Youngs Merlot kit - 6 bottle

Laner · Oct 20, 2024

I put a kit on to brew and forgot to take the OG after addding the 900g of sugar, so not sure what it should have been or what ABV is but it taste like water..

it took a while to ferment down to .990, with no activity for 3 days I decided to degas and add the finings as per instructions. 48hrs later I’ve racked into a clean DJ and it looks crystal clear, but how long should I leave before bottling, and how long to hopefully develope some actual wine flavour?

jof · Oct 20, 2024

Too late to worry about OG.
How long did the instructions say before drinking?
Personally I would double that as the absolute minimum.

Hopefully it tasted of wine when you siphoned it into bottles.

As it's only a 6 bottle kit, you have less of them available to sample at monthly intervals to find out the optimum maturation time.

Laner · Oct 20, 2024

jof said:
Too late to worry about OG.
How long did the instructions say before drinking?
Personally I would double that as the absolute minimum.

Hopefully it tasted of wine when you siphoned it into bottles.

As it's only a 6 bottle kit, you have less of them available to sample at monthly intervals to find out the optimum maturation time.

Not bottled yet, that was one of my questions. I would say very little wine taste at this point and the kit says drinkable straight after but best left 3 months

jof · Oct 20, 2024

Well depending on how it goes, I rarely got 6 full bottles from a kit.

I end up with 5.75 bottles time you leave the sediment behind.
With the part bottle going direct to the fridge for sampling.
These days I do 30 bottle wine kits and expect to get around 28 full bottles out.

You can of course mess about sharing equally between your bottles & top each up with a little water, but it's a bit of a faff.

soupdragon · Oct 20, 2024

Laner said:
I put a kit on to brew and forgot to take the OG after addding the 900g of sugar, so not sure what it should have been or what ABV is but it taste like water..

it took a while to ferment down to .990, with no activity for 3 days I decided to degas and add the finings as per instructions. 48hrs later I’ve racked into a clean DJ and it looks crystal clear, but how long should I leave before bottling, and how long to hopefully develope some actual wine flavour?

As it's finished fermenting, you've degassed it, fined it and it's cleared. There's no real reason with a cheap kit not to get it bottled. Some of the expensive kits might benefit from bulk maturation in a demijohn but I can't see any benefits with the Young's kit

Cheers Tom

Laner · Oct 21, 2024

soupdragon said:
As it's finished fermenting, you've degassed it, fined it and it's cleared. There's no real reason with a cheap kit not to get it bottled. Some of the expensive kits might benefit from bulk maturation in a demijohn but I can't see any benefits with the Young's kit

Cheers Tom

Thanks.