September 2008 Blog Archives
Banana Wine
Posted by: Greg on September 21st, 2008
In the past, I've made a lot of different fruit wines, but I've never tried my hand at making banana wine. I didn't know a whole lot about the process of extracting the juice from the fruit, so I visited a couple of online wine discussion forums to see if I could read up on the subject. According to everything I read on those boards, its really not that difficult to make the wine. After discussing it over with my better half, my wife picked up 25 pounds of bananas (5 gal batch) at Walmart while she was grocery shopping a couple of weeks ago. Bananas are relatively cheap in price, 63 cents a pound at Walmart, so I said to myself, what the heck! I found a recipe in Terry Garey's book, The Joy of Home Winemaking, modified the recipe a bit to our liking, extracted the juice from the bananas, put the rest of the ingredients together and fermented the wine. Below is the recipe that we followed (makes 1 gallon):
1 gallon water
5 lbs Ripe Bananas
1½ lbs sugar
4 ounces of Welch's White Grape Juice Concentrate
3 tsp Acid Blend
1 tsp Yeast Nutrient
½ tsp Pectic Enzyme
¼ tsp Tannin
1 packet of Lalvin EC-1118 Yeast
1 Campden Tablet, crushed
According to the instructions, the sliced bananas, skins and all are to be simmered for ½ hour in order to extract the juice. Well I simmered the bananas in a large pot and I was a little alarmed at the color of the must, it look like dirty soapy dish water! I was also surprised that it only took 10 days to completely ferment dry. Normally, it takes a batch of wine about 3 weeks to ferment dry. I maintained a fermentation temperature between 68 - 70° degrees and my starting SG was 1.092. Well I guess we will have to wait a year before we see how this wine turns out.
Hurricane Gustav Claims Another Victim
Posted by: Greg on September 6th, 2008
Labor Day was suppose to be a day filled with relaxation, the smell of hamburgers and chicken cooking on an open grill, or just kicking back and enjoying a day off from work, but people in Southeastern Louisiana wasn't celebrating the holiday like the rest of the country, instead we was watching Hurricane Gustav take down trees, destroy property and damage power lines. I guess Gustav was jealous because Hurricane Katrina was grabbing all the publicity for the last three years, so he decided it was time for him to step out and grab some for himself.
Fortunately, my home didn't sustain any damage from the storm, it just blew down a lot of limbs from my oak trees making a mess of my yard. The power was out for a total of 3 days and by the time power was restored to my community, we lost the apple wine, because we was unable to maintain the proper fermentation temperature. When fermenting apple wine, the fermentation temperature shouldn't exceed 70°F (fermentation temperature commonly employed by the winemakers ranges between 50° to 70°F), if the temperature goes above 70°F for an extended period of time, there is a good chance the wine will develop off-flavors. This is because of the increased production of unwanted enzymes by the yeast and the possible growth of micro-organisms that thrive in warmer temperatures. Realizing that the taste of the wine might have been compromised, we didn't want to a chance or waste any more time on a wine that might not taste right, so we decided to pitch the wine and wait to a later date to ferment a new batch.
I think we could have saved the wine had we had enough time to do so, but I was working a lot of overtime for my employer (Utility company) and my wife had her hands full tending to our household and keeping our aging wines cool with the help of a 6,000 BTU Haier window air conditioner that we purchased from Walmart a couple of years ago. We had to conserve on the gas for our generator due to fuel shortages caused by power outages to gas stations in our area and we didn't know how long it was going to take for power to be restored. Three years ago, Hurricane Katrina hit our area and it took the power companies quite a bit of time to restore power to gas stations and when the power was finally restored, people had to wait in long lines for hours just to get fuel and there was a limit on how much fuel a person could get. I remember very well how my wife and I had to drive for an hour north of our area just to find a grocery store or gas stations that was open for business. Hurricane Gustav wasn't as powerful as Katrina, but he still caused a lot of trouble for everyone who was affected by the storm.
