Lemon wine and orange wine

Orange on the left, lemon on the right. Lemon looks darker since I did an oopsie with the water level and had to boil for a while. Orange wine is at an fg of 1.006 and tastes very sweet, don’t even have to back sweeten it. It tastes different but I like it! 18% abv. Lemon wine has a very bitter back end. I’ll be screwing around with back sweetening it to see how it is. The lemon wine ended at 1.032 or 10% abv. Girlfriend likes both so I’m not sure which I’ll be turning into brandy but either way, citrus test was a success!

26 comments

We need technology that allows tasting things through the internet. 😩 I wanna try these so bad.
- Take a trip out to Buffalo NY USA, though make it quick, they never last long 🤣
- Me too
  
  You’re always welcome to swing on by if you come state side ever!

Whatever you do, do not put these next to the urine samples
- Bear Grylls has entered the chat

I am now going through Spain and it is orange season, you wouldn't believe how much oranges accidentally fell in my bags...
- How is the trip by the way? I imagine it’s a blast. But also, definitely take some home with you, the orange wine isn’t as good as the watermelon I made a while back, but it’s definitely up there lol
  
  Yeah for cycling the weather is amazing, for camping outside not so much... Amazing views that change all the time, historical cities but darn I use my card too often, I hope that it will get better when I can stay outside.
  Right now there are high winds and I just can't sleep because it's too loud.

How does the acidity of the citrus not kill the yeast needed to ferment?
- Good question! All I can say is same strain of yeast, the orange abv is almost double the lemon with one week less of fermentation. I did not add baking soda or try to balance the acidity to either. Yeast is a resilient organism it seems.
- Only once I've got yeast staggered by lemon juice addition, and that happened in secondary fermentation. If there is enough sugar (and, if I recall correctlt, there was added sugar in these ferments), they'll keep going. Acidity that slows them down for real is much higher, like what acetobacteria do. Yeast still thrives in bread starters and combucha, and those are sour!

Love to see it
- Also shit, just was about to go back to the old comment you made on one of my older posts to give you an update but realized you commented here. Orange wine turned out fantastic! I’ll report back in the next few days on distilling the lemon wine, that ones got a strong flavor of pith on the beck end. Backsweetening it helped but, oddly, the orange wine is the winner without any back sweetening. It tastes very different from any other wine I’ve made, including the watermelon, but it’s quite nice. hopefully my girlfriend doesn’t notice I’ve been “sampling” lots of glasses since I tried it for “taste tests” since I told her one of the citrus wines was just for her lol
  
  I'm a big limoncello fan, I wonder if it will turn out similar
- They’re tasty. After screwing around with back sweetening the lemon wine it seems the girlfriend prefers the orange wine. So I’ll have some nice lemon brandy in the next few days for myself!

26 comments