ChrisinCowiche
Posts: 7857
Joined: 12/16/2009 From: Cowiche, WA Status: offline
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Well, cherry season arrived quickly this year, my buddy's Bings got some mold damage, so I told them if they got rejected by the processors even, they probably would not want the moldy wine they'd produce either, but Rainiers did well, so we nixed dark red cherries and just went with Rainiers. Not sure how the harvest and sorting worked exactly , but I picked up 18 15 pound boxes, 270 pounds total, a week ago Thursday evening in an undisclosed location. Beautiful fruit labeled Cat 1's, we think there might be a higher grade, because there was some bruising and damaged fruit but not much. My destemming crew got busy last Friday morning, and I tried a few methods of manually crushing before settling on using a small Cuisinart food processor. Lots of small 1 pound or so batches, but I added a cup or so of sugar/sodium metabisulfite /peptic enzyme stew to each batch for preservation and pulp breakdown without losing Brix. Fruit was right at 21 Brix (pretty damn sweet), and this is what the finished mash/must maintained. Pits stayed with the mash and a few may have broken, but flavor does not seem at all affected. Took us about 4 hours to get it all processed and another 4 hours cleaning the sticky off the kitchen sink, countertop, floors, and walls. Ended up with around 35 gallons of cherry mash, nice bright yellow/gold color of cherry flesh with flecks of red from the skins. I threw the yeast on last Saturday and things took a while to get rolling. First one out of seven carboys that I used as my "mother" batch to eventually get the others rolling. This was this past Tuesday, the pink from the red parts of the skins created a lovely shade of peach/pink. All the goop and pits seemed like it was hindering fermentation, mostly floating on top, some sinking, some mixing with juice, so yesterday I started siphoning off free juice, which has created some interesting different shaded batches, all in varying stages of fermentation, but the clarified batches are rolling along pretty fastly as of this morning. I decanted more since this photo and now have about 22 gallons of semi-clear must/wine, and probably will get another 5 gallons or so when I squeeze off the rest of the pumice. This stuff is too goopy for a wine press, so I got some nylon mesh and sieve at the brewer supply today to do more separation tonight. Not sure what this stuff will taste like, so far lots of sweet cherry juice and yeast flavors in sampling/siphoning, but I'm pretty happy with the color, and I'll deal with sugar levels later when I've got a dry wine isolated and clear. Should be around 12-13% alcohol and maybe 10-11 cases of wine. Not sure what size or style bottles to use, but that's the friend/customer's call, I need to let him know that I guess.
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