2015 Muscat, day 11

0600:  69F outside, 74 in the cellar.  225 hours since yeast.

0.9 Brix, still 28 bpm.  Down 0.6 (40%) in the last 11 hours.  Will need to know this evening how we should top up the carboys - one of our wines from the last few years, commercial wine, or water.  Will do the topping & SO2 addition tonight or , maybe more likely, tomorrow morning

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After charting this morning's numbers I went to look at the Brix to alcohol chart that we've pointed to for years on the sidebar - 404,it's gone.  But I found a handful of calculators at WineBussiness.com, and some helpful explanatory information.  Their Brix / alcohol calculator expects for you to know the conversion factor of the yeast you are using.  It's somewhere between 0.55 and 0.64: each gram of sugar will get converted into somewhere between .55 and .64 grams of alcohol.  So far so good.  But Lallemand's spec sheet for EC-1118 doesn't point me to a value I should use.  Which officially indicates, I think, that I shouldn't care about what I can't measure.  But it does make a big potential difference to the alcohol content of the finished wine.

The calculators at WineBusiness are a subset of the calculators at Vinoenology.  Geek heaven!

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2100:  75 F cellar, 73 F outside, 240 hours since yeast.

0.8 Brix from a different carboy, 26 burps per minute.  Hmmm.  15 hours, 0.1 Brix delta (11%).  In the morning I'll go back to the previous CB to see if there's a significant difference.  Used juice from the test CB to level out the three we have cooking.  When we get to less than zero I'll top everything up and add 30 ppm SO2.

2009 yield notes for the Merlot blend

As we're getting ready for 2010, here's a red wine yield guideline:

2009:

• 7 x 36# Merlot +
• 2 x 36# Cab S. +
• 1 x 36# P. Syrah
• ------------------
• 25 gal. pressed, fermented juice
• - 1.5 gal. in 1st rack
• - 1.5 gal. in 2nd rack and carelessness
• = 22 gal. finished wine
• = 100 to 110 bottles

10 cases require five 5 gal carboys plus smaller vessels.
10 cases require either a 50 gal primary, or two smaller primaries