G'day Guy's,
Well with winter this has been a very long ferment and originally I did just a 4 litre ferment in my 5 litre beaker.
600 grams of diced strawberries then frozen for for about a month to ensure it was a brick.
Inverted 2 kg of sugar to make a simple solution
Re-hydrated some EC1118 yeast
Made a paper towel cover using some mnasking tape and found over night it had foamed up something horrid and lost about 300ml. Anyway wrapped it up after cleaning up the mess and bubbles were present showing the ferment was still going. Left it for a month and took a sg reading and WFT :teasing-tease: 1118 SG. :angry-banghead: :angry-banghead: :angry-banghead:
So decided to get my old 25 litre fermenter out and I diluted the ferment with 100% of rainwater, took a sg reading and it showed 1065 so just let it ferment out. Last weekend did a sg check and 1010 was the reading and the other day I took another and it's down to 1001 and still active. So the EC 1118 yeast is doing a great job and that is the one I bought off the group buy a few years ago. Still haven't cracked open the second block but both live in the fridge so usebuy dates are only a guide.
The plan is to do a couple of strip runs in my old 2" pot still and as it's going to take ages for the TPW wash to finish I'll use some of the low wines of TPW I made to boost the yield of the strip runs. Then I'll do a nice slow spirit run in the pot still and temper it down to 65%, time to get the hacksaw out and saw a bit more off my big domino that originally weighed up to 2.2kg. It came to me after I gave a bottle to my mate to give to a foreman, now how was I to know this foreman toasted French Oak. So he put a 5kg lunp of French Oak in the toaster and gave me the result. A fully toasted domino to provide years of aging different brews and so far the result of this oak is outstanding.
Basically with any fruit if it has any brix the EC1118 yeast will ferment it but always freeze first to bring out the sugars then just bump it up with some simple solution to get the right sg for the volume.
Anyway I'll check the sg this weekend and as always I let it clear for a week or two before strriping that way I know it won't foam up due to the yeasties being still active.
More to come when I am ready to strip this ferment and I do know it will be an interesting drop to try at xmas.
Cheers Bryan