Alcofrolics Anyonymous....

Bananas add body to wine, if you can get them reduced by 90% [1] their sugar content value alone will exceed their cost. I'll wait for these to go squishy and put them in the steam juice extractor with some Blackberries, Elderberries, etc. for a batch of heavy red.



[1] The 'original' price on stickers is after an initial 50% reduction.

 

It's cheaper to buy cartons of pure Pineapple juice, Apple juice, Grape juice, etc. than it costs to buy the whole fruit with the same amount of juice in. Using carton juice will produce a wine that matures quicker than one pulp fermented.

For 5 galls try 5L White grape juice (Waitrose, NB not all stores still stock it, but if you phone their CS they'll advise you of which locsl stores do), 3L of ' value' Apple juice and 2L of Pineapple juice, 3.5Kg of sugar and water to 5 gallls.


P.S. I think I've read that Watermelon wine is insipid, but if you find them reduced really cheap you should be able to cut the flesh into chunks, slow freeze for a few days, then defrost in the bag, cutting off a corner with it sitting in seive so the juice pours out into a small bucket/tub underneath (towel over to keep flies out) and this will avoid a messy pulp fermentation, but you'll need to add some other juices to get enough flavour.

 

Daughter's back at uni so I've got the extra space needed to start brewing again.

Put a 99p EC1118 sachet in 1L of starter juice mix a couple of days ago and I'm now dividing it into 2 and topping back up to 1L with sugar solution, then in another 2 or 3 days I'll divide again, adding blackberry juice to some and apple juice to others, until I have 5 starters for 2 x 6gall whites 2 × 6gall reds and 1 x 5L cider. Cost of yeast only 4p/gall.

The cider is a special batch for our daughter and will be made from juice pressed from apples from her ex-headmaster's garden, mixed with juice from crab apples growing in the hedge along her old school. The sloe gin we're making for one of her Xmas presents was made using sloes also from her old school hedge.

Hope you didn't get Waitrose red grape juice as that's very expensive. Lidl red/white mixed grape juice is far cheaper and a better substitute for white grape juice.

 

How did that wine turn out? I would've thought was probably dissapointing, as WGJ is far more suited to quick maturing juice wines than RGJ. I bought another 6 cartons from Waitrose at the weekend as a neiighbour asked me to buy them a newspaper, so got their expensive paper free with my £10.50 purchase to get the money of my own purchases.

Finished my 2017 apple pressing on Saturday, and got some more cider on. I still haven't turned the heating on so poured a couple of gallons of hot, freshly pasteurised juice in with another 4 galls of previously bottled juice to warm it up before pitching the yeast.

When that finishes I'll have about 75 galls of wine and 18 galls cider to keep me going for a while, nothing else going on now until the weather warms up, perhaps around late April.

I also still have all the Blackberry/Elderberry/Apple/Plum juice I'll need for next year, and probably for most of 2019, but once pasteurised it lasts for several years and I believe in always keeping a decent stock of ingredients in hand.