Banana Wine advice

Don't need to boil the raisons, they are nearly pure sugar. The bananas are boiled to extract the oils juice and sugars from them, the pulp is usually just discarded. The raisons on the other hand you want to ferment in the primary because it is during fermentation that sugar and flavors are extracted from them. A little hint with the raison. Get a meat grinder that you use solely for crushing fruit pulp. (careful not crush seeds)

oops....too late...I already boiled them and discarded all the pulp, and the yeast has been pitched. Should I throw a handful of raisins into the primary? How much will this increase SG?

Lesley -- If you had read more than just a couple of posts on this newsgroup, you would know that the best source for recipes like this (at least on the web) is Jack Keller's site:

It seems as though about every third post on this group recently is along the lines of "does anyone have a recipe for ____ wine ?" The responses invariably suggest Jack's site.

Jack lists at least 4 recipes for banana wine, and quite a few more for combinations of bananas and other fruits. Check there first. If you can't find what you need there (or something pretty close to it), you're welcome to post the request. Jack's pretty hard to stump, though. If you've heard of it, he's probably tried making wine from it, or has a recipe from someone else who has.

Doug

Well the advice is too late now, but in the future if you made the same mistake, yeah throw in a small amount of chopped raison. It is a bit late now though, sorry. I am not on top of the newsgroups even when I am around.

I havent' been around in a few years.

Yeah the skins are generally full of mold spores. Some mold spores and such can survive boiling, and you might say OK then what would prevent them from multiplying in the resultant juice? Well all I can say is that the solid peels might be just enough to protect the molds long enough for your sulfite to evaporate, where as the boiled juice provides no such protection from the sulpher. That last sentence was conjecture, but I haven't had any problems with my banana wines and I have even had one bottle win a ribbon. Ok to extract the juice with boiling and even desired as a great deal of flavour is in those peels, but the added starch and molds and other nastiness I wouldn't want to entertain by leaving the peels in the must.