Debugging Wine Fermentation with Ikea Lingonberry and Elderflower Concentrate
As of late I've gotten into wine brewing. It's a cheap, fast, and inexpensive hobby that produces a tasty beverage in a short amount of time depending on the wine you're making.
The recipe I used for mango wine and cherry-cranberry wine have both come out well and consistently ferment properly. Granted I've only made the mango twice and the cherry-cranberry three times, but five for five on those is pretty good. I also tried my hand at making lingonberry wine based on the lingonberry concentrate sold at Ikea. I used the same spreadsheet to calculate the target sugar percentage and mixed up the lingonberry the same way I would the other two wines but the lingonberry never took. After a day the cherry-cranberry and mango were started to bubble along in fermentation nicely yet the lingonberry was doing nothing. I tried tossing some fresh yeast into the jug but still nothing. I thought that maybe it was a temperature problem since some wines ferment better at higher or lower temperatures so I put the jug into a warm water bath while at Com Con. There was a little bit of change though I couldn't tell if it was simply due to increased temperature or actual fermentation since it wasn't exactly a controlled experiment. In the end I had to toss out the jug since juice sitting out for a week with no sign of safe fermentation and a rank smell is probably bad for you.
This past weekend I thought I'd given it another shot. Some friends of my wanted to try elderflower wine, also using a concentrate found at Ikea. So this past Saturday I ran the numbers again, got the right sugar percentage, double checked the water temperature for the yeast activation, and mixed everything together. When I got up the following morning there was no sign of fermentation in either the lingonberry or the elderflower mixtures. The ingredients for each were sugar, lingonberry juice concentrate or elderflower juice concentrate, and citric acid. No sign of any yeast inhibitors in the ingredients list. Not wanting to loose another batch I put both containers in the fridge and did some research. Turns out that if yeast is in a mixture with too high of a sugar percentage, it won't activate well and there will be a large early die-off of the yeast cells. Think of it like drowning in too much food. The cherry-cranberry and mango were based on juice, whereas the lingonberry and elderflower were based on concentrates which according to my math were supposed to equate to the same sugar levels as opposed to strictly following the mixing directions on the package and adding more sugar to make up the difference.
So to try and gain a foothold for the yeast I activated some yeast in a cup of water with a table spoon of sugar and let it sit for an hour or so. Then I pour out a cup of the previous proto-wine from the jugs in the fridge to a smaller bottle and added the freshly activated yeast. Then placed the two bottles into a room with a space heater set at 80 degrees to help incubate it. My theory was that if the prior mix was too potent I'd essentially get the yeast going in a more diluted version first and see if things worked.
I let that go overnight and when I woke up this morning it was bubbling along. Not a rolling bubble like a fermentation that had been going for a couple days, but at least one which showed a semi-stable yeast colony. So I got slightly bigger bottles, shook up the smaller bottles and added that mixture to two cups of the proto-wine which I had first allowed to reach room temperature. The reason for the shaking is so that all the yeast colony -- both the live and dead parts -- get transferred into the new bottle. If you were to just siphon off the top into the new batch there might not be a large enough colony and the fermentation would stall again. This evening when I got home, the larger bottles were bubbling along as well so it seemed to worked.
I just turned the space heater back on again and I'll let it go overnight so that the colonies in the bottles are pretty strong. Then in the morning I'll add them to the jugs that had been in the fridge after letting the jugs warm to room temperature first. It's still a slower fermentation process than I'm used to but at least it seems to be working. By tomorrow evening I should know if it's still working.
The next time I try working with these concentrates from Ikea I'm going to start the mix with only one half the amount of concentrate that I need, wait two days for the yeast to take hold, then add a half the remaining concentrate, wait a day to make sure the yeast colony is still good, then add the remaining concentrate. So when using 4 cups of concentrate it'd be two cups in the initial mixing, add a cup on day two, and add the last cup on day three.
