It’s time to use the plums before they all fall from the tree and spoil. A lot of our plums are already splitting open on the tree from being ripe and having all the moisture we’ve been getting the past couple weeks. I am making the same recipe I made last year for plum wine because it turned out really well. The only differences this time is that I am going to use my steam juicer to get the juice from all the plums instead of mashing them in the primary, and I am using a different kind of yeast.
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Process:
Washed and halved all of the plums, removing the stems and pits. I then added all the fruit to my steam juicer, filling it all the way to the top with only 15 lbs of the plums. I started heating the water and let it juice for about 30 minutes before adding in the remaining 5 lbs of plums (I gave it time for the plums in the steam juicer to cook down a bit, giving me more room for the remaining plums.) I ended up juicing the plums for 2 hours, twice as long as I expected. The skins and pulp were clogging the small holes and slowing the juice from dripping through. I mixed the pulp a few times and tried to scrape it off the sides and bottom to let more juice through. At the end, I came away with 1.75 gallons of juice with an OG of about 1.040.
I cool water until I reached 4 gallons, and added in my sugar to reach a OG of 1.124. I then measured the acidity of the wine. Initial TA was 0.35%, so I added 2 Tbsp of acid blend to raise the TA to 0.57% (a TA of 0.60% is recommended for fruit wines.) I added the grape tanning, pectic enzyme, and yeast nutrient. I am again skipping Campden tablets as I believe the steam juicing process kills any wild yeast and bacteria and pasteurizes the juice. When the must reached 85 F, I pitched in my dry yeast and sealed the bucket with an airlock.
9-21-10: Put into primary bucket, OG measured at 1.124.
10-2-10: Racked to 5-gallon carboy. SG measured at 1.040.
10-17-10: Racked the wine again, there was about three inches of sediment and yeast that had settled to the bottom of the carboy. SG measured at 1.032.
4-14-11: Bottled into 37 12-ounce bottles.
Tags: plum, plum wine, recipe, steam juicer, wine
I like the idea of using a steam juicer. Alcohol content is higher than I would have expected; how did you decide on your target gravity?
Erroll
Erroll,
The steam juicer is new to me but I do like using it. I’ve made a few batches of wine with it this Summer (rhubarb, blackberry, blueberry, plum) but none of them are ready to drink yet, so the results are still unknown. I expect it will turn out to be fine, though I have read that sometimes the wine can have the flavor of cooked fruit instead of fresh fruit.
I made a batch of plum wine the traditional way (sans juicer) last year, and the OG I happened to achieve on that recipe was 1.125. You can see that recipe here http://beer.sterr-bros.com/2009/09/23/plum-wine/ That batch of plum wine turned out rather nicely compared to the couple other wines I had made up to that point (cherry and pear), and the few bottles I still have left are delicious. So, I decided to aim for the same recipe and gravity this time around as well.
As a side note, I’m using Italian plums.
Delicious, thank you for the tips.