2011 Muscat, Day 4

6:00

• Room 74, must 74, Brix about 16.
• Bracing for a big burn.  Mihai has been making ice, and we'll add that to ours. 
• Brix was 18 fizzy in hydrometer, closer to 15 after agitating the juice, and close to 18 by refractometer - I'm calling it 16.

12:15

• Room 74, must 71, Brix 15.
• Maybe our first ever cooling of the must while there's still lots of sugar?  We had a lot of ice in there.  And now we've added a bunch of Mihai and Colleen's ice balloons.  Shoot for the 60's!?

16:15

• Room 74, must 64.  Did not take Brix, but very active.
• Not a typo!  I took the temp twice, to make sure I hadn't lost the ability to read the thermometer.  We added a heck of a lot of ice at lunch time, and almost all of it was balloon block and we broke the temperature barrier.  Next year, for sure, we'll arm ourselves with lots of balloons before before we press.
• It also occurred to me, as I was just paging through Warrick, that next year we should have a big primary fermenter handy at destemming - not to ferment in, but to hold the destemmed grapes so that the folks working the destemmer can go full speed, and not wait for the folks operating the press.

19:20

• Room 75, must 68, Brix 13.
• All ice melted, and added four balloons - not likely to last until morning.
• Day four falls have been 1 to 2 Brix every 6 hours or so.