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Hi peeps,

Back for more brewing advice after Stonehead's recipe for cider gave us a taste of how rewarding homebrewing can be.

We found a coffee wine recipe somewhere on SSish forums and gave it a go. Our demijohn full seems to have stopped fermenting now and if I believe our newly acquired hydrometer it is around 19% abv. Tastes strong, but fairly rough at the moment, so planning to mature it for a year or so.

My question is this: do we need to add anything to kill off the yeast, or can we just bottle now? With the cider we wanted fizziness so added sugar before bottling, but that's not the desired outcome for this wine. We have Campden tablets since the nice lady in the homebrew shop thought we'd need them. The wine is still opaque after one 'racking' - is this a problem?

Hi Scrake,

What does the hydrometer say now? For a dry wine you're looking for something about 0.996, and for a sweet wine about 1.020. If you want a sweet wine then I'd use the campden tablet to kill off the yeast before bottling otherwise it may continue to ferment the remaining sugar and you might get exploding bottles.
Try leaving the wine somewhere cold for a few days after adding the campden tablet and it will help any sediment clear before bottling.

If the hydrometer is still quite high around the 19% mark or 1.135 then there is still a lot of sugar left to ferment and it's stuck, if it is that high then it's likely that there is just too much sugar for the yeast to ferment, i'd add some cold boiled water to take the S.G down to about 1.1.

Hi 9ball,

SG is 0.996, and the 19% I mentioned is our estimated final alcohol (as calculated here: http://www.rooftopbrew.net/abv_calculator.php)

On tasting a sample, the wine is definitely dry, which wasn't quite what we intended (hoped to make a sort of liquer-style sipping drink) but that's okay. We used a 'high-alcohol' yeast so I suppose it just fermented pretty much all the sugar available.

Will add a Campden tablet (just one, right?) and move to a cold place before bottling. One more question: is it better to bottle into small bottles (wine bottle sizes) or keep in one large bottle if we intend on maturing this one for a while?


Many thanks for your help!


Scrake

As for bottling I'd say it's personal preference, depends on how much of it you plan on drinking at a time
If you want to sweeten the wine you could add some saccharin at any point (careful not to use too much) or just add some sugar before serving it.
Go with the instructions on the packet with the campden tablet.

Hope it all turns out well,

Many thanks for the advice!