8lbs very ‘sleepy’ pears
1.5kg sugar
1½tsp citric acid
1½tsp of both wine yeast and yeast nutrient
I attempted pear wine for the first time last year after a friend at work donated a bag full of pears from a tree she has in her garden. That first attempt failed miserably – I believe due to too little sugar and leaving the mix too long without checking. This year however, things will (hopefully) be different.
I received another very large bag full of delicious pears (I think the variety is conference) a couple of months back and promptly started researching the net and my trusty book (C.J.J. Berry’s First Steps in Winemaking) for recipes.
Quite a few recipes suggested using very ripe or even overly ripe/‘sleepy’ pears so, as a lot of mine we’re slightly under ripe, I left them in the bag in a dark, cool place and forgot about them for a while (well, except for the occasional one to munch on while I waited :0)
A few weeks later they were ready for home brew attempt #2 to begin…
I washed and sorted them in the bath. A few had ripened too much and were lost to mush in the bath water, but the majority were fine and I was left with a little over 8lbs.
I added about 5.5 litres of boiled water into a huge stock pot with the pears and simmered the mix for about 15mins (no longer as this can, so I’m told, prevent the wine from clearing later).
This helped to break the pears up into a gloopy mush, ready for straining the whole lot through muslin.
I sit the muslin sheets into a steamer insert and sit it on top of a pan. Everything that comes into contact with the mixture has been thoroughly sterilised using ‘Wilko’s own brand of baby bottle sterilising solution – much cheaper than ‘Milton
The strained peary liquor was then poured over 1kg of regular, granulated, sugar and about 1 and a half teaspoons of citric acid.
After leaving it to cool for a couple of hours I tested the Specific Gravity (SG), or the liquid to sugar ratio. I wanted it to be around the 1090 range as I like a rather dry wine which isn't too strong (this SG should get me a wine around 12%ABV).
1st SG test was 1070, more sugar needed to reach the 1090 mark! This was where the mathematical difficulties were to begin – according to my book, 2.25oz/56g will raise the SG of 1 gallon of liquid by 0.005 (5 degrees of gravity), but as I’m tying to make a couple of gallons of wine, I have more than 1 gallon of liquid – but not quite 2. In hindsight I should probably have just added the extra boiled water to make up to 2 gallons, or as close as you can get using the markings on a fermentation bin. But that would have been the easier thing to do and, well, not really my style!
I added more sugar a bit at a time, stirred thoroughly, and then re-tested the SG until I got the mix to 1094 – just about perfect! In all an extra 500g was added.
Due to lack of demijohns (all currently being used for apple and elderberry wine),
I left the mix in the fermentation bin with a tight lid on it to prevent the dreaded vinegar fly from getting in.
That was a couple of weeks ago; I have since bought a couple more demijohns and have divided the ‘must’ between the two. It’s tucked up in a nice warm spot (the spare bedroom – aka my brewing room), gurgling away nicely :0)
I will give an update on progress when fermentation has ceased, probably in another couple of weeks.
