I am probably being overly cautious here, because many vintners claim that the yeast doesn’t want to get started in blueberries. So most blueberry recipes call for yeast energizer. Still, many recipes for blueberry wine do not call for yeast energizer. So it may not be necessary. This recipe calls for a substitute yeast energizer by boiling 1 teaspoon of bakers yeast in about ten ounces of water for 15 minutes (to kill it) and then adding that to the must. (The amount of water you add in this process is negligible because most of the water evaporates away).
- 4 pounds blueberries (64 ounces)
- 1160 grams sugar
- 1 teaspoon boiled bakers yeast
- 1.25 tsp pectic enzyme
- 1.75 tsp acid blend
- 1 tsp yeast nutrient
- 13 cups water
- 1 crushed campden tablet
- 2 grams wine yeast (I’m trialing Premier Rouge)
The water that is added must be pure water. Don’t try to add 13 cups of water that already has the sugar added. You can, of course, add the sugar and the water together and you should. But you are trying to get one gallon of sugar water. Not 13 cups of sugar water. The addition of sugar raises the volume of the water, so if you added 13 cups of sugar water you would only really be adding about 10 cups of water.
Rationale: When you add 1160 grams of sugar to your recipe, it will be added to about 180 grams of sugar that are in the blueberries. So the total amount of sugar in your must will be about 1.34 kg. Or about 47 ounces. Now, how much water is in the must? You are adding 13 cups. The 1160 grams of sugar will raise your water levels by about 3 cups. (I tested this myself by stirring in a kg of sugar into ten ounces of simmering water, which resulted in an additional ~2.75 cups of liquid.) And there are about 7 cups of water in the blueberries. So your total water is about 23 cups, or about 1.44 gallons of liquid. So when you divide your sugar by 1.44, you get right around two pounds of sugar per gallon, or about 1.09 specific gravity. This results in a final ABV of about 11.7%, (really closer to 12% since, due to my proclivities to round, there is slightly more sugar in the must than I have accounted for), which is about perfect for a full bodied but low tannin red wine.
Please be aware that just because there are 1.44 gallons of liquid in your must, that does not mean that you will be able to recover 1.44 gallons of wine. That’s why I estimate that you will get 1.25 gallons from this batch. The reason for the loss is that when you take your bag of fermented blueberries out of the must, there is going to be some moisture in the berries. Now, you could go ahead and – with sanitized hands of course! – try to wring as much moisture out of the berries as possible. That’s physically possible but it’s not especially wise, as it defeats the point of the bag in the first place, which is to remove as much sediment as possible from the wine. But the better way – hanging the bag over the fermentation bucket until it is no longer dripping naturally – involves a significant amount of moisture loss.
A helpful hint for not having to stand in place for a half hour while the bag slowly drips: have two large bowls that the bag can sit in. Get the large volume of wine out of the bag – maybe a minute holding it over the bucket – then move the bag to one of the sanitized bowls. More liquid will seep out. After a few minutes, move it into another bowl and then pour the contents of the bowl back into the bucket. Again more liquid will seep out of the bag into the second bowl, which can then be added back to the fermentation bucket. Keep moving the bag back and forth until it is no longer dripping. If you are removing the bag at about a specific gravity of 1.03 – which you should! – you should not yet have to worry about oxidation by employing this method. Oxidation becomes a huge worry after fermentation is complete, but while fermentation is ongoing oxygen exposure is not much of a worry.
