Rice wine primary ferment time
 

I've loosely followed this Jack Keller recipe:

http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/reques74.asp

It calls for a primary fermentation of two weeks, but after 5 days of
vigorous fermentation my SG is down to .990 and it's about to go
still. I'm inclined to transfer to secondary. Should I not?

Back information:

I've got about 10 years experience making grape and fruit wines.

I deviated from the recipe in two ways:
1. I started with about 2/3 of the sugar and an SG of 1.064 then
blended in the rest of the sugar after the fermentation was robust.
2. I used niagra grape juice instead of raisins.

Lastly, I used Red Star Pasteur Champagne yeast and the primary sits
in a temp controlled water bath at 70F.

Tim

Rice wine primary ferment time
 

That's the general problem with recipes that don't list technical
parameters like sg for different steps - 2 weeks can lead to very
diferent things, depending on the yeast used, temperature, nutrients,
starting sg. etc.

It's possible the raisins release the sugar slowly over the time of
the fermentation and that's why the time in primary is longer? - just
guessing.

I'd transfer ASAP if you're at 0.990 - that's dry.

Pp

On Feb 15, 6:40 am, wrote:
> I've loosely followed this Jack Keller recipe:
>
> http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/reques74.asp
>
> It calls for a primary fermentation of two weeks, but after 5 days of
> vigorous fermentation my SG is down to .990 and it's about to go
> still. I'm inclined to transfer to secondary. Should I not?
>
> Back information:
>
> I've got about 10 years experience making grape and fruit wines.
>
> I deviated from the recipe in two ways:
> 1. I started with about 2/3 of the sugar and an SG of 1.064 then
> blended in the rest of the sugar after the fermentation was robust.
> 2. I used niagra grape juice instead of raisins.
>
> Lastly, I used Red Star Pasteur Champagne yeast and the primary sits
> in a temp controlled water bath at 70F.
>
> Tim