I Bought A pH Meter

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I’ve used pH papers for a while, but in making red wine from cherries I’ve gone beyond their limits. I can’t read the color very well when I’m measuring dark colored wine, and for the same reason, its tough to do acid titration with an indicator. Since I didn’t have a good way to measure it, I didn’t adjust the acidity of my cherry wine. Well it’s been fermenting away, but I didn’t solve that problem I just bought a little time. During that time, I ordered a cheap pH meter and I expect it to arrive today.

There’s an old saying that if you buy cheap, you buy twice. That probably applies here, but sometimes that’s not a bad thing. Buying cheap can be a good way to learn just what you need in a tool, and help you buy intelligently later on. I understand that replacement tips for high end pH meters cost about what my meter cost, so it might be smart to just buy a new cheap meter every time the old one breaks. I don’t know yet, but right now I can measure acidity a lot more accurately than in the past. That should mean better wine, and I’m excited about that!



Pruning Gold Nugget Tomatoes

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I put a lot of thought into pruning my grapes, but I normally just let my tomatoes grow any which way they choose. I might try to tuck them into their cages every now and again, but I never thought about pruning. Now that I’m growing tomatoes for wine, I’m starting to wonder if some of the principles behind grape pruning would apply to tomatoes. If one leaf shades another on a grape vine, then I would want to pull one of those leaves because a leaf in the shade isn’t doing much in the way of photosynthesis. Wouldn’t that be just as true for tomatoes? Also, tomatoes have a way of sending branches off in every direction. Maybe trimming off the ones growing into the dirt would keep the fruit cleaner? Maybe it would reduce insect problems?


Pointing at a low branch that is sloping downward. This is the sort of pruning cut I'll be making.


In this photo, I’m about to prune a low branch that is sloping toward the ground. This is the sort of pruning cut I’ll be making this year. The tomatoes have grown taller and bushier since 6/21/07, when I took the above photo, but I’m going to start slowly with my pruning. If this goes well, I may try pruning tomatoes more like grape vines. I don’t know if I’ll really go that far, but if I do, I’ll get there by taking baby steps.



Cherry Mead Recipe

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Country wine, second wine, and melomel

Cherry mead, often called “cherry melomel”, is usually made like a country wine. You make a country wine with small amount of fruit, 2-6 lb, per gallon of water (250-750 g/L) with enough sugar to bring the alcohol up to 12% and acid to balance. You would do something similar to make a conventional cherry mead, but use honey instead of sugar. Also fruit would be at the low end of the range. I’m not going to do that.

After pressing a conventional wine, the pressed fruit (called “pomace”) often has some color, flavor, and other “goodies” left in it. By adding water, sugar, and acid, you can make a light bodied enjoyable wine. That’s the way I’m going to make cherry mead.

How much honey? How much water?

The more water you use, the less impact the fruit will have. In deciding exactly how much, consider the amount of wine. You shouldn’t make more second wine than original wine, and maybe only half as much. Since I estimate three gallons of finished cherry wine, that leaves a 1.5-3 gallon range for my cherry mead. I decided on the high end of that range because fruit meads are often made with less fruit than comparable wines. The amount of honey depends on your alcohol target.

I’m aiming for a low alcohol (8-9% ABV) fruit mead, because I think this would suit a second wine better. If you prefer a higher alcohol content, then you could use more honey or less water. Using 2.5 gallons (9.5 liters) of water, for example, would raise the potential alcohol to 11% or so. In these calculations, I’m assuming no contribution from the pomace. There will probably be some sugar, though, so the actual amount of alcohol will be a little higher. To get more precise control over the alcohol, you could place the pomace in a clean bucket, mix up the other ingredients, then take a gravity reading. You could then nudge it up or down, to your target gravity, by adding honey or water. Such precise control wasn’t important to me, so I skipped that step.

Ingredients

Pomace from cherry wine
3 gallons (11 liters) water
6 lb (2.7 kg) honey
1 tsp tannin

Procedure

1) Place the pomace in a clean fermenter.

2) Heat one gallon of water to a boil, take off heat, and dissolve honey. Cool in a water bath.

3) Measure out another gallon of water. Use a little bit to dissolve the tannin and add it to the fermenter. Use some more to rinse out the honey container, to get the honey that didn’t pour out, and add it to the fermenter.

4) Add one gallon of water, plus any unused water from step 3, to the fermenter. At this point, you should have used three gallons of water including one gallon to dissolve the honey in step 2. The point here is to use three gallons (11 liters), so the exact amount in each step isn’t important. Just keep track.

