Secondary Fermentation

This weekend, I set up shop in my dorm room to rack (or siphon) my two gallon batch of apple-pear wine into two smaller experimental batches and check on its progress. I meant to do this before leaving for spring break at the end of February...

Looking a little oxidized...

I washed and sanitized everything in my dorm bathroom, choosing inefficiency over the hassle of packing my equipment to drive over to another residence hall. Granted, I ended up making my room smell like a speakeasy for a few hours from the wine I spilled on my floor.

I hit my target ABV (alcohol by volume) of about 13 - 14%. After spitting out two mugs worth of yeasty wine while trying to create capillary action on my makeshift tube system, I can attest that it's probably much closer to 14%. Strong stuff!

SG (starting gravity) 1.100

FG (final gravity)      0.990

It's still a young wine, so I wasn't expecting it to taste all that great. I took note of the dark oxidization that has occurred (the apple juice I used was dark to begin with), and the cloudiness (probably from the pectin in the unfiltered pear nectar, which I can deal with later). I threw in some different herbs and spices to create the following two, one-gallon experimental batches:

Pear Orange Spice on the left, Pear Ginger Hawthorne on the right.

~ Pear Ginger-Hawthorn Berry (two tea bags of ginger tea, and 4 TB of dried hawthorn berries)

~ Pear Orange-Spice (two tea bags of black tea, 2 TB of dried orange peel, 2 cinnamon sticks, 8 cloves, 2 star anise)

            

 

I don't expect fermentation to restart, since all available sugars have been consumed by the yeast, but this is the time for the flavorings to infuse and allow the wine to bulk age before bottling in a few weeks. I might grate a few pears and toss them into the wine to see if I can get more pear flavor, and it might be a good idea to back sweeten one or both of them.  

We shall see...