Habanero/Pineapple Wine

I make a jalepeno/onion wine that is used for seasoning/marinating. The onion has much more flavor than the peppers even though I use about half & half of each. So I'll answer what I can.

2) I use fresh (OK, frozen/thawed) peppers & they do just fine. I guess dried would be OK, but may as well use fresh.

4) You're talking about habaneros & I use jalepenos, so no direct comparison. I use quite a few peppers & am surprised at how little heat the finished product has.

Robert

I've been challenged by a friend to make a Habenero/Pineapple wine. The desired end result is a cooking wine that's just a little too potent to drink without dilution, and with some sweetness and pineapple flavor retained.

I haven't found a recipe specifically for this, but I could wing-it and merge recipes for pineapple and jalapeño. I have several questions though.

2) Would fresh or dried peppers be best for this?

4) How many peppers would produce the desired level of heat? (slightly too hot to drink)

Thanks in advance for your input.

Greg G.

Not to my knowledge, but my recommendation is to add it to the secondary.

My choice is dried peppers because I have experience with them.

No, but I wee no reason not to try it.

I use ground Red Savina Habeneros to season soup, chili, spaghetti, etc. several times a week and use the beveled end of a chop stick to measure it. My goal is to get the flavor and not the heat.

In a cooking wine, you probably want the heat. For that I would suggest a straight, heavily flavored, pineapple wine with a fresh Habenero pepper (split in halves or quarters, seeds and all) in each bottle, and bottle aged for a few months. You can always add more peppers.

As an afterthought, you could accomplished the same thing by making a Pineapple/Habenero marinade for broiling only - broiling removes both the alcohol and the pepper heat.

Dick

Oh, and although I don't have my recipe in front of me, I do remember that as a base, I use either white grape juice or apple juice.

Robert

Jack Keller has a jalapeno wine recipe on his site, you might want to look at it. The version with seeds is plenty hot.

There is a winery here in BC that makes a dessert white (grape) wine with a hot pepper in the bottle, it's quite dramatic look. Not sure if they use hot peppers during fermentation as well. No issues with preserving the pepper inside - there is no air so nothing bad can happen to it.

I'd use fresh peppers.

Pp

I did something a little different for my last batch. I did a cold soak in a refrigerator in a 5 gallon bucket for about a week before I started fermentation. That REALLY boosted the flavor extraction.

Robert

Jack Keller has a jalapeno wine recipe on his site, you might want to look at it. The version with seeds is plenty hot.

There is a winery here in BC that makes a dessert white (grape) wine with a hot pepper in the bottle, it's quite dramatic look. Not sure if they use hot peppers during fermentation as well. No issues with preserving the pepper inside - there is no air so nothing bad can happen to it.

I'd use fresh peppers.

Pp

Does it have to be fermented together? Could you make a pineapple wine and a habanero wine and blend them together over a pepper in each bottle?

Perhaps it would be a good idea to slit the pepper before putting it in each bottle and agitate/top up on filling to remove air from the pepper itself?

Interesting project, do keep us updated :) Good luck!

Jim

This past fall I put Serrano peppers (sliced) under several liquids (in different jars) as a test. It's been 5 months so far and they all are in good shape. I put them under some home made malt vinegar, wine, sherry, gin, and some beer I made (about 5%). The peppers lost a little color but show no other degradation. They are not mushy (yet?). Some I pretreated by giving them a strong brine soak for 24 hours, and some I did not. The brine doesn't seem to have made any difference.

If you put peppers in the bottle, I would make a couple of suggestions:

I plan on making a Serrano pepper wine based on the Jack Keller recipe for jalapeños once I get a fermenter freed up. I'm curious to know how your wine turns out. Sounds like a tasty combination - both of those things have tons of flavor (heat aside).

--Jeff