And now... the waiting game...

Something I hadn't been doing all along was checking the specific gravity of my primary, which is a big mistake. Not in the "I have to throw it out now" category but in the "I don't know how much alcohol is in here and if there's enough sugar to make what I want" category. Oops...

I started checking two days ago, and it was at 1.040, which makes sense. The SG is measured relative to water. 1.000 is water. Above is something denser than water (say, water with sugar in it). Below is something less dense than water (say.. alcohol). Most wines start with a SG of around 1.096-1.100 depending on how much residual sugar you want. Want a sweeter wine but don't want to sacrifice your alcohol amount? Start with more alcohol and then the yeast won't consume all of it by the time they die off from alcohol poisoning. Luckily Jack Keller seems to prefer dryer wines and following his recipe has led me down a good path.

Yesterday, my SG was 1.020. I was surprised as you typically rack into the secondary at 1.010, it was getting close with two days left! This afternoon, I checked and it was about 1.005. Time to get it out of that bucket and under an airlock!

This, itself, is an interesting process because you want to keep your wine from contacting oxygen as much as possible. Oxidation leads to vinegar, and that's bad. So instead of pouring and hoping, I used my racking siphon and put the hose way at the bottom of the container. My siphon is a wonderful tool suggested to me by my wine enthusiast co-worker that makes siphoning FAR easier, with less sucking on a tube and getting stuff in your mouth.

Here you see the whole setup. It kinda looks like a blood transfusion.

Holding the siphon. You can't see the whole thing, but the intake is about 1 inch from the bottom of the wand. This is so when I rack, I won't have to be careful to not get any of the lees in with the wine. I use this by pumping the top a few times and it gets the suction and the siphoning going.

You see my hose is all the way at the bottom of the container to be filled, in order to minimize the wine's encounter with oxygen.


I filled this container to the narrowest point, again, to avoid as much surface area contact with oxygen. It looks really pretty, I think.

The airlock is on top. It's filled with water and will let the carbon dioxide out, but not allow any oxygen in, thus keeping things truely anaerobic. I truely didn't expect it to be such a vibrant pink, however. And it is cloudy, yes (a friend commented that it looked like an alcoholic smoothie). There's still billions of yeast in there doing their yeasty thing, so it'll be cloudy until the yeast die and float to the bottom.

Another thing when it comes to red wines. Light is bad. It won't affect the taste of the wine, but it will affect the color. I had planned to store these in my pantry anyways, but that does get opened frequently, so I wanted to protect things as much as possible. Enter a shirt I didn't care for!

Doesn't cover it all, but covers most of it.

The wine's home for the next who knows how many months.

Now, I knew I'd have more than 3 gallons. The recipe called for 21 pints of water, which is only 3 pints less than 3 gallons, and I KNOW I had more than 3 pints of juice after doing all the mushing and extraction. I decided to use one of my other bottles for the overflow. I will use this to top up my main one every time I rack, so as not to dilute things with water. Luckily, I'd planned on doing another batch relatively soon, so I had a second airlock.

Ignore the messy pantry.

You can see I had probably about a gallon extra, so that will make for some decent topping up supply, and maybe even an extra bottle or two when all is said and done.

As of now, both airlocks are bubbling away, telling me fermentation is still going on, and eventually both will fill with carbon dioxide instead of air, so even the extra one will be away from the bad oxygen.

We did taste some. Definitely not to my taste as I really don't like dry reds, but my boyfriend absolutely loved it. Which is good because he's the reason I'm making this one first. I wanted a nice robust dry red for him. So far, so good!

So, this is the last I'll post about the blackberry for at least a month. After that, I'll rack it for the first time and see how things are proceeding.

Next up.... either a fig or a peach banana wine!