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Juice Concentrate?

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    • #4557
      Fire_Capt
      Participant

      Ok Guys and Gals, We are fresh at this new hobby of ours, So here is the question of the day…(Back Ground) we have made sugar shine, Rum, and Whiskey thus far. Sugar shine was basically sugar ,water and yeast. If the yeast turn the sugars into alcohol and the more sugar we added made it sweeter! Ok so what if you were to use a large amount of Juice Concentrate, lets say Pineapple for this question. and then we were looking at the frozen Hawaiian Sun Concentrates? Would the flavor be lost? would adding more sugar help? could you put crushed pineapples in the mash? or would they mold and ruin the mash?
      We look Forward you comments and Help….
      Thanks,
      Fire_Capt

    • #4635
      Spawnman
      Participant

      I am not an expert but that sounds like a good recipe to try. I would think the fruit would be fine as long as the yeast is working. I would ad sugar to the mash if I where you. Maybe someone else can chime in on this as well. Good luck! Let us know how it turns out!

    • #4639
      Fire_Capt
      Participant

      Spawn,
      Well NO one else responded…So my son and I did it anyway…Just so happens Hawaiian Sun Juice Concentrate was on sale… We used 40 cans of Passion Orange Concentrate, 10 Lbs of C&H White sugar, 2 Lbs of C&H Brown Sugar, 3 packets of bread yeast. There is a total of 7 gallons in the bucket (1.5 was used to melt the sugar). Its in a controlled temp room at 78 degrees. The Yeast is doing its thing and its bubbling. The room smells AWESOME…Today is day 3 of fermentation. I will keep you posted…
      Fire_Capt

    • #4640
      Spawnman
      Participant

      40 cans seems like allot for a total of 7 gallons in a bucket including water. What is C&H sugar? I just use regular table sugar from the store. Keep me posted I might want to try this one!

    • #4641
      Fire_Capt
      Participant

      Well we thought we needed to keep it more on the heavy side rather and watered down.. On the can it says to mix 3 cans of water with one can of concentrate. From what we have read when using fruit your supposed to just puree it. Hell we have no idea what we are doing, but it sounded like a great experiment. That’s was we held back on the water.
      The sugar brand was C&H Sugar (its a Cain sugar) and is readily available here on the west coast.

    • #4644
      JimmySutton
      Keymaster

      Did you take a gravity reading of the mash?

      Distilling will remove quite a bit of the fruit flavor– but you will retain a bit of it…and usually you get a bit on the nose.

      Here is my standard fruit brandy recipe
      for fruit: First, select the best, ripest fruit. The better the fruit, the better the wine, the better the brandy. Cut out any brown spots or other discoloration. If you wouldn’t eat it, don’t ferment it.

      It takes about seven pounds of cleaned fruit to make a gallon of puree. I cut my fruit up into chunks and fill my Ninja blender up, and puree it.

      I’ll give you this recipe in ratios so you can make as much or as little as you want.The recipe is one part fruit puree to two parts water and 2.5 pounds of cane sugar per gallon of mash. I have eight gallon fermenters and do six in each. I put two gallons of fruit puree, add 12.5 pounds of sugar and stir it in, then get a gallon of water up to 200°F and stir it in until all sugar is dissolved and let it set for 30 minutes. Then I top it up to six gallons with cool water. I let it cool down to 80°F and pitch my yeast.

      I use Lalvin K1-V1116 for fruits. I don’t use yeast nutrients. The fermentation goes fourteen days and gives you an ABV of about 16- 18%. When the fermentation is finished, let it settle for a week and siphon it off into clean, sanitized fermenters and let it settle for a month, siphon it off, then another month and siphon. Now your wine is perfectly or almost perfectly clarified and ready to run.

      I do twelve gallon batches, which ends up being about ten gallons of wine. I reserve a gallon and a half of the wine and run the rest. I get about a gallon and a half of 120- 140 proof booze from that. I blend all of the booze together in a carboy and age it with un-toasted white oak chips for two to three months.

      Then I siphon off the reserved wine one last time and blend it with the aged booze. Then I drink it. Yes, that is about five to six months total time from blender to belly. It’s well worth it, though. You can cut the time down by settling for just a week and running it. But you do have to settle the wine you reserve before you blend it, because it will end up with yeast sediment on the bottom of the bottles. This will make it taste like shit over time. And you don’t have to blend it. You can just run the whole batch of wine and have straight booze if you want. But if you do the long process, you’ll be blown away by the flavor.

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