I can't believe I haven't posted about this already. But either I haven't, or I'm failing greatly at the search engine.
August 2016 our grocery store had strawberries on sale, and I'd just listened to this song, so I bought 8 lbs of them, brought them home, and shanghaied my wife into helping me make strawberry wine.
We trimmed the tops, put all the fruits into a Ninja blender (which is awesome, just so you know), and then strained them through a 200 micron yogurt bag, to get rid of as much fibrous material as possible.
This is not the recommended method. Almost every recipe I've found said to chop them and put them directly in the bucket (or in a bag and put the bag in your bucket). But sometimes, I just gotta do things my way--and I didn't want to deal with the potential clogging issues when krausen pushes whole fruit into your airlock and blows the lid off. Our forearms were sore for days, though.
Not that I should've worried. 8lbs of strawberries only made enough for 2 gallons of wine in my 6 gallon bucket.
3 months later, I transferred to two 1-gallon jugs. It was looking awesome.
But I was worried. The wine had a strong sulfur smell, which could mean a sulfur dioxide problem--something difficult to correct for. I've never really had that problem with my meads, so I googled up a lot of solutions. And in the end, because I'm lazy, I did nothing.
3 months later (today!), I bottled. There was still a sulfur smell, but one of the solutions to that problem is introducing oxygen. So, I got out the Buon Vino wine filter that my wife got me two Christmasses ago for close to $200, and which I'd sadly never used. I filtered twice, at 2 microns and .5 microns. This not only made the wine crystal clear, but also introduced just enough oxygen to clear up the sulfur smell.
We tasted a bottle tonight--young, fresh, and unaged. It's freaking amazing, and my wife has declared it her favorite out of all of my homebrews thus far.
August 2016 our grocery store had strawberries on sale, and I'd just listened to this song, so I bought 8 lbs of them, brought them home, and shanghaied my wife into helping me make strawberry wine.
We trimmed the tops, put all the fruits into a Ninja blender (which is awesome, just so you know), and then strained them through a 200 micron yogurt bag, to get rid of as much fibrous material as possible.
This is not the recommended method. Almost every recipe I've found said to chop them and put them directly in the bucket (or in a bag and put the bag in your bucket). But sometimes, I just gotta do things my way--and I didn't want to deal with the potential clogging issues when krausen pushes whole fruit into your airlock and blows the lid off. Our forearms were sore for days, though.
Not that I should've worried. 8lbs of strawberries only made enough for 2 gallons of wine in my 6 gallon bucket.
3 months later, I transferred to two 1-gallon jugs. It was looking awesome.
But I was worried. The wine had a strong sulfur smell, which could mean a sulfur dioxide problem--something difficult to correct for. I've never really had that problem with my meads, so I googled up a lot of solutions. And in the end, because I'm lazy, I did nothing.
3 months later (today!), I bottled. There was still a sulfur smell, but one of the solutions to that problem is introducing oxygen. So, I got out the Buon Vino wine filter that my wife got me two Christmasses ago for close to $200, and which I'd sadly never used. I filtered twice, at 2 microns and .5 microns. This not only made the wine crystal clear, but also introduced just enough oxygen to clear up the sulfur smell.
We tasted a bottle tonight--young, fresh, and unaged. It's freaking amazing, and my wife has declared it her favorite out of all of my homebrews thus far.
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