 13 to 14 ABV tends to be the sweet spot for taste as well as it's really good for most yeast most yeast will ferment that dry except for bread yeast they probably won't and they will not really stress much to get there so based on the methods that we like to use which is keeping it very simple and authentic we can kind of know that it should work so if I go by that 1.100 minus 1.032 which is the must that we have right now we get 0.68 0.068 so if I divide that by 0.046 we get 1.478 so about 1.5 half pounds of sugar [Applause] pretty simple stuff now I wanted to use as little sugar as possible and here's why think what Alton Brown used to say about water water doesn't bring anything to the party so use a flavored broth or vinegars or things like that not for brewing for cooking in Brewing sugar is the equivalent to water for sweetening it's going to add alcohol it's going to add sweetness but it doesn't bring any flavors so I wanted the strawberry flavor to be the main thing of the Brew therefore that's why we're using as little sugar as possible and trying to use the juices as much as we can but before we do that let me get my scale going and I am going to add some water because this is going to be difficult to mix we have a bag in there stuff I know what you're thinking take the bag out nope I got it in there I'm not pulling it back out now I'm adding three quarters of a gallon of water to this you see how high that went that's not even quite three quarters of a gallon I'm hoping to end up with about one gallon at the end and I think we're gonna be fine we need to tear that out I like to push buttons yeah you know those people that just constantly push the button even though they've already pushed the button say an elevator or a walking sign to cross the street Brian is the person that will keep on pushing it no matter how many times he's pushed it before and then when it works I think see it worked because it works every single time right after I push the button it says go or the door opens see okay 1.5 pounds that was a pretty cool effect yeah okay I did 8.1 ounces [Applause] but you know what I need now besides a vacuum spoon a spoon and now I need to mix this up so I finally did a thing and we know we we still have a spoon of unusually large size but now we have a spoon of normal size I just cut one of the paddles down so now we have both so thanks Drew because now I have both and I want to mix this up because you know there's a lot of sugar in here if you don't mix it the yeast will still get to it but they will not you won't get an accurate reading at the start and I kind of want to have an accurate reading I have I have a feeling it's going to be a little bit lower than my Target because I think there's more juice here than before and we have the volume of the bag and everything it could make it feel like it's a little bit more diluted kind of idea do you think you're going to put the rest of this water I don't think I'm going to put the rest of that water in there I don't think I'm putting anything in here but yeast well and he's doing it good thing it's semi-transparent I can totally see all that Sugar floating around on the bottom there one thing I was concerned with with using the Canon tablets was that we're going to lose all of our color I don't that's as much of an issue now I think we're gonna keep that color now the Camden tablet the whole point of that was to make the fruit not have anything that could cause an infection and not have any wild yeast if you froze it for a long time you probably don't need to worry about it as much it's still not a bad idea but it's not as necessary we don't normally do that because we usually freeze things but I wanted to use fresh because a couple people have asked so let's uh try some fresh fruit so now that we have here you're not going to use it anymore right I I don't know maybe but I don't think so okay so I'm going to take another reading just to see if we're at our Target or where we're at for a gravity reading I hope it retains that pink color I think that'll be really cool to have the wine be pink like that it's Pretty in Pink um okay where are we at it dropped a lot it's 1.062 um my only idea behind why that would happen is because I added a lot more liquid than I expected like I think there was a lot more of that juice than a quart so when we added all that because we are way up past the gallon Mark um let me just do some quick calculation here 1.062 1.062 if that goes to dry 1.000 that gives us 62 points of Gravity used up times 135 gives me 8.37 . do you want to add more sugar I think we want to add more sugar I just feel like eight percent isn't really enough um do you want to redo your math to get back to your target I'm not even going to use a scale what yeah well see here's the thing I can try to figure it out but I don't actually know the quantity that I have here including the bag and everything like that I know you are I'm just trying to explain so you know what I'm gonna do I'm gonna just dump a bunch of sugar in and then I'll give you a final gravity reading a final gravity that isn't really a final gravity it's more like a final original so fog final original gravity magnitude now I need the spoon again for those of you playing along at home trying to figure out what I just did I added more liquid than the gravity that I calculated would have worked for okay because a pound of sugar is .046 points of gravity or specific gravity in a gallon of must we have more than a gallon therefore it's less than .046 does that make sense and at this point you're wondering did he do that on purpose well maybe not exactly I know this is going to be a good wine I know strawberry strawberry is one of Derek's favorite things so I know having more of it wouldn't be a bad thing and I knew that I could show a new technique a new idea a way to make Corrections if we did it in a large container like this so I sort of did it on purpose but not completely accidentally accidentally on purpose um we're also just gonna roll with it so I want to mix in that extra sugar I probably added another half pound I'm guessing that half pound might put me up to like the 1.100 or so Mark and this is another way you can do it if you don't want to use a scale you don't have to go buy gravity readings it's much like the way we do our sweetening we're doing it to a certain sweetness level that we like and here I'm aiming for a certain starting gravity so the amount that I put in doesn't even matter it's my starting gravity that makes the difference the only reason why this might not be the best idea is if you can't volumize as well yes if you put way too much fermentable sugar in a brew your yeast are going to have a lot of problems so you want to make sure that you get as close to that Target or slightly shy of that Target just so that your yeasts don't get stressed now one other caveat if you're doing this make sure you are mixing it perfectly because if there's extra sugars in there they're not being counted mounted into your gravity reading right so you're very inaccurate in your gravity reading to start with so that's why I'm being very careful this time around especially to make sure that I get all the sugars mixed in just to be extra doubly triply quadrupley pinky square safe that um it's all mixed in and I'm pretty sure it is it's mixing quite well was that warm water I think so it's not really warm anymore yeah well the the fruit was room temperature