Mystery liquid & Steam extracted raspberry......update

Ok, so the post from last weekend (24th) where I showed pictures of the mystery liquid and the raspberries in the steam extractor..... the mystery liquid (1.3kg of Polish blended honey and 1 litre of red grape juice) was mixed with the extracted raspberry juice for a "Raspberry Melomel".

On either tuesday (or was it wednesday) evening, I checked to see how it was progressing. The initial gravity on the weekend (Sunday, I think) was about 1090, and allowing for a total drop to 1000 (a drop of 90 points), that would have given me a %ABV of about 12.2, but as it had dropped quite quickly to about 1045 in 2 or 3 days, I added about another 600 grammes of the honey (Polish blended honey - happened to have just under a half jar sitting there) to the ferment and also a teaspoon of FermaidK. What I didn't do, was take a gravity reading of the must after the extra ingredients were added.....

I've just been and checked how it's getting on and while I don't know how much the gravity might have been increased with the extra honey, the ferment is now showing that it's back down to 1035 and there's still a nice view of tiny bubbles showing on the surface, so I'll leave it be now to see where it stops.

It's very likely that it will finish with some residual sugar, which is sort of what I'm aiming for anyway - though whether or not I add tannin to the finished ferment will also depend on the finished taste. The residual sugar will mean that I don't need to think about back sweetening. Plus once I'm happy it has finished fermenting, it'll be sorbated and sulphited to allow it to then settle/clear naturally. I made this up in a bucket as I'd like to make sure that it produces the 6 bottles to the gallon that you don't normally get as you do get racking losses - which will be negated as it should through a reasonable sediment in the bucket. I won't bother moving it to a DJ just yet, as the ferment should produce enough CO2 to prevent any oxidation.

Hopefully that lot makes sense.

Oh, and I don't recall whether I mentioned that I used Lalvin 71B-1122 yeast in this batch, mainly because raspberry is a "malic" fruit and the 71B will metabolise some of that, which should prevent any malolactic fermentation (not always a bad thing of course).

TTFN!