North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["robscott@freeshell.org" <robscott@freeshell.org>]

Lisa,
Good luck with the Balckberry wine this year. I started brewing this year 
and I've got 6 carboys going now (mint champagne, rhubarb wine, red 
currant wine, aronia wine, sweet mead, and er, a "sugar wine").

First of all yes, multiply all the ingredients except the yeast. Unless 
you're making more than 5 gallons at once a single yeast package will 
suffice.

If you're using 3.5#, or even 7# fruit per gallon, you're probably looking 
at a recipe that involves adding sugar. 3.5# will probably get you enough 
flavor for a gallon and I'd more likely make an extra gallon with 7# and 
just double the sugar. A hydrometer ($5-10 tool for measuring sugar 
content -- i.e. potential alcohol) will tell you if you exceed the ammount 
of sugar the yeast can digest. At a certain point the quantity of alcohol 
kills the wine yeast and the rest of the sugar is "residual" -- the sweet 
flavor. Too much sugar will give you a Robitussin-like beverage. The easy 
way to do this is to match the sugar at the beginning to the ammount the 
yeast will digest before dying. Then you will have a dry wine, which you 
can sweeten to taste before bottling.

Also, when you rack the wine out of the bucket you don't want a lot of air 
in your "secondary fermenter" -- carboys are easiest to find in 3 5 and 6 
gallon sizes, so a 2 gallon batch might be a little awkward.

Good luck!
Rob Scott
Urbana, IL 5b/6a
Oyster Mushrooms growing out of our compost bins...

> Lisa wrote:
>
> The recipe I want to use (a sweet wine) calls for 3
> 1/2# blackberries to make 1 gallon wine.  Another
> blackberry wine recipe (dry wine) uses 7# for a 1
> gallon batch.  Can I sneak more blackberries into
> the sweet wine recipe?