How To Make Fresh Strawberry Wine At Home!!!

What's up y'all? Today I'm gonna show you, bar none, without a doubt, my favorite wine recipe. It's extremely easy. It's not tough at all. It's really pretty simple as far as wine recipes go and how intrusive you have to be. That said, it is a two-stage ferment. This is a super easy recipe to duplicate. It's my favorite. Gets a lot of positive attention from family and friends that come by the house or they get handed a bottle of wine. So without further ado, here's the mystery ingredient. Look at those beautiful strawberries. That is, I should start off by saying, I'm making roughly six gallons of wine. Really, really there's gonna be closer to seven. I'm gonna pretty much max this fermenter out. For that, I'm gonna enlist the help of my blender. I have off to the side here another fermenter with a micron bag in it that's gonna help me get all my pulp and seeds and all that good stuff out of my wine before I put it over into my carboy when I go from the first stage ferment to the second stage ferment. I just found that the bag worked better for me, but if you don't have one, it's not a deal breaker. You can absolutely do this recipe without one. I've done it countless times. I just found that I had to rack a little bit more, had a little bit more loss, but that's fine. This turns out to be a real bright colored, pinkish, orangish, reddish, fluorescent, kind of really funky, really pretty color. And I'm hoping that I get the same out of this batch, but we'll see. Well, first thing I gotta do is start blending these bad boys up. I'm gonna start blending these strawberries. I should say too, let me give you all an ingredient list real quick for this batch. I got 18 pounds of strawberries, 10 pounds of sugar, and I'll add how much water I need to, dilute my sugar down and get this thing filled up. All strawberries are not created equally, so they're gonna have different sugar content. You're never gonna know until you get all these things blended up, shove them over into your ferment with a little bit of water. You're not gonna be able to add the same pounds of strawberry per gallon to your ferment and get the same result. Again, I'm buying strawberries and it's the end of January here in Arkansas, so these strawberries are likely gonna have a different sugar content than the strawberries that I get here when they're in season. All that to say, I'm gonna take a specific gravity. Once I get all these blended up and thrown over in here, I'm gonna add a little bit of water and I'm gonna take a, well, I'll get into the specific gravity later. Let's get these things blended up. Shit. I'm just using this. We were made for each other. These strawberries have been washed. I've taken all of the tops off of them. See, there's no green foliage on any of these bad boys. I wish you guys could smell this. You're not gonna believe it, but it smells real strong like strawberry. Well, that was about all the strawberry blended I could handle. I got probably two gallons of strawberry puree. I'm gonna add three or so gallons of water and see what my specific gravity is at and see how much I need to bump it. All right, I've got about all the water that I'm gonna put in there for right now. I'm gonna attempt to get a specific gravity and see if I can get what I believe to be an accurate reading, and then I will see how much sugar I need to add to my mixture. It's also important to note that I have pretty much a standard practice that anything that's gonna come into contact with my ferment, even at this stage, I sanitize. Is that me being a little overly cautious? Maybe, probably, but I never have to worry about it. And that's what's important to me. Yeah, this is thick. I worry about getting an accurate reading at this stage because of just how thick this is. All right, so this is what I was worried about. Let me bring this a little closer and I'll show you. That is just not accurate. It's reading a 1.010. That is not compatible with the sugar content of strawberry, but that's okay. The reason for this is there's a significant amount of pulp in the strawberry mixture that I'm taking a specific gravity of. So I will calculate off the average strawberry specific gravity and I will bump my sugar accordingly. Well, what do you do? Well, I can tell you what I'm gonna do. So I will rely on this specific gravity that is a good average for strawberries and then I will bump with sugar accordingly based on how many gallons of mixture I have. My target is six and a half gallons, so I'm gonna add this amount of sugar. All right, I'm gonna bump it with sugar. I'm gonna measure with my heart here and get about, I don't know, seven to eight pounds of sugar. Well, that's about five pounds there or so. So I'm gonna take some hot water and I'm going to put in with this and I'm gonna use my blender. I'm gonna let my blender do the work and I'm gonna let this sugar saturate into this hot water solution so