Scaling up

Sometimes you get to a point on a learning curve when you have a decision to make, I've been hovering around making that decision for some months, but today I decided.

Last year I made 4 gallons of Elderflower wine and it was a stunner. Shortly after making it I learned that I could make the same volume of wine using only a fraction of the flowers. The trick is to add the flowers later into the ferment. Apparently this avoids so much of the volatile flavours being blown out of the airlock while the ferment is vigourous. I suspect the increased level of alcohol in the must is a good solvent for said molecules, better than water alone anyway, and that this adds to the effect. So I had to decide, pick less flowers and make the same amount, or scale up. Scale up won out.

So today I bought myself a new 5 gallon fermenting vessel, with a wide neck and an airlock. I'll now be able to add my flowers, in muslin bags, during secondary fermentation. Getting them out will be no probs, and I wont be fiddling about with single gallon demijohns and sieves. I'll probably still do a similar batch to last year; flowers in at primary stage etc. Ensuring that I get a true comparison of the methods. All in all there could be as much as 10 gallons this year.