Blackberry Wine: Straining

I had originally intended to get this done yesterday, but two weeks of poor sleep during that heat wave caught up to me. Anyhow. It’s been just under a week since I started that wine. It was pretty damn hot for most of the time, so I cut the ferment on the pulp short. I’ve been checking the smell, and it definitely smells winey. Before that it was yeasty, which was good cause I’d worried I’d killed my yeast with Campden tabs. When the temp dropped yesterday, the smell stopped being as strong.

When I got home from work this afternoon, I began to sanitize.

I cleaned out another bucket, in much the same state as the first, and re-sanitized a ladle, a spoon, a gallon jug, and my hands, since they would be doing the pressing. The recipe I’m following has me adding more syrup at this stage, and I had it cooling in a salted ice water bath. With everything clean, I was ready to strain out the pulp.

I ladled the mash into the muslin bag, and dumped the dregs in. I let it drip and drain under its own weight for a bit.

Then I got in there and started squeezing and pressing by hand. My palms are still tinged slightly purple. Once I got as much juice out of the pulp as I could, I added the cooled syrup and sloshed the mix around a bit. Then I positioned the jug and funnel under the spigot on this new bucket.

And I let ‘er go.

It’s quite full, more so than I expected from the recipe’s photos. It calls for one more syrup addition, but I won’t have room for that, and more syrup wouldn’t give it enough volume to fill two gallon jugs. But, I fit the bottle with a rubber stopper meant for the airlock, and put a balloon over that.

Now it will sit for ten days. If I didn’t murder the yeast, that balloon should slowly inflate with carbon dioxide as they consume the sugar and turn it into ethanol. It will be racked two more times to rid it of sediment. And sediment it will have- I know I squeezed plenty of seeds back into it. Since I can’t add more sugar syrup to it (unless racking it really reduces the volume), I’ll rack it once (after ten days) back into a clean jug, and then that third racking (once fermentation stops entirely, approximately a week or two later) will be the final one, and I’ll add the conditioning sugar to carbonate it before I cork it.