I finally read all 1200 posts and I want to start a batch of this in a few weeks. I have only made cider and beer before so I am opting to make a starter. I have seen white grape juice suggested but could I use apple juice as well?
I also like the idea of making a 5 gallon batch and flavoring individual gallons. I am thinking about a can of limeade concentrate for one gallon and maybe something like fruit punch for another gallon. Is a can of concentrate a good amount?
I also want to bottle carbonate this batch because my wife is a champagne fan. I have xylitol and Splenda as options to backsweeten and I was thinking about using a lemonade concentrate to prime. How much of each should I use? I read that 1 cup Splenda is equal to 6 c sugar. Not sure if xylitol is equivalent to sugar or not.
I also do not plan on using finnings, tannins, or chemicals to stop fermentation since I plan on bottle carbing. Will that affect flavor?
OK first off not using finnings is fine but tannins are important for the recipe. It helps to balance the flavor and add a little body. Dont just not use the tannins. If you have no grape tannin on hand I actually use 1 TBS of Black tea in my SP for tannins. I just dump the dry tea right into primary.
If you are just wanting to make a quick starter then any juice should work really. But I suggest making a simple 1 gallon wine and get a real good healthy yeast cake that you can dump into the SP must. That will have much better results. For my Last SP I did just that. I made a simple White grape peach wine as follows:
4 cans concentrate
1/2 tsp pectic enzyme
1tsp yeast nutrient
1/2 tsp yeast energizer
1tbs Earl grey loos leaf tea
Yeast (Lalvin 71B-1122)
If using concentrate you can use any flavor you want. If using strait juice then you want to add table sugar to get your OG up to about 1.08 or so. The above recipe and yeast takes about two weeks to ferment completly and then you put the jar in the fridge and 1 - 2 weeks later it is crystal clear with a real thick yeast cake on the bottom you can rack off of.
If you split this into one gallon batches and flavor them then one can of concentrate should work out. If you want to make these sparkling when you bottle then make sure to rack when fermentation is active but not completly done so that when you add the concentrate it ferments through those sugars appropriatly and you can know fermentation is complete to properly prime the SP for bottling once clear.
I would just prime with sugar to be honest becaus there are calculators on the web that tell you how much Sucrose or Dextrose is needed to prime and not bottle bomb. For Sucrose in a 1 gallon batch you are looking at about 17.69 grams needed to prime the gallon before bottling.
However I like a challenge and still ended up doing some conversions for lemon concentrate. Looking at nutritiondata.self.com I figured that Lemonaid concentrate is about 44.97% sugar. Doing a little math that comes to 39.33 grams needed to prime or 1.07 fl oz.
Laslty back sweeting with splenda is about 1cup splenda per 3 cups sugar. My SP before last used about 2 cups splenda to get it to the appropriate sweetness.