Elderflower wine help

[Joe90]

Hi

I'm after a bit of advice from you guys. I have just made a 2 gallon batch of elderflower wine, I loosely used a c.j.j Berry recipe but in my own style. I have done it like this before but never had any problems:

3.5pints of elderflowers removed from stem
2 gallons of water
2 lemons
1 orange
.5lb of raisins
7lb of sugar
Teaspoon of yeast

Boiling water over flowers, added rest except yeast which went in once cooled.

My problem is the start sg reading is coming out at 1.118 ! Not sure why. Looking back at my notes last time it started at 1.102 which I know is still a bit high but gave me a nice pokey wine at about 16% and wasn't stupidly sweet.

Does anyone know where I've gone wrong and can you recommend my next move? Shall I add more water? Will that mean adding more flowers too?

Any help much appreciated.

Joe

 

[Joe90]

Ok, taken the gravity again and it's the same so have decided that I am gonna have to add water. I have been out to find some of the last of the elderflowers. Plan on boiling up a gallon, pouring over the flowers, letting it cool then add to the brew until the desired sg is reached. The reason I am adding more flowers is that I don't wanna risk watering down the flavour.

Is this the right thing to do?

Cheers.

 

[Cheshire muzz]

7lb of sugar seems a lot!

 

[Tim_Crowhurst]

As a rough guide, 1Lb sugar per gallon (or 100g per litre) becomes 5% ABV. So for a 12.5% ABV wine you want 2.5Lbs per gallon, or 250g per litre. You need to account for the sugar in any fruit used, of course.

I would add another orange and lemon, 250g of chopped raisins, and enough water/elderflowers to bring it up to 3 gallons. In 3gal of wine, the 7Lbs of sugar should give you ~11.7% ABV, and the sugar in the raisins should increase that to ~12%.

 

[Joe90]

Thanks for the advice

I had already gone ahead with changing the gravity before i read them but it seems to have worked.

I boiled up another gallon of water added most of it to another half pint of flower heads then to the mix. Annoyingly this brought it down to much to 1.080 so dissolved sugar in the remainder of the boiled water and added it until the sg reached 1.090.

I am presuming this is the optimum amount?

Not sure what went wrong there, maybe my water measuring was wrong and yes i think some of those berry recipes can have too much sugar. Oh well at least i know for next time, i've never really altered sg before just taken it so i can work out how strong it is gonna be, i presume this is the best way to do it?

Thanks again

joe

 

[Tim_Crowhurst]

For a table wine, anywhere between 1080 and 1090 is good.