Pea wine question

[devexwarrior]

What's the dfference between Pea Wine and Roast Beef?

Anyone can roast beef!


Taxi for one, please

[mib]

See the problem I seem to be having in anything that's none beer making is the Swmbo reckons it's too sweet where as I just get a dry mouth and instant heartburn/indegestion. Will running an acid test cure this maybe ?

Cheers for the formula old bloke, so in theory if my predicted fg was 0.998 and I was aiming for 1.080 SG I could work out the sugar required by predicting the abv but then fruit has sugars so dunno if what I'm suggesting will work

Sorry I didn't get back to you on this. I've been having hardware issues...

I would doubt that acid balance is your issue. Getting acidity right will turn an OK wine into a great wine. It won't turn a rubbish wine into an OK one. Acidity does matter as you get to higher alcohol levels.

Tbh it sounds to me like way too much alcohol. Some people taste alcohol as sweet, others as very dry/burning. Could also be excessive tannins which is common for pulp fermentations. Possibly both.

If you want to convince yourself that you can make drinkable wine then try this (not my recipe, blatantly stolen from elsewhere):
1l grape juice
1l apple juice
700g sugar
1 tsp citric
Nutrient and yeast.
Make up to 4l. Top up with water once initial fermentation had calmed down. Rack, as campden, bottle add normal.
Should be really quite drinkable within a month and delicious after a little aging.

That was the first non kit wine I made that I thought was drinkable. I've subsequently learnt where I went wrong before that, by using this as a base.

Obviously my approach to wine differs to oldbloke's. I'm rather obsessive about measuring everything so that I can reproduce a wine precisely later. There's nothing wrong with the bung it all in approach, it's just not for me.

I promised an explanation of how to get your must to the right starting gravity. This is not quite correct, but is close enough for the sort of gravities we care about.

First off, get a refractometer. It is so much easier. Failing that, use your hydrometer and convert the gravity into brix. You may have to filter solids out of your sample to get an accurate gravity reading with a hydrometer. To convert gravity to brix you simply divide the fractional part of the gravity by 4. So 1.080 would be 20 brix. Brix is the percentage of sugar, so 1kg of must at 20 brix contains 200g sugar and 800g of other stuff.

An example:
We want 4l of must (we'll top up with sugar syrup later)
Add all the ingredients and top up with water to 3l (any convenient volume is good here).
Measure the sugar content. It comes out at 15 brix.
We're going to add another 1l of water so we need to correct for that.
Take the reading, multiply by the starting volume and divide by the finishing volume.
15x3/4 = 11.25
So once we get to 4l we'll have 11.25 percent sugar or 450g of sugar.
We want 800g (20 brix or 200gx4), so need to add 350g.
So take that 350g of sugar, cover with boiling water and top up to 1l with cold water.
Add to the must, and you're done.

Easy really.

Matthew