When trying to diagnose the specific problem I was facing with the two concentrates, I couldn't find any references to their use. In keeping with helping random strangers on the Internet, I decided to post this public in case someone else has a similar problem with these juice sources and a search leads them here.
The recipe I used for mango wine and cherry-cranberry wine have both come out well and consistently ferment properly. Granted I've only made the mango twice and the cherry-cranberry three times, but five for five on those is pretty good. I also tried my hand at making lingonberry wine based on the lingonberry concentrate sold at Ikea. I used the same spreadsheet to calculate the target sugar percentage and mixed up the lingonberry the same way I would the other two wines but the lingonberry never took. After a day the cherry-cranberry and mango were started to bubble along in fermentation nicely yet the lingonberry was doing nothing. I tried tossing some fresh yeast into the jug but still nothing. I thought that maybe it was a temperature problem since some wines ferment better at higher or lower temperatures so I put the jug into a warm water bath while at Com Con. There was a little bit of change though I couldn't tell if it was simply due to increased temperature or actual fermentation since it wasn't exactly a controlled experiment. In the end I had to toss out the jug since juice sitting out for a week with no sign of safe fermentation and a rank smell is probably bad for you.
This past weekend I thought I'd given it another shot. Some friends of my wanted to try elderflower wine, also using a concentrate found at Ikea. So this past Saturday I ran the numbers again, got the right sugar percentage, double checked the water temperature for the yeast activation, and mixed everything together. When I got up the following morning there was no sign of fermentation in either the lingonberry or the elderflower mixtures. The ingredients for each were sugar, lingonberry juice concentrate or elderflower juice concentrate, and citric acid. No sign of any yeast inhibitors in the ingredients list. Not wanting to loose another batch I put both containers in the fridge and did some research. Turns out that if yeast is in a mixture with too high of a sugar percentage, it won't activate well and there will be a large early die-off of the yeast cells. Think of it like drowning in too much food. The cherry-cranberry and mango were based on juice, whereas the lingonberry and elderflower were based on concentrates which according to my math were supposed to equate to the same sugar levels as opposed to strictly following the mixing directions on the package and adding more sugar to make up the difference.
So to try and gain a foothold for the yeast I activated some yeast in a cup of water with a table spoon of sugar and let it sit for an hour or so. Then I pour out a cup of the previous proto-wine from the jugs in the fridge to a smaller bottle and added the freshly activated yeast. Then placed the two bottles into a room with a space heater set at 80 degrees to help incubate it. My theory was that if the prior mix was too potent I'd essentially get the yeast going in a more diluted version first and see if things worked.
I let that go overnight and when I woke up this morning it was bubbling along. Not a rolling bubble like a fermentation that had been going for a couple days, but at least one which showed a semi-stable yeast colony. So I got slightly bigger bottles, shook up the smaller bottles and added that mixture to two cups of the proto-wine which I had first allowed to reach room temperature. The reason for the shaking is so that all the yeast colony -- both the live and dead parts -- get transferred into the new bottle. If you were to just siphon off the top into the new batch there might not be a large enough colony and the fermentation would stall again. This evening when I got home, the larger bottles were bubbling along as well so it seemed to worked.
I just turned the space heater back on again and I'll let it go overnight so that the colonies in the bottles are pretty strong. Then in the morning I'll add them to the jugs that had been in the fridge after letting the jugs warm to room temperature first. It's still a slower fermentation process than I'm used to but at least it seems to be working. By tomorrow evening I should know if it's still working.
The next time I try working with these concentrates from Ikea I'm going to start the mix with only one half the amount of concentrate that I need, wait two days for the yeast to take hold, then add a half the remaining concentrate, wait a day to make sure the yeast colony is still good, then add the remaining concentrate. So when using 4 cups of concentrate it'd be two cups in the initial mixing, add a cup on day two, and add the last cup on day three.
When trying to diagnose the specific problem I was facing with the two concentrates, I couldn't find any references to their use. In keeping with helping random strangers on the Internet, I decided to post this public in case someone else has a similar problem with these juice sources and a search leads them here.