Blackberry Wine

Taste Notes:

Ingredients

Amt	Name	Type	#	%/IBU	Volume
12 lbs 4.8 oz	Fruit - Blackberry Puree (Vintner's Harvest) (0.0 SRM)	Adjunct	1	55.2 %	1.35 gal
10 lbs	Sugar, Table (Sucrose) [Boil] (1.0 SRM)	Sugar	2	44.8 %	0.76 gal
1.00 tsp	Acid Blend (Primary)	Other	3	-	-
3.0 pkg	Lalvin 71B-1122 (Lallemand - Lalvin #71B-1122) [23.66 ml]	Yeast	4	-	-
2.20 tsp	Yeast Energizer (Primary 3.0 days)	Other	5	-	-
1.10 tsp	Yeast Nutrient (Primary 3.0 days)	Other	6	-	-

Gravity and Alcohol Content

Primary and Secondary Additions

Carbonation and Storage

Notes

1/19/2021 - Brew Day - Disolved sugar in about a gallon of warm water and mixed using mix-n-stir. Added two big cans of Vintner's Harvest Blackberry puree, yeast energizer, yeast nutrient, and yeast and topped up with cool water. Used refractometer to take gravity reading, which was 26 brix. Planning on stirring daily to mix in fruit that floats to the surface for the first 4 days until we head to Mexico. Then it's on it's own.

1/20/2021 - stirred in 1 tsp of acid blend when I was mixing in fruit on top. I didn't want to add the full 3 tsp that the recipe called for because I've had issues with citric acid being too strong in my seltzers. I tasted some of the acid blend, and it seems pretty tart, so I plan to add more to tast later if needed.

2/1/2021 - Transferred - SG=.998 - Very dry and alcoholic at this point. Not getting much in the way of fruit, but the alcohol is pretty strong. I'm hoping this mellows a bit. There was a lot of fruit pulp in the bottom of the fermenter that was plugging up my auto-siphon, and I ended up leaving about a gallon worth of trub behind. I may look into nylon bags to start fermentation in and then remove that so I can squeeze the pulp out into the fermetner and lose les volume. There was way too much headspace in the 5 gallon Better Bottle, so I ended up racking again into my 3 gallon fermenter and then the rest I siphoned into a quart mason jar (used my vaccuum sealer to purge oxygen) and sealed it up. I can monitor clarity and progress with this and drink it as a sampler at some point.

3/10/2021 - Sampled - There was still a good amount of alcohol warmpth, but it was less of a burn than before. The vineious and fruit notes seem to be coming out more with a little age. At almost 16%, I'll likely dilute this a bit with RO water when bottling, along with trying to back-sweeten with some simple syrup.