so okay so I'm going to take a reading it's okay to aerate you saw what I just did right I squeezed it off in here at this point now it's okay it's good to add air in the beginning now I know I made a big deal about I don't want to use as much sugar as I have to well I I only used as much sugar as I needed to to get to the gravity that I actually wanted okay um still going to stand by that it's my story I'm sticking to it wow I must not be mixing well because this only went to 1.072 so let me pour this back in and mix some more I think that may be part of the problem is I have not mixed it well at all I don't know it looks like it looks pretty good maybe my half pound wasn't really half pound he was a quarter pound an easy way to check that just to make sure is I'm going to mix it up a little bit more I take another reading I know it's a lot of readings but you know what I'd rather be safe than sorry the more time you take in this stage to be sure that you're right the better off you're going to be down the road we hear a lot of stories about people that say oh I accidentally added 16 pounds of honey to my one gallon of meat first off I'm not sure 16 pounds of honey can fit into one gallon of meat and I'm exaggerating for effect but you get the idea okay it makes it a little bit more let's just see because that was only like a 1.072 or something so we may have to add more sugar we're still only at like a 1.074 or so so as much as I mixed it up well I didn't put enough sugar in there see 1.072 all right at this point if you're wondering did you do that on purpose no this is not on purpose I thought I added enough someone's gonna add some more perfect that last I was there that was what it needed he's making a mess here today but you know the way we see it is this Homebrew is what you make of it if you want to make something that's very complicated and very precise you can do that if you want to make something that just tastes good and you have a rough idea of what you want it to be you can do that too and that's what this is I know I wanted to have roughly a 12 to 13 ABV in the end and we're probably going to sweeten this so in order to do that I have to start with enough gravity to get to that 12 percent here right here and right there does anybody get that reference I think we get that reference if you get that reference let me know in the comments like tell me what the reference is don't just say yeah I get it because how do I know if you go and don't just copy somebody else if they put it in first you know I'm joking I'm glad we did put that goop in a bag though because I think the bag being it's a very fine mesh is holding a lot of that sediment in there I don't think I don't think it's going to come out because it should have by now I've been beating that got this bag in here I occasionally see just a few sugar crystals but I think you're pretty close to being all mixed up oh I'm I'm all mixed up that's for sure 1.080 now we're getting to a point where it's close 0.08 times 135 that's 10.8 that's almost 11 percent I think I'm okay with that yeah Strawberry Wine doesn't need to be super high ABV we're at a point where I think it's good plus there's probably a little bit of sugar that didn't get fermented in there so I don't want to overstress the yeast or make it too high but I am going to go with that 1.080 as our original gravity what he meant by that is that he thinks there's some sugar that didn't get thoroughly dissolved that affecting our reading and making it lower than what it actually is yep fermentation has not started yet did I say fermentation you did it's okay that's why I'm here okay all right so a couple things we want to add to this first we want to add some space because that is really up close to the top we are going to end up with a lot of product out of this one which is a good thing but I am using fermato as our yeast nutrient it's just fermaid o f e r m a i d hyphen o for organic it is a yeast nutrient and you might be wondering well why are using these well because you know what it's kind of an insurance policy we use it in almost everything now it just seems to help so I just have I don't know an ounce of water maybe and 2.5 grams of fermato just gonna put that in there it is sort of optional if you really have a problem with using it but you know what honestly do it get used to it and do it in every Brew you'll be very happy in the long run we have had much better successes since we started [Music] for your convenience in the description below right now I'm just trying to get some of the air out of that bag because it's floating it's not floating too bad I think it's gonna well any amount of it that's poking out of the liquid can possibly cause mold so you want me to get a weight no because then I have to untie it and all that kind of thing so we're asking I know I appreciate it but we're not going there if you cannot get it to stay down the option is keep pushing until it goes or you can just give it a little bit of a swirl every couple of days and you're fine all right before you make your final decision on the weight you do know that once this gets fermenting it's going to create gas and the gas is going to fill that fine mesh bag and cause it to float even more yep okay and I know they're putting a weight in it doesn't stop it it lifts the weight up anyway all right I just wanted to we've we've gone down this road many times put it out there I know so we're yeast because you gotta add a yeast rolls this is going to do nothing but sit and rot over time which fermentation is sort of rotting but anyway we're going to be using what are we using today the Beast Alvin 71b and why are we using loud and 71b thank you for asking Brian as I've done my preliminary Google food to give you some information on 71b it has been isolated and selected by the inra of France for its ability to produce a high level of Esters allowing it to reinforce the aromatic profiles of wines fermented for Mutual varieties well having somebody 1B has the capacity to absorb polyphenolic compounds on a cellular wall which limits tan and structure of young and fresh red wine hey um basically it's the perfect choice for creating young fresh and fruity red rose or white wines that are easy to drink and also good choice for late Harvest wines so that's why we selected this because this is kind of red rose so 71 B is going to work really well for that um of course it's not going to say what it's we've also had great luck with 71b in general it works really well and I believe it's a 15 minutes I believe it's 15 alcohol so we're fine this is a point that I want to to stress on yeast selection for our viewers Titan please and that is okay we're good yeasts are different but they're also different in different environments so what works for us isn't necessarily going to be the best used choice for you we tend to be slightly warmer than many of our audience and in some cases we're cooler in our temperatures than some of our audience I don't know our audience is pretty cool [Music] so you want to keep all those variables in mind and experiment with different yeasts and find what yeast works the best for you and that's the yeast you should use we have no idea how many how much sugar we put in here but we know we added enough sugar to get to that gravity 1.080 now what does this tell you a it tells you that Brewing can be much more chaotic than you think but B it also tells you that the poundage or actual