Is my gravity high enough? muscadine honey wine

[Oksu112]

Hello, my grapes have been skinned however not fully crushed and my reading is around 13 on the hydrometer which represents .013 if I'm not mistaken. The ingredients are 3 lbs of honey, 4 gallons of skinned grapes, and water to fill my 7 gallon carboy.
My question is would you add more honey to bring up the gravity? I want at least 6% potential alcohol. While some sugar remains in the grapes undissolved the calculation still comes out low gravity.
I appreciate your advice and any other tips. Thanks in advance experts!

 

[RPh_Guy]

Specific gravity (s.g.) is a measure of density, expressed as grams per milliliter. Pure water is approximately 1.000 and solutions with dissolved solids like sugar are higher.... So your s.g. is 1.013.

Your honey isn't dissolved. Even with just honey, the s.g. should be higher.

Without an accurate s.g. it's hard to say whether you should add sugar and how much.
At this point I would suggest simply following whatever recipe you used. They listed an alcohol level for it, right?

 

[Oksu112]

Ah yeah that's what it is. The recipe is being made up as I go. I was hesitant to stir too hard for fear of oxidation and breaking my deep thin glass vessel, but this honey was quite runny so I assumed it'd be ok. The yeast has been pitched for a few hours so I suppose not knowing the gravity will be acceptable on this one.

 

[Yooper]

3 pounds of honey in 7 gallons? Not nearly enough. That's about 1.015 or so for an SG.

The 4 gallons of grapes aren't crushed (or are they)? A good rule of thumb for wine is 20 pounds of wine grapes equals about a gallon of wine, but regular table grapes have very little natural sugar, so you won't get much in the way of fermentable sugars out of them.

So, yes, you'll definitely need to add honey or sugar if you want to make wine out of this.

 

[Oksu112]

They are semi crushed by pinching the skin off, these are scuppernongs so pretty sweet. Thanks I'll throw another lb of honey in for good measure.

 

[RPh_Guy]

The must should be thoroughly mixed and aerated/oxygenated when pitching the yeast. The yeast need oxygen to reproduce and conduct a healthy fermentation.
Oxidation is only a concern after fermentation starts winding down.

 

[Yooper]

They are semi crushed by pinching the skin off, these are scuppernongs so pretty sweet. Thanks I'll throw another lb of honey in for good measure.

Scuppernogs aren't really very sweet- I mean they taste like they are a little, but definitely very little in the way of fermentable sugars will come out of them.

A pound of honey will bring your OG up to around 1.020 in 7 gallons. That's a potential ABV of about 3-3.1%.

Normally, you'd use about 2 pound of honey per gallon of liquid to get around 10% ABV.

 

[Intheswamp]

A quart of honey usually weighs 3 pounds. So, from Yooper's 2lb per gallon ratio you need a total of almost 5 quarts of honey. I'm not sure what the price of honey is at the moment but if you're not keeping your on bees it could get expensive. You might want to consider looking at regular white sugar to balance out the sugar requirement.

Tinkering with FermCalc (I'm a newbie so somebody check my calculations! ) I calculated this figuring your current SG of 1.0130 and 7 gallons of liquid. The problem I see is getting the sugar dissolved in the must...that's a lot of sugar to dissolve whether it's white granular sugar or honey. I would think you'd need to remove a couple of gallons from the batch, heat it up and gradually stir the sugar in to dissolve it and then mix back with the rest of the must.

I'd appreciate some of the experienced folks to look at these calculations and see if I've greatly goofed.

Scenario #1:
ABV% desired = ~12%
Current SG = 1.0130
Target SG = 1.0900
Current Volume = 7 gallons

Additional ingredients:
Sugar = 13.764 poundsof white sugar *OR* 18.478 pounds of honey
Resulting Volume = 8.0214 gallons if using white sugar
Resulting Volume = 8.5405 gallons if using honey

Scenario #2
ABV% desired = ~10%
Current SG = 1.0130
Target SG = 1.0780
Current Volume = 7 gallons

Additional ingredients:
Sugar = 11.345 pounds of white sugar *OR* 15.058 pounds of honey
Resulting Volume = 7.8412 gallons if using white sugar
Resulting Volume = 8.2548 gallons if using honey

Best wishes,
Ed

 

[Intheswamp]

Dang, I don't read very well. For you a ABV% of 6-7 here is what I calculate:
Scenario #3
ABV% desired = ~6-7%
Current SG = 1.0130
Target SG = 1.0550
Current Volume = 7 gallons

Additional ingredients:
Sugar = 7.0141 pounds of white sugar *OR* 9.1262 pounds of honey
Resulting Volume = 7.5194 gallons if using white sugar
Resulting Volume = 7.7597 gallons if using honey


Btw. With a 7 gallon batch of muscadine wine I doubt you will drink it all in a couple of sittings.<GRIN> Thus, I figure you'll be storing some for a while. The higher the ABV% the more protection you have for the wine. It is already acidic so that will naturally help (I think) with storage. But, don't forget to protect the wine with k-meta at basically every other racking and at bottling. Unless the wine goes to bone dry you will probably want to add k-sorbate at bottling time. At least that's my newbie take on things.

Ed

 

[RPh_Guy]

It's more complicated than this unfortunately.

First, we determined that the initial gravity reading is likely inaccurate (because the honey probably wasn't fully dissolved and the grapes weren't really crushed), so precise calculations are pretty much out the window.

Second, 4 gallons of grapes contribute a lot of solids. Your calculations are assuming it's all liquid, so they're going to overshoot.

Third, the sugar content of honey is variable, so predicting the number of gravity points it contributes is an approximation at best. (Certainly not valid to 4 decimal places)

Other than that, you ran the calculations correctly. FermCalc is really cool. I use it a lot.
Cheers

 

[Intheswamp]

Thanks for the feeback, RPh_Guy. Maybe it will give the OP a ballpark idea of what direction to start heading in. The single quart of honey in six gallons....a long way from where he/she needs to be.

Maybe a mix of honey and granular sugar would work...the sugar for fermenting/alcohol-production and the honey more for flavor?

Yeah, I like FermCalc. I'm beginning to catch on to the basics of it but there's lots that I think will stay a foreign language to me.

 

[Seamonkey84]

Depending on what your after, a mead would call for using using more honey, and will give it more mouthfeel and floral aroma at the end. Roughly 2lbs per gallon, plus the sugars from the fruit would be closer to what you want. Otherwise use sugar as it’s cheaper.