Tried my first batch of wine yesterday. It is a red beet wine. I decided to make it when I was preparing red beets from my garden for freezing and after par boiling the beets I was left with all this sweet tasting liquid. I found a recipe online that I used as more of a guideline because my boil times, quantity of liquid and weight of beets that I started with all meant things needed to be adjusted. Well...I got off to a great start calculating (more like guessing) the quantity of the other ingredients, filling up (almost) 3 one gallon jugs, checking and adjusting the starting sg (with my new understanding of a hydrometer)with a simple sugar syrup and then mixing and pitching some dry wine yeast when the temperature was just right. I was so proud when two hours later there was foam starting on the top of the ruby colored liquid. It assured me the yeast had started it's amazing work. I went to bed after cleaning up everything (the worse part of beer\winemaking), it was 1:00am. At 6:00am I got up to take my daughter to school and when I returned I started to read my winemakers manual to see what I needed to do next to assure myself a good finished wine. I became alarmed when reading about the necessity of the proper quantity of acid and ph. No problem!..I have an acid testing kit I bought a year ago but never knew how to use it. After reading the instructions... (who does that anyway?) and taking a sample of my now VERY vigorously fermenting must, I decided I needed to add some acid blend. Ignoring the fact I should have added this BEFORE the yeast, I boldly measured out the required amount of acid blend and dumped it into the must. ........INSTANT PINK VOLCANO !!!! and a BIG PINK MESS !!! It would be nice to hear if anyone else has had a similar experience?
Pink Volcano
Sep 20, 2005
5 Replies
I have never had this happen to me but it is mentioned in the group every now and then. When you add a powder or crystal to a super saturated system it is going to go off. You would have been fine if you were doing your primary in a bucket with 1/3 head space. Always add something to your wine slowly while stirring. That way you should be able to catch it before it gets too bad.
Ray
greetings to all: I'd never heard mention of the necessity of acidizing before yeastifying ( I just follow direx or do as I'm told) so this was an interesting fact to know!
I saw the exact same thing happen at a commercial winery a couple of years ago - but that was in a 5000 gallon tank! A cellar worker (who should have known better) dumped a bag of tartaric into an active fermentation, instantly nucleating the dissolved CO2 that was in supersaturation. Sounded like a jet airplane taking off, and suddenly there was a geyser of foam shooting out the manway! Fortunately, it wasn't my wine and at least it was a white wine, so not so messy to clean up.
Tom S
"Tom S" wrote in news:FU3Ye.1166$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr21.news.prodigy.com:
I would have locked the doors, sold the house and moved to an island where i could drink fermented coconut juice!
I'll bet that cellar worker doesn't go for a command performance. Another good reason to do ALL adjustments with additives BEFORE inoculating with yeast.
I would have captured some of the foam, added frozen banana and made a health-food smoothie LOL. (But how many times does one have a blender and frozen bananas at a winery? hehe)
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