Beer Forum

Hi all,

I have a winemaker friend who has given me a 5 gallon carboy of grape juice to ferment out into wine. I'd rather make pyment, as my next door neighbor is a beekeeper and has plenty of honey. I've never made wine before and am trying to find a good recipe. The juice is from white grapes, beyond that I don't have much details on them except that they're a good wine variety. I can get details from him today (gravity, etc) when I get the grape juice. He's already pitched a wine yeast into the must, and it's already been fermenting out for 3-4 days. What I'd like to know is how much honey to add to this, how much water, and if I'd need anything else. It'd be nice to make a 10 gallon batch and use 2 carboys, but I'm not sure if there's enough grape juice for that. This will be my 2nd mead attempt, I made a table mead (not very strong, 7.5 lbs honey in a 5 gal carboy) with ginseng and ginger root back in February, and am about to bottle it up sometime this month. Any suggestions on how I can make a good pyment out of this grape juice would be greatly appreciated.

You know what I'm thinking.... since you've already got a batch of wine fermenting away in its own 5-gallon carboy, why not make another 5-gallon batch of mead, then ferment that out, and finally at bottling time, mix the two batches based on taste??? It'd be a heck of a lot less guessing of what's going to taste good and what's not. I think that's the way I'd do it. Not to mention, if you want to split the batches to make some plain mead (or even flavored if you want!), some pyment, and some plain wine, you could get 3 or more types of fermented beverages out of just 2 carboys! Sounds like the best plan if you ask me! (I can't believe I thought of it!!! )

Ferment out the wine. It will probably end up around 0.996 gravity. At the same time, make a 5 gallon traditional mead with the honey. If you want it sweeter, stronger alcohol, add more honey. Less alcohol drier, less honey. Once completely done fermenting and stabilizing and clearing, blend the wine and mead to your taste. I made my first wine kit (merlot). I have a sack sweet traditional mead that stopped at 1.050. I blended some of the merlot with the mead to make a less sweet pyment. Worked out great.

What might also be interesting is to take 2 1/2 gallons of the fermenting wine, combine with 8 to 10 pounds of honey in another carboy and let that ferment out. Then you have 2 1/2 gallons of wine and about 3 gallons of pyment.

Cool, sounds like folks would prefer to blend after the ferment rather than before. My only concern with fermenting out this wine fully is that it's about 4 gallons in a 5 gallon carboy, so there's lots of headspace and I don't have any extra must to top off with. I have a 6 month old mead that I'm ready to bottle now that I could blend with, but it's heavily spiced with ginseng and ginger, so it may not be ideal for mixing with wine (who knows, though, it might be great!). I think I'll make enough of a mead must to top off my wine carboy just for sanitation purposes to get rid of all that headspace. I've got enough carboys, I think I'll also make a batch of non-spiced mead and blend the two down the road sometime. Thanks again for all the feedback, plenty of room for experimentation in meadmaking!