volume that you're putting in isn't as important as the numbers okay we stress take readings all the time we take readings for fermentation for Gravity like starting gravity final gravity final after sweetening gravity we stress that on purpose because look at the volume we have what do we have with the bag and everything how much actual liquid is in there we don't really know I know it's somewhere around a gallon to a gallon and a half because this only holds 1.5 gallons in total and it's pretty full so because of that variable if you go and use if we said this is two pounds of sugar and you put two pounds of sugar in there and your gravity was different than ours your wine is going to be different than ours it's going to come out differently it's going to act differently if you happen to use a lot less liquid you might be over the amount of sugar that you have you should have for the yeast and it might not ferment it might stall or it might come out different vastly different than what we did so to me this is just another lesson in use the numbers learn how to read that gravity someone said the other day that the only reason to take a final gravity reading is to know how much alcohol you have I wholeheartedly disagree the reason to take a final gravity is not to find out how much alcohol you have it's to make sure these did their job the reason to take an initial gravity is not to find out how much alcohol you have at the end it's to make sure that you don't overpower those yeast or to reach a specific Target for consistency sake if we were to make this again I probably wouldn't add so much water but that means I wouldn't have to add as much sugar for the same volume either to get that 1.080 starting gravity see the difference there it'd be the same recipe but our gravity would be a little bit the gravity would be the same but our volume would be a little bit lower and we might not have to worry about as much of a mess that we're going to have to worry about with this one Speaking of messes we're not going to put this in the fermentation station not no we're going to put it on a tray that has a lip so that we should put in a five gallon bucket put a lid on it if if these get really excited which we're intending them to do they're going to create so much gas that's going to come up into this it's going to come pouring out like a lava flow and it's just going to make a big giant mess everywhere so putting it on a tray with a lip that's going to catch that mess rather than ending it up all over it's already making gas all over our kitchen it really is but anyway that's what this is going to do and then it's going to sit for a week maybe two maybe three weeks until we see no more airlock activity whatsoever then we'll be back to show you then what it's like so things have happened they got messy yeah it got really messy you see all that around the sides and stuff that is what we don't want and if we take the lid off you can see what's going on in there that bag has just risen up all the way into the top the air got into it and everything and it just totally blocked everything up so we literally had to leave the lid just like loose on it for the last several days and that brings us to you today so this ended up kind of like a perfect storm of issues not only did we have the bag that was filled with that super dense strawberry pulp that created pretty much an impendedral layer for all the fermentation gases so just pushed it up and filled it up like a balloon but not only did it do that it pushed it up flush against the aperture that is connected to the airlock that is supposed to relieve the gases so the gases weren't even getting out that way and if we weren't paying close attention we could have had a serious problem so luckily we were paying close to attention and we had this out and we had it on our lip tray see people I I stressed that for a reason it actually got out over the top of this lid and leaked out overnight and then when we left it open here it was leaking out through the threads so it did both this was full we emptied it the first morning so if we had waited this probably with two full size of the pickle weights then that probably could have held it down however we had filmed it already so there was no room for displacement to continue to add weights to try to keep it down plus that particular bag is known for ballooning what what I mean by that is it fills with gases from the inside and it just pushes out no amount of weight is going to hold that down and it would have it would have just pushed out anyway so this is two things a bags can be good and bad weights can be helpful but they're not the end-all and don't get too greedy that's the real key but what I did was usually a couple times a day I took a sanitized Chopstick and I would push down to try to free up some area for that bag and you know gases came out but it's not a perfect uh concept so every once in a while you'll have a situation like this is this ideal for sanitation no okay is is this horribad where it's automatically going to go bad no not that either because the likelihood of anything bad getting in there is so slim because it was pushing everything out so not as big of a deal as you might think it could be but what we're going to do now the fruit's been in there for seven days yeah it's been a week but if you remember when we started out because we pre-prept our fruit s we already had extracted a large amount of juice so we're not really concerned really about leaving this in further and since it was causing us so many problems we're just gonna remove it yep it like I say it's just mostly the pulp and the skins and seven days it's done what it's going to do I don't want to squeeze the bag too much it's not a pleasant feeling all right I'm good I'm good with that I'm gonna go wash my hands so at this point we know that it's still fermenting I do want to just take a look and get a smell it smells like strawberries it smells like fermenting strawberries so it doesn't smell like there's anything rotten going on in there or vinegarization which vinegar takes a month to occur in most cases so you wouldn't notice it yet there's nothing really to be worried about so that's what we look for and right now for a primary fermentation it's got enough room so I'm gonna put the lid back on but before we seal this up we're gonna clean it up and put the and then we're going to put the label back on it'll go back in the fermentation station yeah because everything kind of erupted on the outside we have a sticky sugary mess on the outside and we want to get rid of that not because of anything that it'll occur it's just gross to handle it's just gross and that will attract more fruit flies than we want the lid will get washed off then we'll put the lid on and we'll wipe off the rest of it and that way we can get it clean we're going over this because a lot of people have asked how do you clean it up when an eruption happens well you just clean it up and there's also water in here right now just because we would have had to replace it 15 times so we're going to clean that out as well refill it with properly diluted sanitization liquid and we've all sanitize lid after cleaning it before putting it back on and then the next time you see it it'll be all cleaned up and it'll have a label on it it'll probably be in a week or two all clean ready to go back into the fermentation station okay this has been going for exactly 14 days