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Recipe & Process
Recipe & Process
Primary
Primary
1.2 gal water
3.2 lbs sugar
Juice of 1 lemon
Juice of 1 orange
A lot of dandelions
1/4 cup butterfly pea blossoms
Half packet Lalvin 71B yeast (~2.5g)
The butterfly pea blossoms were added well into primary. They're almost exclusively for color, as this wine was turning out almost white I figured it was an excellent candidate for the pea blossom purple.
Secondary
Secondary
Orange and lemon zest
Gravity & ABV
Gravity & ABV
Measured OG 1.110
Projected FG: 1.000 - 1.005 (at 71B's 14% ABV tolerance)
We had the wine analyzed on professional-grade lab equipment after we racked into secondary. Those results show us how homebrew equipment gets you in the right ballpark, but not quite right:
Actual FG: 1.03045
Actual ABV: 11.26%
Actual OG (we calculated based on FG & ABV): ~1.116
Nutrients
Nutrients
0.625 tsp boiled yeast slurry at pitch
0.625 tsp boiled yeast slurry once a day for the first 4 days
Issues
Issues
This has been fermenting extremely slow for me and has struggled to even hit 10% which is giving me some vinegar concerns. I've periodically added some extra nutrients in an effort to keep fermentation running. I'm hoping I don't overdo it and mess up the brew by adding too many nutrients too late, haha.
Timeline - Pitch to Bottle
Timeline - Pitch to Bottle
Pitched on 05/30/2020
Added 0.25 tsp boiled yeast slurry on 06/07/2020
Added 0.25 tsp boiled yeast slurry on 06/27/2020
Added butterfly pea blossoms 07/12/2020
Added small dash of Fermaid K 07/13/2020
Removed pea blossoms 07/18/2020
Added zest of 2 lemons and 1 orange 07/20/2020
Removed zest 07/21/2020 (that added flavor quickly)
Gave up on kickstarting fermentation and racked into secondary 07/26/2020
12/02/2020 this brew is doing something. I don't know what, but it started bubbling sometime during a heat wave several months ago, and simply hasn't stopped (and I mean small bubbles you can see in the brew itself, not just airlock activity). It could be offgassing, but I know this wine isn't stable or at ABV tolerance yet, so I've just been waiting to see what happens.
Wine still in progress
Using Dandelions
Using Dandelions
For this brew, I made a tea from my dandelions. I've been told you only want the petals for this, as any other part of the dandelion plant is very bitter. Separating the petals is tedious, but not particularly difficult. I picked many of my dandelions while they were not quite fully bloomed - because the petals were still facing upward instead of spreading out, I was often able to grab the petals right above where the green bits of the flower ended and pull them straight out.
I collected petals in the freezer until I had enough to start, so this doesn't have to be done in a single sitting.
Once you have enough dandelion petals, you can add them all to a a gallon of boiling water, turn off the heat, put the lid on your pot, and allow the dandelions to steep. How long is up to you, I found recipes with folks steeping for anything from 10 minutes to 2 days. I steeped for about 2 hours.
How much dandelion is enough? It's hard to say, since it's difficult to measure, and depends on how strong you want the taste to be. Personally, I had enough to cover the surface of my tea as it steeped in 14 quart pot, but so far not much dandelion flavor is coming through in this wine - so next time, I'll try using more.
After I finished steeping, I ran my tea through coffee filters. This step is largely optional - a strainer is probably sufficient - but my dandelions weren't all that clean, so even after the pasteurization of a boil, I just felt a little better filtering to catch any weird dirt, grime, or bugs that might have gotten into my must.
By the time I had steeped for ~2 hours, filtered the tea, juiced a lemon and orange, and mixed in all my sugar, the must was cool enough to pitch my yeast.
Retrospective
Retrospective
Process Improvement
Process Improvement
I'm not sure why this one is going so slow, perhaps it didn't end up with enough nutrients due to the base recipe having very little in it. I have since ordered Fermaid K, so perhaps that would help with brews like this in the future. In the meantime - this isn't technically stalled out yet, it's just going very slow.
Recipe Improvements
Recipe Improvements
The dandelion flavor, so far, seems to have gotten lost under the residual sweetness and the citrus introduced with the zest. We probably need even more dandelions in order to get significant dandelion flavor.
If I were to try this again, I'd try it as a mead. Sugar alone is too simple, and I can see why the dandelion wine recipe I saw included raisins. I thought it was bad nutritional practice - and it probably partly was - but I'm sure they also help fill out the flavor profile quite a bit.
This is helping me realize I don't like really enjoy super simple flavor profiles in my homebrew. I want complexity and simply pu, this has none at the moment.
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