high TA

You can cold-stabilize without adding anything and see what happens. Why is the TA so high? Did you add too much tartaric acid? If so, you could add some potassium carbonate or potassium bicarbonate to lower the TA. I don't know much about the natural acids in blackberries, so I can't tell you what to do if the TA is high from acids other than tartaric. I'm sure someone else knows more.

Good luck,

John

Alex, First off- if it tastes good to you then dont rush to make any corrections. That having been said- did you degas the sample before making the test? This is necessary to get a correct value. Next- verify that the numbers that you got are repeatable and you are sure of the amounts of each item added. Ex- my test requires 15 ml of wine/must, and then 2-3 drops of indicator. Rinse the syringe and then add 10 ml of Sodium Hydroxide to the syringe. Add the Sodium Hydroxide until the color change is permanent. (Note- this can be very difficult in a red/ dark wine such as your blackberry as it is quite hard to see the color change and end point- see end note for how to compensate for this) So let's say you add the entire 10 ml of Sodium Hydoxide and still dont have a permanent color change. Your current value is

Yep, that's just how I did it. It took the full 10ml plus another 4! It almost filled the vial that came with the test kit.

As far as taste, the rasberry is just fine. The blackberry tases like.... well, acid! Pretty nasty stuff.

I should have checked the TA and adjusted before fermentation, but oh well. I think the reason that it was so high was that these were domesticated blackberries. They are traditionally more 'tart' than their wild cousins. Not bad for being free, though. 25lbs is a lot of blackberries.

I guess I will try to add some bicarbonate to a small sample and see what that does.

Alex.

Use potassium carbonate or bicarbonate - not baking soda. There's no way to remove the sodium from the wine, and it may end up tasting salty.

Tom S