Strawbery Wine

On top of cider, we made some Strawberry wine before I left for NY. The strawberries at the local grocery store were buy 1 get 2 free....kind of hard to pass up the oppurtunity.

Here's our basic recipe:
30 lbs strawberries
3/4 tsp tannin
5 lb corn sugar
4 lb cane sugar (unfortunately we ran out of corn sugar)
2 gallons of water
1 pkg K1-V1116 Lalvin dry yeast

OG of Total: 1.078

We started off by adding all the ingredients to the 6.5 gallon carboy. In order to make sure your fruit (now must) is sanitized, you need to add sulfur in the form of Campden tablets. The goal is to get 50ppm of sulfur into the must. This will kill any bacteria. Since we were using 6 gallons, I needed to get 300ppm for 1 gallon in order to equal 50ppm for 6 gallons. Since my Campden tablets give 30ppm per gallon, I used tablets...this gave me my 300ppm for 1 gallon or my 50ppm for 6 gallons. After waiting 24 hours for the sulfur to dissipate, we're ready to pitch the yeast.

Using a carboy for an initial fruit wine fermentation was my first mistake. If you're going to make wine, make sure to do it in a bucket, not something with a narrow neck.

Here is why:

The fermentation was "vigorous" to say the least!! Upon filling the carboy up to about 6 gallons, I capped it with an airlock and bung. However, one thing I didn't think about was that the strawberries would float. Once the liquid underneath the strawberries started to produce CO2, the strawberries on top were pushed up the neck of the carboy. The airlock quickly plugged with strawberry gunk, and eventually exploded out of the neck, and into the air!! The carboy then spewed molten strawberry lava for the next few hours!!

However it wasn't all bad. The strawberry lava, actually tasted great! They tasted like strawberries dunked in wine, and covered with pop rocks (the CO2 they released made them fizzy).

Needless to say, we had quite the mess to clean up. However when all was said and done, the wine kept on bubbling away without spewing anymore. It's now aging in the cupboard waiting for its first rackings.