I’m getting a bit more technical with the wine making this year. At first I went for the minimalist approach (mash it up, ferment it, drink it) but one batch of last year’s rhubarb brew did have quite a strong yeasty aftertaste – the result of sitting too long on the ‘must’ (the sediment at the bottom of the fermentation jar. So this year I am doing things more by the book, and racking the wine off into a clean demijohn after the first few weeks fermentation. I’m also getting to grips with how to use the hydrometer – in my innocence the first year I thought you just dropped it in and it told you how alcoholic the wine was. But no, apparantly I would need to grovel to the analysts in the university chemistry dept to find that out; all the hydrometer does is measure how much sugar there is in the wine, and therefore what the potential alcohol content is once it is all fermented. So you need to take a reading at the start and at the end of fermentation and work out the difference. So, in June, when I started this batch off, the specific gravity (SG) reading was 1.09, which could give a potential alcohol content of 11.8%. Now the reading has gone down to 1.01 which still has potential for 1.3% alcohol – and means it has already reached a strength of 10.5% (but is still rather sweet). Hopefully it will now keep on fermenting for a few more weeks to use up the rest of the sugar.
Coastal Permaculture 