Rice wine primary ferment time

Feb 15, 2007 1 Replies

I've loosely followed this Jack Keller recipe:



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It calls for a primary fermentation of two weeks, but after 5 days of vigorous fermentation my SG is down to .990 and it's about to go still. I'm inclined to transfer to secondary. Should I not?



Back information:



I've got about 10 years experience making grape and fruit wines.



I deviated from the recipe in two ways:



  1. I started with about 2/3 of the sugar and an SG of 1.064 then blended in the rest of the sugar after the fermentation was robust.
  2. I used niagra grape juice instead of raisins.

Lastly, I used Red Star Pasteur Champagne yeast and the primary sits in a temp controlled water bath at 70F.



Tim



That's the general problem with recipes that don't list technical parameters like sg for different steps - 2 weeks can lead to very diferent things, depending on the yeast used, temperature, nutrients, starting sg. etc.

It's possible the raisins release the sugar slowly over the time of the fermentation and that's why the time in primary is longer? - just guessing.

I'd transfer ASAP if you're at 0.990 - that's dry.

Pp

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