now I know we uh removed the bag from it a week ago I didn't take a note on that shame on me but today we're going to take its first reading because it's looking like it might be done like it's getting close to finish there was very little airlock activity smells like strawberries now I like strawberries Optical and olfactory check looks good I mean everything looks fine I think if there was ever going to be a problem with the bag of strawberries we got to it before it was going to be a problem if you are unfamiliar with the scent of fermenting fruit like if you're not a gardener who perhaps forgot to harvest everything then this may smell odd to you it's a little Tangy a little a little pungent yeah uh but this is what fermenting fruit smells like so yeah we get questions all the time like this doesn't smell good um okay you're fermenting something that's literally Nature's way of disposing of the trash just so you know all right um well holy crap yeah uh uh oh yeah I gotta get all the ball this I need I need to be right because we might have a momentous event here somebody gave us a number recently and they're like oh I fermented to this number and we're like we have never seen anything fermented yeah they were saying 0.982 this is not 982. this is nine eight eight that's a first I've never had anything go that low before uh usually 990-992-994 never saw below 990 before this this hydrometer actually goes to 9.980 I didn't I just noticed that the marking is 990 but there's ten more lines above that so let's calculate our ABV using the calculator the teacher said I would never have handy this started at 1.080 it's a little lower than we normally like to start but that's because we had so much liquid in this and that um minus 0.988 times 135 gives us 12.4 ABV I really can't complain about that I figured this would be in the 11 to 13 range so 12.4 percent now one note about this this is about as dry as dry can you just hold that please I don't want to set that down because anything you know whatever uh so what I want to do is pour this back in but like I was saying this is dry as dry can be I'm expecting to have to back sweeten this but we are going to let this go for one more week before we are now well yeah I just stirred everything up um we are going to let this go for one more one more week to settle out fully because it was very very cloudy still so and now it's even worse because you know when you pour the sample back in but what am I supposed to do with it no we're not racking this dick I like to wait the second reading and this is only two weeks old so but I will be shocked oh it's not gonna move it's more a case of I want more of the leaves and things to fall out of suspension before we uh before we do anything with it so we're just gonna put the note back on there stick it back in the fermentation station and see in a week all right another week has gone by and when we last looked at this it was a record-setting 0.988 final gravity which for us is pretty low and I'm not expecting it to have gone any further but just for consistency sake we are going to take our second reading before we rack it and make sure it's already starting to clear look at that now that's nice yep it's clearing up so my in you know everything about this tells me this is done but it's always good just to verify and make sure that way we don't uh screw up and make mistakes because you can mess up one reading but it's unlikely a mess of two readings in a row so I just like to be sure oh yeah it doesn't look like it's moved at all but I'm so used to it sitting higher that I can't really reach it yeah it hasn't moved 0.988 no problem so we're going to Rack this today all right so now we need to decide what we're going to wrap this into we do have uh some sediment it goes up to about here which really isn't that deep so I don't think this is going to fit in a one gallon so we'll probably just need to put it into another little bit more bubbler yep so we're gonna go wash one of those up be ready to Rack it when you're racking the first thing you do not want to do is pour your sample right back in here with all the leaves because if you do you're going to disturb those leaves they all cloudy and then there's not much point in racking you're going to have to wait several days until you can do it so I'm just going to pour it right into the new vessel saving myself all that trouble the other thing is you want to have a destination placement and a source placement yeah I said that right you did this is the source this is the destination destination must be lower than source we like to use an auto siphon for racking I highly suggest you get one for yourself if you don't have access to one some vinyl tubing or plastic tubing will also work it's just a little bit harder to get started and a little bit more clunky to work with but the auto siphon is great because you just put it in about halfway give it a few pulls and it's going now you want to watch it because I left the cap on so that we can go a little bit into that lease this is the first racking so I don't mind getting a little bit of the goop in there that's the technical term just because I don't want to lose product so that's okay this time around but I don't want to go all the way in and just have it come up all over the place you want to be careful you don't like just suddenly move it all over the place and stir everything up like I just did I want to make sure that everything is clean by clean I mean sanitized our preferred method is to soak it into a properly diluted sanitization liquid our favorite is star sand and then once it started I just watch it and I'm keeping it a little above the least cake at the bottom until I get close to it and then I'll just determine how greedy I want to be normally when it gets to a little bit past the halfway mark I'll tip the bottle like this so I actually have more depth for the auto siphon to work with and it seems to go just a little bit faster I just wanted to be really careful if you choose the Tipping method because the movement of the liquid can disrupt your least cake now in this particular case our lease cake looks like it compacted quite nicely all right right at the end I did get a little bit more of these but as I said this is the first rack not such a horrible thing so because our original lid didn't get all that gunky I did a check to make sure I'm just going to reuse that the airlock is all set there's no bugs that have been captured in our airlocks so yeah we are set to go and we're using the same style fermenter so it's going to fit just fine however I am going to let Brian screw this on because I've been having problems with that lately the trick is just go light touch to get them started these little big mouth bubblers the threads are a little odd but light touch to get it started and then really crank it down we did have somebody that I've been talking to them in the uh no no I'm done I'm just turning a little uh I was talking to them in the comments they were having a problem with a little big big mouth bubbler where they saw bubbles in their Brew after four days but they didn't see anything in the airlock I said well it's just a seal nothing to worry about I don't think any bugs are going to get past that seal even if it's a little bit leaky but you might not see any airlock activity but you will definitely see bubbles coming up the side this is another reason why I love using glass because I can look at