It’s been seven days now since we started off the wine, and really we should have been adding out mix to clarify it and stop the fermentation yesterday afternoon. By today we should have been siphoning it out of the fermenter and into bottles.
Except it doesn’t always work like that. We’re brewing it in the kitchen where there’s no radiator, which means it can get quite cool over night and when we’re out at work and the heating is switched off. That’s not so good for wine as it needs to be kept at between 20 and 25 degrees Celsius for six days to reach the necessary specific gravity of 1.06 on the hydrometer.
A hydrometer is essential for any kind of brewing, and we couldn’t have bottled our beer back in April without one. The picture below is from back then, where Rich is measuring the point at which it stops falling through the liquid. When it does, you read off the measurement on the glass hydrometer at the top of the liquid.
If you don’t read the correct gravity and go ahead with bottling anyway you risk having them explode in storage, much like our elderflower champagne did. We won’t be making that mistake again.
So for now we’ve put the lid back on and slid the fermenter back into the corner of the kitchen for another few days. It doesn’t really matter that it hasn’t finished brewing in six days – it should still work, but just a little more slowly than first anticipated.
But then that’s half the fun of doing these things yourselves: there’s no need to rush.
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