Tonight the missus forced me to go to the local Tesco to do food shopping. Whilst there I spied some tins of strawberries in grape juice. Being a compulsive person I bought ten tins :-)
The tins hold 106g of fruit with grape juice to make each tin up to 406g. This means I have about 4 kilos of stuff containing a kilo of strawberries. No artificial flavourings or preservative. I also picked up three pounds of clear honey.
I was thinking maybe a strawberry wine and a strawberry mead. Anybody suggest a good use?
I'd use all of it to make some strawberry wine. I'm not terribly mad about mead myself, takes too long to age ;)
Check the SG of the grape juice the berries are packed in, and then gently mash up the berries, add those in with the grape juice and let'er rip. I've had good results in my strawberry wine with 71B-1122 Beaujolais yeast. Watch the time the wine spends with the fruit and seeds, sometimes bitter tannins can come out after too many days... I left mine on for four days, and it's slightly too bitter at dryness, but a bit of residual sweetness brought it back into balance. For more strawberry aroma, I sweetened with strawberry syrup. It turned out to be my best country wine to date. HTH
personally, i prefer meads. i like the residual sweetness honey imparts. most every wine i've made has incorporated honey in some aspect. if you use nutrient with the strawberries you should be just fine. some of the most vigorous fermentation i've ever seen was from me being lazy... i took 5 lbs of peaches, threw them in the blender and pureed them, then added them directly to the must after boiling the honey. fresh fruit (and to a point even whole fruit) seems to inspire _fierce_ fermentation. literally spitting out of the airlock! ... heh, it was cool. =)
i usually make melomels (fruit wines) with approximately 5 lbs of fruit,
5 lbs of honey, and 3 lbs of sugar, and usually get 13-15% strength wines. (ie, using EC-1118 i'll get 15% with no sugar left, but if i use 71B i'll get a 12% or 13% with some left over for extra sweetness)
ummmm. i guess time would be a problem. i usually figure a month to ferment, rack, then at least two months to start to get rid of those young wine flavors. rack again, and give it another two months before i'll consider it good, and everything after that is just gold.
the woman suggested jam. mmmm.... yeah. jam. your call. =)
I made a nearly pure strawberry wine from fresh fruit, and it was balanced... I am not sure that strawberry benefits from a lot of dilution. I'd just add sugar and acid to get a PA of 10-11(max) and a TA of 0.7 or so. You'll get some astringency out of the seeds if you leave 'em on for too long, so keep that in mind too. Search the archives for strawberry wine, a thread from last year by me should come up and it contains heaps of good information.
I decided to start with a gallon of mead. Three pounds of honey, four tins of the strawberries and a bit of water plus acid, nitrient, B1 and tannin. It is going like the clappers after only six hours. Got a starting SG of
1.076 so will add some more honey later to aim for 11/12%. (Anyone give me an idea of amount of honey in a gallon I should be looking at?)
Also leaves me with six tins to make a wine with once one of my demijohns is free :-) Might get some more tins before that to increase the flvaour.
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