and go yup there's fermentation happening whereas with a plastic bucket really really hard to do when it's getting to that near ending phase now this is done this is this one's totally done right some tricks to adjust the seal if you're having difficulties with them is to do the two teamed partner thing where one is holding the base still and the other is really cranking blood down tight that's going to compress that seal more or you can get multiple seals and stack them in there giving more of a cushion layer and that will create a seal quicker absolutely but for now this is just going to go back in the fermentation station for another week maybe two let this clear out some more and we'll be back to continue the process okay so it's been another week guess what that means means it's time to Rack this and give its penultimates tasting where we figure out does it need anything is it good you know of course it's gonna be good it's just a question of can we make it better than it already is lots of threads on these little big mouth bubblers people have been saying lately that they've been having a lot of problems with the gaskets too get a couple extras um that's the easiest way we haven't done that yet looks good smells good it smells strawberry like super strawberry and as she said looks good I don't see anything untoward in here so we're going to ratchet ratchet we're going to Rack it to our fancy pitcher that has raised numbers now somebody said that I got ripped off for spending 28 dollars for a plastic pitcher now let me just go into this picture for just a second will you let us show it's you with speakers yeah that was a really awkward try it but anyway it's all right if you know what we're talking about let me know but anyway this picture yes it's 28 I get that it's expensive for a plastic pitcher but it has raised letters on the side and my letters he means numbers yeah well there's letters too the versatility of that cannot be denied because that means no matter if the ink washes off or whatever it's still going to be there now this has been used quite a bit and the ink is still here okay but it's also in us and Metric that is so big because we can tell you it's x amount of milliliters and x amount of ounces at the same time having those measurements is huge if you have another pitcher that has those measurements on it by all means use that I'm not saying you have to get this one but the other thing that's really cool is the spout now this may sound like an infomercial but this is because many people have asked okay this spout is deep enough and sharp enough that you can pour without spilling if you've ever seen me try to pour out of a Pyrex one measure it's a big mess you can't do it it's I mean you might as well just pour out of a coffee mug it's just it just doesn't work that well they spill all over the place this you don't have to do that commit first you can just kind of dribble it over the edge that way you can pour without oxygenating if you you absolutely have to for smaller amounts and things like that but it's just really great when you're filling up a picture or filling up a fermenter that kind of thing enough about the pitcher it's great get one they're awesome so we're going to rack from the little big mouth into the picture it also is going to tell us how much we have so that we know what kind of fermenter to put it into when we're done and it's great when you're bottling because I can see exactly how many ounces we have so I can calculate how many bottles we need so I I see I see it a little bit yeah enough that I I'm Gonna Leave the cap on what we're talking about is the leaves at the bottom there's a dusting it's probably about an eighth of an inch it's enough that if I took the cap off and I just stuck this down in there I'm probably going to suck up a whole bunch of Gunk that I just don't want in my Brew so I'm going to leave the cap on it does mean a slight bit more lost but we do have more than a gallon here anyway so we're actually doing pretty well and the way you rack really simple use an auto siphon first that's this thing right here and you put your Source higher your destination lower you stick it in about halfway give it a couple of pumps pumps on the thing I don't know there's no technical term for this and uh make sure that it's held to the bottom there so that it's not falling through air and oxygen and boom there you go you're racking all right so I just made a big deal about the picture and here's the problem it's only one gallon so we ended up with more than a gallon so in order to do this right we're gonna siphon back into the little big mouth bubbler basically we didn't have to do it to the pitchers in this case we could have gone right into the little big mouth bubbler I tend to like to mix things in pictures but because now we'll have two batches I don't want to do that so we're going to put them back into the little big mouth bubbler and this is a new sanitized oh yeah little big mouth it's all clean so we're gonna do that right now and okay so now we have it back into the little big mouth bubbler and as you can see it's pretty good in there there's a little bit of Headroom but once we sweeten this there won't be that much now one thing very very important we are going to be sweetening with regular plain table sugar which means there's a chance of re-fermentation and uh yeah this one went super super crazy stupid dry so there is a definitely a chance we do oh 1.082 oh yeah let's uh let's figure out our ABV I'm going to use the calculator teacher said I would never have handy and I had to look for it at this time it was over there way over there sometimes it's right here sometimes it's in my pocket 1.080 minus 0.988 times 135 this is 12.4 percent I even wrote it down on the Note last time so this is 12.4 percent which is pretty decent and what we're going to do now is we're going to we're not doing any of that ignore the man behind the curtain we're going to take a case right this is what it tastes like sorry folks a lot of videos long day this is the first one but you know that doesn't matter okay so we are going to do a tasting and this is the penultimate tasting and I'm trying really hard not to laugh this is what we call the penultimate tasting because it's the next to the last tasting so we do this to get a feel for how the Brew is like does it need anything it doesn't need sweetening does it need more acid does it need tannins does it need whatever it might need first off it's weird in here it's red in here it's like orange before without the strawberry ruse it ends up being like an apricoty peachy kind of thing there's a very slight Haze I mean I would say this is like a seven and a half but again when you look through the top you don't really see it so it's like a seven and a half to an eight for clarity on the smell it smells a little young which you know not surprising we started this uh April 4th today is only May 2nd so you know it's less than four weeks old but we're not getting to all the details we're just gonna taste it to see what does it need maybe a Klondike bar oh needs sweetness it's Tangy it's got the strawberry Tang I do feel like it's got a good acidity level a really good tanginess to it uh mouth feels hard to tell and sugar can sometimes add to that mouth feel it'll make it a little more viscous it's kind of a little watery right now so yeah you can definitely tell this went to oh yeah this went super dry and you know