I made it in to Winemakers today, and friendly, pretty Debbie asked as soon as I walked in, “Oh, you’re here for your air locks and bungs?”

Someone reads my blog – thanks Bob!

So I picked up a few extra airlocks, bungs and a couple more carboys. Recently Debbie pointed out to me that the “Mexican” carboys, although stouter in shape, have about a half cup less volume than the Italian ones. That is handy for wines that you don’t want to top up very much, so I purchased one of those as well as another 19 litre carboy.

Unfortunately, one of the products I was hoping to get was not in stock – the large size “Hops Boiling” bags.

Basically the same as cheesecloth, but better. At least for my use. What I like about the large size is that it fits tightly around the top of a plastic pail, and then the rest of the “bag” sits inside the pail. This means that when I have a fruit wine like blueberry, I can pour one pail into the other that’s been fitted with the large size hops boiling bag. It catches all the larger size bits of fruit while allowing the juice to pass – and then after, I get in a good wrist workout by slowly squeezing the fruit that is left in the bag, pressing the remaining juice right out of it.

That was my plan for this evening with the blueberry wine that I started last week. I headed over to the grocery store and picked up some cheesecloth, figuring I could rig something up from that, but truly it is not wide enough to work well.

So, I thought I just try racking with the syphon tube. That wen’t “o.k” for awhile, but then bits of blueberry would get stuck in the tube, and it became a pain to try to massage and caress the tube in order to get the flow started again.

After about 30 minutes (yes, the flow was quite slow), and the pail was about a quarter full, I decided to try my funnel with the screen filter. That didn’t work so well, as the filter is so fine, that it got clogged.

So then I used a large hunk of cheesecloth inside the funnel, and poured from the pail into that. That worked, kind of. I finally got all the blueberry wine into the carboy, with of course, some berry pieces in there as well. But that’s ok.

What did surprise me though was the amount of wine I actually had. If you’ve been following my blog, last week when I started this, I used 12 1/2 lbs. of blueberries, which took up quite a bit of space in the pail.

I estimated I’d have to add at least half a gallon, perhaps even a full gallon of water later to bring the total amount of liquid to five gallons.

Not so. The amount of pulp that I took out was relatively small to the amount of space those blueberries took up in the first place. I’m estimating there’s about 1.5 litres of headspace right now in the carboy – which I’m not topping up just yet as the Specific Gravity was a bit higher than I had thought it would be at 1.030 – so I want room for the continued fermentation that I expect.

Anyhow, it was all a bit of a mess, with splashes here and there, a funnel to clean, some kitchen utensils that I also used to press the berries, and two pails later. It also took me longer than I expected so I’ll leave the racking of the blackberry and black currant wines until tomorrow.

I did however rack a 4 week Zinfandel kit, that I’ll bottle in the next few days. I’m going to set aside some bottles for longer ageing so I also added a 1/4 teaspoon of sulphite to that after it was racked. I’ll probably bottle that in about two or three days.

Random Posts

• Let’s Have A Little Controversy
• I’m Impressed!
• Blueberry Follow Up
• Mmmm – Garlic Wine For Dinner
• Beer Time

No Responses to “What A Mess”