4) Add the honey-water mixture to the fermenter when cooled (less than 100 Fahrenheit or 40 Celsius).

There’s plenty of yeast in the pomace, so no need to pitch any more. I noticed signs of fermentation the same day. The CO2 from fermentation will push the fruit to the top. This is called a cap, and you need to stir it in every day. If you’ve every heard a winemaker talk about “punching down the cap,” this is what he was talking about.

The cherry wine is still going, the cherry mead just got started, now it’s time to think about raspberries!

Cherry Wine Recipe: Pressed

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I pressed the cherry wine last night. I got just under three gallons of free run, and another half gallon or so after pressing.


Free run cherry wine in a carboy. The wine is dark red with a layer of pink foam that comes just up to the '3' mark. These marks indicate gallons, and the one above it looks like a '1' but is actually '4' with some of the ink worn off.


The photo is from last night and shows the free run wine in a carboy. It’s foamy because I just poured it in through a funnel, and it’s still fermenting. You can see the foam comes up to the 3-gallon mark (the next mark is a “4” but looks like a “1” because some of the ink has worn off). Now that I’ve pressed, and the cherry wine is fermenting under an airlock, I’ll start on the cherry mead!

Still No Supply Squeeze From Colony Collapse Disorder

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My cherry wine is fermenting nicely. I plan to press it soon, and use the pomace to make a cherry mead. The good price on the cherries worked out really well, but it did leave me with a dilemma about the honey. Use the wildflower that I have? It would be much better in the beer-like mead that I’m planning. Order more wildflower, so I can use it anyway? That would mean I couldn’t try something new. My brilliant plan was to pop over to Costco. They’re selling clover honey in 6 lb cartons for $7.99. That’s a little higher than I remember it from last year, but at $1.33/lb it’s still a good price. As an aside, it means that there’s no sign of a spike in honey prices as a result of Colony Collapse Disorder. The season isn’t over yet, of course, and we don’t really know how CCD will play out, but I wrote back in May that I didn’t expect a honey supply squeeze. With no new information out since then, I’m still an optimist.

Cherry Wine Recipe

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I made the case for white wine from cherries a while back, but when I made cherry wine yesterday it was a red. I bought 43 or so pounds of Bing Cherries, and after setting aside 4.5 lb for cherry liqueur, I had about 38 lb left for wine. They’re dark skinned cherries with red flesh, so they wouldn’t do for a white. Here’s how I started my red:

Ingredients:

38 lb (about 17 kg) Bing Cherries
3.5 lb (1.6 kg) sugar
3 quarts (2.8 liters) water
3 tsp pectic enzyme (approximately 7 g)
sulfite to 50 ppm (equivalent to 3 campden tablets)
0.5 tsp tannin (about a gram)
Premier Cuvee yeast

Cherry crush

I destemmed, sorted, and nibbled, by hand. It took a while, but Marsha and I did it together and that made it fun. The result: seven gallons of destemmed cherries ready to crush. An ordinary grape crusher would probably work, though you would need to adjust the rollers to accommodate the cherry pits. I used an older method …

Crushing cherries in a chest cooler with bare feet

Crushing the cherries with my bare feet worked well. I could feel the pits but they didn’t hurt, and I got through all the cherries quickly. Last year, I tried a potato masher. It was too flimsy, so I ended up crushing each cherry between my thumb and forefinger. I don’t recommend it. Anyway, at this point I added sulfite and pectic enzyme. Now I had to add water, sugar, and possibly acid to prepare the crushed cherries for fermentation.

Dilute with water?

Most traditional cherry wine recipes dilute with water. For every gallon of finished wine, you might use four to six pounds of fruit (500 to 750 g/L). That can be tempting on economic grounds alone. Even though I got a good deal on these cherries, an undiluted wine would cost between $5 and $6 per bottle, just in cherries. That’s a great price for commercial wine at retail, but high for homemade wine. In the end I decided that I really wanted to stay as close to conventional red wine as I could, so I did add water, but only a tad more than needed to dissolve the sugar.

Adjusting the sugar

And I did need to add sugar. To know how much, I first had to determine how much was in the cherries. I needed a clear sample of the juice, and that was harder to get than you might think. First I scooped a bunch of crushed cherries+juice through a strainer, and I measured the SG as 1.070. That’s high for cherry juice. What’s happening is that dissolved solids in the juice make it thicker, and that will push the SG higher, so I ran this juice through a coffee filter.

