Derigiberble
Member
My father just got bitten hard by the brew your own bug. I've been brewing my own beer and cider for a while and while I've spoken with him about it I'm not sure what triggered this particular decision of his.
First I think a bit of an explanation is needed. My parents live on a lot of land and have a very large garden. In this garden are some kiwi vines they planted on a lark, which really didn't do anything until the last few years. This year the vines really pulled through, and the kiwis were almost as densely loaded as their grape vines. In June all the vines (except the male one) looked like this:
They have many many pounds (40+) of kiwifruit and really there isn't too much you can do with it besides eating it raw, so my father wants to make wine (or whatever you call fermented kiwi) with them. In order to use as much fruit as possible he'd prefer the recipe to be mainly kiwi. I've found some straight kiwi recipes, and I was thinking about tweaking the strawberry-kiwi wine recipe from here to cut out the strawberries.
From what we can find most recipes use kiwi + a large amount of sugar. Is this to be expected due to the lower sugar content of the kiwis? Would it be better to use dextrose, honey, or grape juice instead of table sugar? Any of those are available easily enough to make a substitution.
I am really at a loss as to where to tell him to start. I think he wants to go big at first, but I kinda want to tell him to start out slow and just do a 6 gallon batch, before attempting anything really large scale. When I visit during the holidays I may carry down some of my equipment and we can get a batch started then.
A friend of his has made blueberry and muscadine (a grape species native to the southeastern US) wine from the fruit in my parent's garden before and it comes out very well. No muscadine wine this year though, raccoons ate all the grapes off the vines in a matter of a few nights, only going after the grapes in the live trap after no more were on the vine.
First I think a bit of an explanation is needed. My parents live on a lot of land and have a very large garden. In this garden are some kiwi vines they planted on a lark, which really didn't do anything until the last few years. This year the vines really pulled through, and the kiwis were almost as densely loaded as their grape vines. In June all the vines (except the male one) looked like this:
They have many many pounds (40+) of kiwifruit and really there isn't too much you can do with it besides eating it raw, so my father wants to make wine (or whatever you call fermented kiwi) with them. In order to use as much fruit as possible he'd prefer the recipe to be mainly kiwi. I've found some straight kiwi recipes, and I was thinking about tweaking the strawberry-kiwi wine recipe from here to cut out the strawberries.
From what we can find most recipes use kiwi + a large amount of sugar. Is this to be expected due to the lower sugar content of the kiwis? Would it be better to use dextrose, honey, or grape juice instead of table sugar? Any of those are available easily enough to make a substitution.
I am really at a loss as to where to tell him to start. I think he wants to go big at first, but I kinda want to tell him to start out slow and just do a 6 gallon batch, before attempting anything really large scale. When I visit during the holidays I may carry down some of my equipment and we can get a batch started then.
A friend of his has made blueberry and muscadine (a grape species native to the southeastern US) wine from the fruit in my parent's garden before and it comes out very well. No muscadine wine this year though, raccoons ate all the grapes off the vines in a matter of a few nights, only going after the grapes in the live trap after no more were on the vine.