that it incorporates into my mix really nicely. All right, we have some technical difficulties there with the camera, but we are back up and running. We've got our sugar blended up in some hot water. All right, give that a nice stir. Be careful. All right, let's add the rest of our sugar. Now, just to be sure, when I think I'm pretty close, I'm gonna go weigh the rest of this bag, see how much I have left out of 10 and I'll know about what I've added in. Three pounds, two ounces with the bag. That's pretty good. Pretty good. Old Yakker ain't lost it yet. Let's get some hot water in this, get it blended up and put it off down in here. Also, I've just noticed that there is a gigantic ferment of six gallon of apple wine behind this camera. And if it sounds like nothing but bubbles this whole video, it is what it is. And on our dear. Nice. We've cleaned our fruit up. We've prepared it. We've mashed it, blended it, added our sugar. We're off in our fermenter, but here comes the most important part. Here are the three things, three things that I add to every ferment after I've taken my initial specific gravity. Pectic enzyme helps break down pectin, breaks down the cell walls, releases more of a fruit flavor into your wine. Pectic enzyme, I can't go over how important it is to making a wine. That's maybe a notch better than what you've been making. Had you not been using pectic enzyme, it's a difference maker for sure. Now you're supposed to add a half teaspoon per gallon of juice. At this point, I've got about seven gallons of mixture in here. Should be, should be somewhere that should be close. Hopefully, maybe. Measure with your heart. Second thing, EC-1118. Essentially, every wine that I make, I use EC-1118. If I'm prepping a wine for a brandy, still using EC-1118. It's a great yeast. It's hearty. It's got a high alcohol content of, it's what I use. It's what I like. It's my preference. But by all means, if you're using a different style or a strain of yeast, use what you like and what you have good results out of. This is just my preference. I'm using two packs today. I've got seven gallons. One pack would probably do it. It says they're good for five gallons. They'll do a little bit more, but what's the harm? You're not hurting yourself by adding any extra yeast in there. Two packs of yeast should work great. The third and final thing that I'm going to add into my strawberry wine here and the last, yeast nutrient. Big believer in it. I just think it really helps your ferment out, especially this time of year where it's a little bit colder. I'm looking for kind of any edge I can get to help my yeast thrive, be happy, be healthy, make a bunch of alcohol for me. I want them grabbing their briefcase and just jumping out of bed every morning, hopping in their little cars, going to the yeast factory and just really putting in some hours. Yeast nutrient, measure with your heart. I really actually, I don't think that was enough. Hold on, I'm going to get more. Oh, this is the same thing. It's just in a bigger bag. There's going to be, you're going to notice a foam develop on the top of this as you're incorporated in. You just want to cover all of the yeast. You want to get all of this knocked down in this fluid. Keep it from staying on the top and just hanging out and being dry and not getting down into your mixture. In all reality, once your mixture starts to kick off, it'll churn that stuff in, but just a little something I do. I'm going to go ahead and show you guys what this looks like now before I put the cap on it and the airlock. I'm going to let it sit for seven, eight days. Then we're going to put it over into our carboy. Look at that stuff. That's what it looks like there. That's what it looks like, foamy. You can already see kind of crazy, but this pulp and everything inside this bag is already kind of rising to the top. Bubbles are already kind of kicking off. Got this kind of foam that comes up here on the top. It's all mixed in, kind of moved to the side. Y'all can see that mixture. All right, nothing else to do, but pack her up. It's my first time sealing one of these things on a, on top of a bag. Oddly enough, it'll do it. It appears like we're getting a little pressure in our airlock. So I don't know, maybe it'll push pressure. Maybe it won't. I tend to think it probably will not because there's a bag breaking the seal between the top of this and the bucket, but that's fine. We're just kind of trying to seal this ferment off at this point from the outside and not allow any dust or bugs or any of that good stuff to get down in here. So that is it. That is the first part of the strawberry wine. Going to end up with a little bit more than six gallons. That's okay. We bumped it with plenty of sugar to make sure we were getting to that certain specific gravity that we wanted. If you want to check in on this ferment, I'll give you guys updates on this particular ferment in my short videos. So yeah. Thank you.