Filtering cherry juice with a funnel and a coffee filterThe filter quickly clogged and when I tried to get it going again, I tore it. I did better the second time. I was patient (didn’t know I had it in me!) and I changed the filter every time it clogged. It still took a long time, over an hour, but I got 0.5 cup (about 120 ml) of filtered juice with an SG of 1.065. I suspect that there’s less sugar than that, but I decided to use that number and target an SG of 1.090. If the sugar was indeed low, my actual SG would be a little less, but anything down to 1.075 would be ok with me. I created a spreadsheet to help me with sugar and acid additions, and after plugging in what I know (SG = 1.065), what I think (estimated liquid volume of the cherry juice of about 2 gallons), and what I’m aiming for (target SG = 1.090), I got back a suggestion to dissolve 3.5 lb of sugar in 3 quarts of water (roughly 1.6 kg sugar and 2.8 liters water).

Pitching the yeast now and adjusting the acid later

The dominant acid in cherries is malic, and Ben Rotter reports that Bing cherry juice often analyzes to 4.7 g/L, as malic. I have a simple acid test kit, but no pH meter. That makes measuring the TA of red juice difficult, so I’ve decided to wait until the wine has fermented out to adjust the acid.

The last step is to pitch the yeast. I had rehydrated it by pouring the yeast packet into 0.25 cups of warm water. After five minutes I added 0.25 cups of cherry juice. I added the tannin and another 0.25 cups cherry juice after it started foaming (about an hour), and I pitched it into the fermenter two hours later. Bottling is still a year or two a way, but I’m excited already!


Update 7/31/07: Sugar and acid

I have since bought a pH meter, and measured the acidity of my cherry wine. It was too high, but so was the pH and that made me reluctant deal with the problem by neutralizing some of the acid. So I’ve decided to balance the acidity by sweetening the wine. I think the high acidity is part of buying cherries at the grocery store; the cherries were just a little under ripe. I’m growing my own cherries, and once my bonsai orchard is producing I’ll have nice ripe fruit that’s not so acidic. In the meantime, I’ll try a different yeast: 71B by Lalvin. It metabolizes malic acid, and that should make it especially suitable for cherry wine.

Update 5/25/2009: Bottled!

Some have told me that it can’t be done, and it is difficult. But you can make a conventional red wine from cherries! It’s an enjoyable red wine and I would recommend it to anyone interested in this approach.

A good deal on cherries and a honey varietal dilemma

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An opportunity needs to be siezed

Safeway is having a sale, cherries for $1.49/lb, and that got me thinking about honey varietals. Let me back up a little. About this time last year, I bought 40 lb of cherries, some from Safeway, and made cherry wine. After I pressed the wine, I made cherry mead in the same way you might make a “second wine.” You make a second wine by adding water, sugar, and acid to the pomace of a wine (so far as I know, nobody calls it the “first wine”). I liked the idea of getting as much use as possible out of the cherries, and decided to use honey instead of sugar. I planned to do the same thing this year, so I’ve been watching for sales on cherries. Now that the sale is on, I realized I was down to my last gallon, give or take, of wildflower honey.

A dilemma needs to be resolved

I didn’t want to use the last of it for the cherry mead (often called “cherry melomel”). Oh, it would make a fine cherry mead, but I thought it would be better for my beer-like mead. Why? It’s dark and even seems a little malty to me, so I think it would be a really good match. The problem is that I’ve got to move fast on the cherries; I’ll probably only get such a good price this week, and a quick check of my schedule says that this Friday would be the best day to buy the cherries and make the wine. Because I’m making a cherry mead from the pomace, I want to press the cherry wine early – three days into fermentation. After all, there’s got to be something left in them for the mead. That means I need another gallon or so of honey on Monday. If I use the wildflower honey that I’ve got, then I’ll either need to use a different honey for the beer-like mead or order another five gallons of the wildflower. There’s nothing wrong with that – I like the honey, but I was hoping to try a different kind. Orange Blossom maybe.

Tomato Wine: Gold Nugget tomato’s first flower

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I noticed the first flower among my gold nugget tomatoes a few days ago, and that marks another milestone on the path toward tomato wine.


A single five pointed yellow flower, the only one of its cluster that is blooming, stands out from the green foliage of this Gold Nugget tomato - 6/21/07


I took this photo on 6/21/07, and since then one or two other flowers have bloomed. These tomatoes are a lot more patient than I am. I’ve done my part. I tended them as seedlings, I transplanted them, and now its up to them. They’ve got flowers to open. They’ve got fruit to ripen! What are they waiting for?