okay now if you like super dry wines Yeah by all means I mean it might be good for you this might be the point to bottle it and if that's the case you don't have to do anything other than bottle it because it's already stable due to the fact that there's no fermentable sugars left in there to continue fermentation well you can't say there's none there's there's still some because pure ethanol likelihood there's very little very slim there's a minute amount but you can't say there's none okay we are going to sweeten this because it needs it badly go ahead and drink that so the way we sweeten if you've ever seen any of our videos before and even if you've never seen any of our videos I'm going to tell you again um the way we do it is we add the sweetener to taste okay because we don't actually know how much we have right now we have over a gallon so we can't really say add half a pound because it's over a gallon we don't really know so instead what we do is we add it to taste and then we give you a reading at the end so you can replicate that gravity reading that way if you're making half gallon full gallon 1.725 gallons five gallons 20 gallons doesn't matter replicate that gravity reading and you're there so the first step is always a little bit risky because if you put in too much you can't take it back so I don't put in a lot okay and this is just a little bit of experience a little bit of taste a little bit of personal bias like what do you want it to be I know I'd like this to be sweet strawberries that aren't sweet taste weird at this point this is a wine so sugars were the primary fermentationable sugar we talked about a non-fermentable sugar right but we aren't adding honey because this isn't a Mead and we don't really feel the need to add a honey flavor we just want the sweetness and that's why we're going with white sugar because I said did a test and white sugar was the most neutral it did taste the nicest um and that's why we're not afraid or unhappy with going through the pasteurization process because we know that in the end it does produce a superior product um different people have different opinions on artificial sweeteners and non-fermentable sugars and all that and that's perfectly fine however you want to do it I don't have a problem um I would rather just use a little bit of white sugar because we know that it's going to taste the best and ultimately that's what we're after so an extra hour or so pasteurizing not a big deal to me plus we found that when we pasteurized they tend to settle out a bit a little bit so that might help with the little bit of quality um even though we did use pectic enzyme in this Brew look I say it's still like a seven day it doesn't detract from our experience no and you want to just mix this carefully so that you don't disturb too much you don't want to oxygenate um some people have asked why we don't Degas well if you look at this I'm disturbing it but there's not a lot of bubbles coming out it's degassed on its own yeah time will the gas and in our environment maybe it's just because we're a little warmer it only takes a few weeks usually three four weeks and most of our stuff is degassed naturally there was no carbonation in that sample that we tried now that being said there is no specific time frame that you know if this time lapses all the gassing is going to occur because the chemistry of each Brew is slightly different and so therefore its ability to degas quickly or slowly ER than the previous one is going to vary you took the glass oh all right now I put in I'm guessing half a pound of sugar if that may be quarter pound barely detectable it's a little better but it's still still needs a lot more so now that was my first test put in you know like a quarter pound or so I know it needs at least as much as I did the first time so I'm going to do a little bit more this time it's also easier to mix when you do it in small batches like that why do you keep putting the glass over there we need it again I have this bad habit of placing things right in front of my face and put it in front of me and that's not good for our viewers and put it in front of me yeah the trick to this is make sure you mix it thoroughly too I'm mixing until I don't hear any of the granules in the glass and I don't see anything floating around yeah because we're using a clear glass vessel we can actually see the the granules that are still there and you can also have the tactile sense of feeling the granules when you're using sugar now when you're using honey you won't have the granules so you wouldn't be able to check you just gotta check yeah and if you're using a bucket that's opaque that makes it extra hard so just keep stirring it sounded very Firefly of you keep flying well okay I was actually thinking keep swimming oh all right I think that's pretty good I'm not convinced that that's going to be the end of it I think it's going to need more this one just for me Strawberry Wine needs to be sweet that's my opinion yeah I also picked one of our homegrown strawberries and ate it fresh off the wine oh my gosh if you have the ability to grow your own strawberries I highly recommend doing so and eating them just in the garden don't even bother coming inside eating them right off the vine so good we're definitely getting there though yeah it's improving but remember we started with a great deficit like this started at 0.988 so if I had a pound of sugar to this it's still going to be like 1.030 that's something to remember too about sweetness sweetness is very relative um in this it probably won't take as much to make it taste sweet as in say a methaglin or something that's very acidic or very astringent because berries want to be sweet they just want to taste sweet already so it's easier when you have something that's very astringent or very bitter that goes you need to go past that right to bring the sweetness level into check and the acidity that is inherent in this already is going to be in your mind already for your experience with strawberries you know that they have that sweetness with that that brightness that acidic like sweet tart kind of there's like a woman going though yes yeah so we won't have to go past that that's already in here because that's part of our memory of what strawberries taste like anyway right smells exactly the same don't feel like like it's also quite young there's a lot of youngness in the flavor too um but it is improving still needs more though and sometimes this is what it takes you know you do this as much as you need to to get the sweetness level you need I I'm gonna say though I don't think I've even put a pound of sugar yet like maybe that was a pound altogether right there just to guess but my take on it is make something that you know you're gonna like or the intended Drinker is going to like yeah rather than stopping short and saying it's almost there make it the way you want it because I am guilty of making something and going oh that's good enough I might be able to do that and then and then nobody drinks it because I choose other things that I went the full spectrum on and really like them so I drink them instead even if all I'll eat was just a touch more sweetness that you can do in the glass I'm lazy if I can't just pour it in a glass and drink it something sweet too much trouble but yeah you can totally just sweeten by the glass too A lot of people like to do that that way like if you have somebody that likes really dry