Bear Grylls has entered the chat

How is the trip by the way? I imagine it’s a blast. But also, definitely take some home with you, the orange wine isn’t as good as the watermelon I made a while back, but it’s definitely up there lol

Also shit, just was about to go back to the old comment you made on one of my older posts to give you an update but realized you commented here. Orange wine turned out fantastic! I’ll report back in the next few days on distilling the lemon wine, that ones got a strong flavor of pith on the beck end. Backsweetening it helped but, oddly, the orange wine is the winner without any back sweetening. It tastes very different from any other wine I’ve made, including the watermelon, but it’s quite nice. hopefully my girlfriend doesn’t notice I’ve been “sampling” lots of glasses since I tried it for “taste tests” since I told her one of the citrus wines was just for her lol

They’re tasty. After screwing around with back sweetening the lemon wine it seems the girlfriend prefers the orange wine. So I’ll have some nice lemon brandy in the next few days for myself!

Good question! All I can say is same strain of yeast, the orange abv is almost double the lemon with one week less of fermentation. I did not add baking soda or try to balance the acidity to either. Yeast is a resilient organism it seems.

Only once I've got yeast staggered by lemon juice addition, and that happened in secondary fermentation. If there is enough sugar (and, if I recall correctlt, there was added sugar in these ferments), they'll keep going. Acidity that slows them down for real is much higher, like what acetobacteria do. Yeast still thrives in bread starters and combucha, and those are sour!