Good job Banana72. During that US visit I hope you pick up some of the more helpful ingredients so you can refine your wines after your return. Various wine yeast, yeast energizers, various acids, disinfecting tablets and gelatin clearifyers. Oh, and some wine extracts. 35 to 45 dollars for each that produce 5 gallons so you may need to pick up some additional 19 litre aqua bottles when you get back here. The worst to find here are good wine bottles so as I mentioned to you, any bottle with a good seal works. I have my wines primarily in 500ml Lemon water bottles.
My ginger wine was a hit and maybe only 500ml left of that. I decided to make. Papaya wine. Now, normally you would be chopping up the fruit and mashing it and then letting it set in a nylon juice bag in water for 10 days, while you squeeze the bag every two days to get out the flavor. I decided that I didn't want to do a 10 day thing so when I bought the papaya I picked out two of the giant ones. Almost 8 kilos total papaya. 50,000 rupiah. Got my big covered pot and put in a little over a cup of water in it. Peeled the papaya, cleaned out the seeds, chopped up the meat. Put the meat and some of the peelings in the pot, covered, and steamed it for about 15 minutes to soften the flesh. Once it cooled a bit I mashed it a bit with a potato masher and then filled my nylon juice bag and started squeezing. OK, that was a pain in the ass but after 1.5 hours of squeezing out the juice and some very tired hands, I got 5 litres of juice out. That included the water I started with but I pretty much had pure juice and not all the flavored water you would normally have.
Brought the juice back up to almost boiling, added the sugar and removed from heat. i only used 1/2 cup sugar per litre since the juice itself was pretty sweet. Added my acid, yeast nutriant, and tannins and let cool. Put in my primary, added some champagne type yeast, covered it up, let it rock and roll on it,s own. After 3 days of being a crazy sugar eater, it stopped completly. That seemed a bit early so I gave it a taste. Yep, out of sugar and extra dry. Transfered to secondary fermentator and added a good cup of sugar syrup and just a bit more yeast to see if I could get it going again. It perked up for an additional day and then stopped again. Upon tasting it I found it still had a bit of the sweetness so in all liklihood it stopped because the alcohol has killed off the yeast. The yeast I used this time should die off at about 14% alcohol so I'm good that way.
Let it set as is for a week to get some natural clearing as sedimate dropped to the bottom. After a week I transfered to a new container and added my gelatin to clearify it. Waited 3 more days and it was a nice clear amber color. Put it in bottles and viola. 8, 500ml bottles.
I think next I will try the coconut water and see how that comes out.