For fruit with seeds/pits, halve them and remove the seeds/pits and put the fruit in your fermenter (bucket, refer back to the equipment post) to ferment. This is what is called fermenting on the fruit. There are multiple ways to prepare your fruit for fermentation, some are to keep it intact, juice it, freeze it, or heat it. Preparing your FruitĪfter you’ve cleaned your fruit, if you haven’t already thought about it, you can decide how you want to ferment it. I would not use vinegar to clean your equipment, though, because it may get trapped in tiny crevices or holes in the surface of your equipment and infect your wine that way. Make sure to rinse the fruit really well with clean water after soaking it in the vinegar, though, especially to get any clinging dirt off. I wouldn’t usually use vinegar anywhere near winemaking because the acetic acid in vinegar can infect your wine, but since the vinegar is diluted in water, doesn’t get sudsy, cleans dirt and kills bugs on fruit, and most importantly you’re going to be treating the fruit with potassium metabisulphite (see additives post), I have to recommend water and vinegar as a cleaning option for fresh fruit. The last time I made fresh fruit wine, peach, I used a water-vinegar solution of three parts water to one part vinegar, and let the peaches soak in it for fifteen minutes, moving them around to knock the dirt and any bugs off, then rinsed the peaches well with clean water. To clean the fruit, I would recommend a non-soap option since suds can be hard to rinse off, and I don’t think you want soapy wine. I wish we had taken the stems off prior to freezing!īefore cleaning, make sure you’ve gotten any stems, twigs, and leaves off your fruit. Nine pounds of frozen elderberries being stemmed. If you are using fresh fruit, especially fruit that has been picked recently, it most likely has dirt, pollen, and possibly bugs on it. In your search for a recipe you may find that there are different ways to prepare your fruit for fermenting, but before I can discuss that, I must talk about cleaning, again. But, you can always turn to the internet to find a recipe, many of which have a more “natural” approach, like using lemons and raisins for acid and tannin (see additives post). Personally, I like the “Winemaker’s Recipe Handbook” because it has many one gallon recipes to choose from, which are easily multiplied to be a larger batch, and there is a list of ingredients, (fruit, water, sugar, and additives) along with comprehensive instructions of what to do from start to finish. A recipe is a good guideline for how much fruit, water, sugar, and other additives you’ll need at least per gallon, if not for your exact batch size. With the fruit you want to ferment in mind, I recommend finding a recipe of that fruit wine. This part was supposed to include additives and testing, but I don’t want this to be too long winded, so those will be in their own part. So, you have figured out how much wine you want to make, and have gathered the necessary equipment to start making a batch, where do you go from here? In this part of the fruit winemaking guide, I will be talking about how to get your fruit ready for fermentation.
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