Pear Wine

This summer I picked a bunch of pears at my aunt’s house. Since it was quite a bit of pears collected in the pear pickin’ I decided to make pear wine. This recipe makes 6 gallons of wine.

Necessary Ingredients

24 pounds of pears

36 pints of water

24 cups of sugar

15 teaspoons of acid blend

3 teaspoons of pectic enzyme

6 teaspoons of nutrient

¼ teaspoon of potassium metabisulphite

1 package of yeast

Method:

I use a clean and sanitized primary fermenter which is basically a 7.5 gallon food grade plastic container that comes with a lid. This size of container allows me to make up to 6 gallons of wine at one time. Inside of this container I add 15 pints of water. To the water I add 24 cups of sugar which I stir in well with my large 28 inch long food grade plastic spoon.

This is the acid blend, pectic enzyme, nutrient and potassium metabisulphite.

Next, I add acid blend, pectic enzyme, nutrient and potassium metabisulphite. I blend these ingredients in well. I purchased these ingredients from Austin Homebrew Supply in Austin, Texas when I visit my daughter who attends college in San Marcos, Texas. But I have also had them ship me supplies as well. They are very informative and once when I ran into a wine problem I called them over the phone and they told me how to fix the problem. They are very helpful. The link below will take you right to their website.

http://www.austinhomebrew.com/

I wash the pears, remove the peel, and cut into small pieces.

I use a smasher to help release the juices in the pears.

This smashing method takes a little while, but really aids in allowing the juice to blend in well with the other added ingredients.

Next, I got a nylon straining bag and placed it inside the primary fermenter where all of the other ingredients had been added. I then put the 24 pounds of pears inside of the nylon straining bag and tied the top of the bag.

At this point I will cover the primary container. It will stay in a corner in my kitchen because it will need to be in a handy place because I will have to be checking it daily for the next few days. In 24 hours I will add yeast.

As you can tell the yeast is at work!

I will also eventually add 21 more pints of water. At this point there just is not enough room for the other water needed. I will add it when I finally remove the straining bag of pears.

Yeast is working hard!

I used wine thief to gather a sample of wine.

Added the hydrometer to the wine thief to take a specific gravity reading.

After I add the yeast I need to spend the next few days giving it a daily stir, pressing the pear pulp lightly to aid in the juice extraction, and checking the specific gravity of the wine. To check the specific gravity I use a wine thief. A wine thief is a hollow plastic tube with a hole in each end. It is used to remove a sample of wine from the container. Once I have my wine sample I drop in the hydrometer to read the results. The hydrometer is used to measure the specific gravity in the wine. The hydrometer is basically a glass thermometer like instrument that is used to monitor the progress of the fermentation. When the hydrometer reads 1.040 I will remove the pear straining bag and move the wine to a carboy.

To remove the pear straining bag requires a second pair of hands to do the job. My husband held the straining bag that contains the pears over the primary fermenter as he did this I squeezed the bag with both hands to get out all of the juice.

Now I will siphon the wine from the primary fermenter to the secondary fermenter.  My secondary fermenter is a glass carboy. This is called racking the wine. To siphon or rack the wine you need to let gravity help you to do the work. I put the primary fermenter on top of my kitchen counter and the secondary glass carboy on the kitchen floor right below. I used a siphon hose. The end where the wine will come out of goes into the glass carboy and the other end that has the siphon pump is submerged into the wine in the primary fermenter. I hold this end a little from the bottom of the fermenter. I then pump it about two times and then gravity takes over and moves the wine from the top container to the glass carboy container on the floor. I want to pump as little as possible because I do not want to get oxygen into my wine.

Once I rack the wine. I filled up to about within 2 inches of the airlock rubber bung with water. This is the rest of the water I needed to make the wine that could not fit into my primary fermenter because there was not enough room. I filled the rubber bung halfway with water. I then attach the airlock rubber bung to the top of the carboy.

I am attaching a brew hauler so that I can move the wine. A brew hauler is a sturdy polypropylene material that creates handles for the carboy. Once that the wine, 6 gallons of it, is in a glass carboy it can be quite heavy to lift. The brew hauler gives you a good grip on the carboy to let you more easily move it, but it is still pretty heavy.

The wine needs to ferment more. Fermentation is complete once the specific gravity has reached 1.000, which should take about another 3 weeks. At that point I will add stabilizer to the wine. In the meantime the wine needs to continue to ferment. The temperature for fermentation can vary. Some ferment at 55 or as high as 78 degrees Fahrenheit. The lower the temperature the longer it takes to ferment. What is more important than the temperature is the temperature fluctuations. The temperature needs to be constant because the yeast really cannot handle much wide variance in the temperature; hot one day cold the next. If this happens the yeast will go dormant. In about 3 weeks I will add the stabilizer and siphon off the sediment again.

Once the wine reaches a specific gravity of 1.000 I stabilize the wine.

Added stabilizer to bottom of carboy before racking wine.

To stabilize the wine I added 1 ½ teaspoons of stabilizer to the bottom of a clean and sanitized carboy.

Notice the layer of sediment at the bottom of the carboy.

I siphoned off the wine and left the sediment at the bottom of the carboy.

The Sediment

 I put the empty carboy on the floor and moved the pear wine filled carboy to a counter. To siphon or rack the wine you need to let gravity help you to do the work.  I used a siphon hose. The end where the wine will come out of goes into the empty carboy and the other end that has the siphon pump is submerged into the wine. I hold this end a little from the bottom, so as to not suck up any of the sediment. I then pump it about two times and then gravity takes over and moves the wine from the top container to the carboy container on the floor. I want to pump as little as possible because I do not want to get oxygen into my wine.

Once I rack the wine. I filled up to about within 2 inches of the airlock rubber bung with water. I make sure that the rubber bung is filled halfway with water. I then attach the airlock rubber bung to the top of the carboy and place it to the refrigerator. I will siphon the wine every 2 -3 weeks until the wine in clear for bottling which will take about 2 more months. At that time I will be ready to sweeten the wine to my taste and bottle it.