things and something likes really sweet things you can actually have the same bottle for some reason that noise is just sounds like wind chimes it's very tranquil rough today normally I'm irritated by it but it's come on third time or fourth time I don't even know I'm not not really counting I think we've hit the point at which you say I think it's sweet enough but I think at this point now it just needs some age because if we keep sweetening this we're going to lose the strawberry flavor and it's just going to be sugary sweet right yeah it definitely reads strawberry yep but it reads young strawberry to me it's it's got a little bit of a youngness funk to it yeah and we also know it needs to go away because we intend to pasteurize this that that's gonna help tone down that youngness sensation a little bit sometimes it does it it has I hate to say a similar effect to aging but it sort of does it like kind of mutes the flavors and Mellows them together a little bit and can sometimes replicate the effect that aging sometimes has um is it aging no it's pasteurization they're completely different processes yeah I need a little bit more I just want to make sure you know for science I feel like that gave it a little bit more roundness in the mouth I still definitely get strawberry it's definitely got some sweetness I'm gonna guess this is like a 1.024 now well let's find out we don't need to guess of course what she means is take a hydrometer reading which is what we're gonna do anyway so I have my handy dandy hydrometer handy yeah say that three times fast does it worked it's odd but it's still my guess was 1.024 see how wrong I am oh wow I was pretty far off it's 1.012 nice yeah so it's actually still medium sweet some people might consider that to be super sweet but it's actually like medium sweet but there's an example of a fruity flavor that got sweetened tasted sweeter than we thought it than I thought it actually was so so now we need to take a note yep first you need to pour this back in 1.012 so that way if you decide that you want to make this and you want it to come out like ours did you just bring it up to 1.012 so there's a little bit of math here that may or may not throw a wrench in the works as far as just go to this gravity and that's because the difference between what your ending gravity may be and what our ending gravity may be I believe if I'm doing this correctly if they had a higher ending gravity nope it's no sweetness and sweetness gravity is gravity okay never mind so what she's what she was getting at is because ours ended so dry if yours didn't end that dry you might have to change the amount of sweetness which you would relative to the amount that we did but if you aim for a 1.012 as your ending ending gravity it all balances out comes out the sugar that's why that system works all right better than we put in a pound of sugar yeah there you go welcome to everything I said Brian no no it's fine that's a good question because we get that often so that's that's cool okay so I did the thing the next thing we're going to do with this is we're going to uh pasteurize it now the way we pasteurize is we use a sous-vide immersion circulator put it in a big pot of water we are going to put a lid in airlock on this though and this is further proof that when you do it in a large vessel like this you don't lose much ethanol is that that bubbler on the airlock barely bubbles during the whole time that's going so the amount of loss is like nothing it's not even something to be worried about the biggest fear is when it comes off the heat having it go backwards and come back into the Brew but even that has not happened so yeah I really believe that 140 degree Fahrenheit is the sweet spot for the internal temperature of the Brew it works beautifully every time we've done it dozens of times at this point however I will link the video where we go into depth our pasture yeah I just gave an overview um in the description below so we're going to take care of that and we'll see you for the final tasting all right it's been sitting for a couple more days looks like it cleared out pretty nicely actually after the pasteurization there's a little bit of fine uh sediment at the bottom but we're going to do our tasting now we say final tasting but this really isn't the final tasting this is like it's young final tasting and then we have the one year where we really get a feel for what it's going to be you know we really get to know it at that point and I agree with Brian but I also disagree with Brian because shocker as many of you know I've working on the spreadsheet of Doom where I list all that information on a lovely infographic that we have on our website link in the description below but in that I have noticed that in general like the younger ones better our one year goes up from the first oh it does but it occasionally it goes down pretty drastic yeah we've had a couple that went down so and everybody let us know too so some of these I mean we actually knew this we we've had this in our experience even before we started the channel that's my sweet red wine I think is better young some things you just want to drink right away and the other is you want to let them sit for a while oh it's got a little Haze it's a little hazy but for some reason it's one of those like look from the top and it's clear because it's strawberry because it's kind of this weird piece oh it's fine to me color that that doesn't it's like a seven and a half to it doesn't disturb me that it has a slight Haze it looked like it cleared more but I don't think it actually did the aroma is pure strawberry it's like fantastic now this is 12.4 it's like candy strawberry and it's been Sweden to 1.012 with sugar we pasteurized it if you haven't been paying attention and if you missed all that just rewind and watch it again that is a lovely example of a strawberry wine now we have had commercially made strawberry wines before and they usually are a little light on the strawberry yeah a little heavy on the wine this one is heavy on the strawberry oh yeah it's like I mean it's like drinking alcoholic strawberry juice that's pretty much what it is yeah that's just this is really nice now I know in the spectrum of strawberry lovers I'm certainly higher on that Spectrum than Brian is yeah I have grown to appreciate strawberries more in the last year or so but they're not my favorite Berry they're not my favorite fruit in general I know are they a fruit or Berry whatever they're not my favorite sweet type thing that grows on trees or plants I think they're actually nice whatever they are not favorite sweet type thing that you can ferment for making Brews with how's that it's about as generic as I can be but I don't mind them in this I'm getting all the Tang that I like from like strawberry jam before he gets hate mail he knows strawberries don't grow in trees so just I know I said plants too right but you initially it was trees and then you whatever you know what I mean I'm gonna get hate mail anyway I like the Tang that I'm getting and I love strawberry preserves I I love strawberry prisoners and in that I'd get that Tang from it in here I get it but I'm also getting a little bit more of an acidity which makes it a little bit more of a complex flavor um we use pectic enzyme we did not add any tannins to this which is a little interesting the mouth feels a little on the light side but I've never seen that Strawberry Wine it should be and