So the time has finally arrived and we have had the opportunity to get our hands on some wine grapes! With 240 lbs of grapes we have ended up with 10 gallons of wine, 14 quarts of canned grape juice, 8 pints of jam and 9 half pints of jam. This was quite a bit of work and even more mess, but so much fun!!
This crusher is intended for a 55 gallon barrel, but all we had was a 6 gallon primary fermentor so we set the crusher on top of that. I highly recommend using one of these if you have the opportunity, it was very easy and very fast. We did all our grapes in less than 30 minutes.
Add Potassium Bisulfite to break down the natural yeast in the grape skins so you don't end up fermenting your grapes before you are ready to...especially if you are making juice for the kids!! (follow directions given on the back of the container)
Crush down your grapes to get one last squish out of the pulp. (I used a sterilized wooden rolling pin...but if you have a fancy wine crushing rod that would work good too.)
Grapes are ready to be filtered into juice! We started by scooping out as much pulp as we could and squeezing the juice out.
Then we lined a 6 gallon bucket with organza fabric and poured the remaining pulp and juice into that so we could easily gather the top of the fabric and squeeze the remaining juice away from the pulp. We talked to someone who prefers to crush their grapes directly into a bucket prepared with fabric like this and then they never have to transfer buckets since all the fermenting and straining can take place in 1 bucket...smart idea!
JUICE!! We did this 3 more times with 3 more buckets and ended up with 15 gallons of juice... With that we made Wine, Canned Juice, and Jams.
When you do your pear-applesauce,put it in the oven to cook through. It would great heats fast and no worries for it to burn. :)
ReplyDelete