I'm not getting that watery sensation I mean there's the idea that we could have oaked it or something I think that would detract from the strawberry flavor strawberries are bright sweet sharp flavor yeah if you Oak it now you just muddied up the whole thing in my opinion I don't think it would work now are there other things that you can do this of course there are there's a myriad oh sure if you wanted to be more like a strawberry cream type situation lactose or something lactose vanilla those things would be good but I don't particularly like that I wanted a straight upstairs I just want Strawberry and so that's where we went and I am happy with the results and you see I'm refilling the glasses right that should tell you something that's usually a pretty good state and we sweeten this to 1.012 which I remember I thought it was more like 1.024 yeah it tastes sweeter than the number would suggest that to the berry coming forward and reading strawberry and so therefore your brain goes oh that tastes like strawberry strawberry sweet therefore this is sweet so mentally it elevated the sweetness uh perception it's not tremendously viscous but it has enough it's not watery like she said yeah but it's not as viscous as some things we've made certainly not as tannic it doesn't make my make my mouth pucker at all yeah but there's been bruise that we've done in the past where the absence of the tannins created this watery almost flat yeah this is not bad where you're like something is missing I don't get that sensation at all from this no I don't feel like anything is missing I think the acidity level makes up for the little bit of lack of tannin yeah and when I say lack of tannin it's just not strong Tanner we tend to make a lot of stronger tannins in our Brews and this is a little lower which is fine because the aforementioned like I said the way strawberry should taste they shouldn't be like you know make your mouth cringe um but the acidity level is a little bit higher and I think when you play The Balancing game between sweetness acidity and tannin if one of those goes down a little another one turning up just a touch can sometimes balance that out and we talk about that more in detail in our tannins and acids and Brews video link in the description below because it is a thing where you don't you totally sound like an infomercial Link in the description the balance is is required but it's more of a mental balance you don't want them to be dead they need to they need to balance each other somebody needs but it's not an equality it's a give and take kind of thing and some somebody needs to be The Shining Star it's a triangle but it's not necessarily an equilateral triangle there you go sometimes it's a right triangle sometimes it's an isosceles triangle that's right I remember my geometry geometry but overall it's a very pleasing experience and if someone was to hands to me and say what do you think this is my first instinct would be this is either a strawberry wine or a flat strawberry cider like a still strawberry sauce sure yeah because the alcohol level of 12.4 is not coming through this is this is sweet and fruity I'm not really getting a lot of ounces sure sure I have to agree with that even when I search for it I don't get it so I could be I could believe that this was a stilled site or something in like the 5.5 or 6 range versus 12.4 which is dangerous yes because you can drink a lot of this and not even know it I can imagine drinking this chilled on a hot summer day yeah and just getting schnockered oh yeah okay yep it'd be very easy to do this is one of those easy drinking things I don't think it pairs with food real well strawberry's just a weird I mean with like strawberry cheesecake or a dessert this might go beautifully but with a meal I couldn't do it no no it would be just too discordant it's not even because it's a dessert sweetness because it's not it's just because it's strawberry yeah they just don't go with everything you know there are some salads and maybe a cheese plate that it would be fine with yeah maybe maybe that's about it okay yeah like I want to have this with a burr pizza numbers numbers I always put a number on it okay our our rating scale if you've never seen our show before it goes from one through ten with the occasional 11 and did you put a 12 on something I did 11. I don't think I was 11. okay I don't think he did a 12. um but anyway an 11 is just like out of this world absolutely perfect a notch above the best okay a 10 is like the best you can expect to get um and then one is basically it's crap it's it's it's horrible you're gonna dump it down the drain and you're a well Robertson Danger yeah you're gonna dump it down the drain and probably forget that you ever ever made it not admit however we would show it just for The Learning Experience just for you learn from our mistakes exactly we haven't made a one yet though I think I gave a three on something anyway so that's our scoring system based off of that do you have a number I do I think I do too I've had two glasses now I think I have enough to yeah okay one two three nine point five you I figured she'd be a little bit higher than me this isn't really in my wheelhouse but it's quite good I I gave it an 8.5 I would actually love to give this something higher than a nine believe it or not because I think we just nailed it right on the head but we may have nailed it right on the head a little too well if you know what I mean and by but that I'm getting strawberry yeah there's not much else that's it it's it's pretty one note so it's a good strawberry flavor it's a lovely strawberry it's 100 strawberry it's yay strawberry but it's like a one and done once you have a glass of it you're probably not going to want another glass so I want more from life than strawberries but I don't so it's a night it's good I gave you an 8.5 because like I said it's not really my wheelhouse it's not got a lot of complexity but what it does have going for it works really really well now normally at this point is when we say what could we do to improve it I don't really know um I think between our success with this and our shocking success from the strawberry jam wine I I'm pretty happy happy with both I don't I wish we had some strawberry jam wine to compare this to because I think they're kind of similar I think it's all gone it's gone I drank it is there anybody up there I don't see anybody we don't have any left so there's nothing left to improve there's nothing left to do to make it better but um we are going to bottle this and let it sit for a year and we'll be back in a year to share with you it's real tasting see how it fares in one year did it get better did it get worse in the meantime did it turn into a grape that would be weird it would be in the meantime if there is a strawberry combo out there there that you would really like us to explore please leave that suggestion in the comments below and we'll add it to the list and as always guys thank you so much for watching and have a great day bye

Channel: City Steading Brews

Views: 255,045

Keywords: how to make strawberry wine, make strawberry wine, easy strawberry wine, strawberrry wine at home, how to make wine, strawberry wine recipe, country wine, how to make fruit wine, wine recipe, fruit wine, homemade wine, how to make strawberry wine at home, diy wine, how to make wine at home

Id: rsLepCGBXqg

Length: 72min 53sec (4373 seconds)

Published: Sun May 07 2023