JoeReal

coffee wine pro continued....

3. Secondary fermentor. You will do this using the same carboy. After 7 to 10 days, obtain a clean food grade plastic pail. Place the remaining brown sugar, 6 lbs into this pail and siphon off about two gallons of must from the primary unto the pail, add the remaining 10 tsp of yeast nutrient at this time, then stir very well to dissolve the sugar, and if you have the bottle of overflow must that you have saved, mix it in also. After the bubbles have died down, pour back into the primary. This time, you will not have as much foam developing, now you can place the regular air lock on the top. Just check to make sure everyday that you do not have anymore overflows and that the air lock have always some liquid in the trap. I use vodka or gin as my liquid in the airlock trap. Let this ferment for at least 2 months more before racking. If you still have fermentation, let it go for another month. You should end up with 18 to 21% alcohol on your coffee wine.


4. Racking and topping off. After 2 months or whatever time it took to complete your secondary, get a very clean 5 gallon glass carboy. Rack off from the seconday very carefully, leaving the sediments. This will be a real challenge because it will be difficult to see the tip of your racking cane. Save the sediments on a small narrow screw top bottle to recover more coffee wine for later purposes. You have not forgotten that 1/2 to 1 cup of ground coffee that I listed earlier, did you? We will use this along with the flavored gin or vodka that we saved earlier. Estimate the amount you would need for topping off, and if you do all the previous steps properly and depends upon how you rack your wine, you would only need about half a gallon to top off. Make half of the volume that you would need for topping off by brewing your ground coffee. For a half gallon volume, we would need to brew a quart of strong dark coffee from 1/2 cup of ground coffee, if you need more than this, just follow the same ratio for more coffee. I would recommend that you use an espresso machine to extract the coffee from the ground coffee. If you don't have an espresso machine, just use an ordinary coffee maker to brew really dark very strong coffee. Save the coffee extracts unto a clean pitcher. Then mix the coffee with the same amount of the flavored gin or vodka that you saved earlier, which would be 1 quart in our case, to have the whole estimated volume, which in our case would be 1/2 gallon, that you would need to completely top off the 5-gallon carboy. By mixing it with vodka or gin, you maintain almost the same 20% alcohol of your coffee wine. Adding the same amount of brewed strong coffee and gin or vodka will produce a flavored topoff that contains 20% alcohol. At this stage, it is okay to use brewed or espresso coffee from ground coffee because there will be no more significant fermentation that will happen beyond this stage, no danger of creating foul smell from aromatic oils of coffee, and besides at alcohol content of 18% or more, this is one truly stable wine. Then cover the 5-gallon carboy with an airlock, make sure there is alcohol in the liquid trap, use vodka or gin in your airlock. Let it stay in a warm place for 1 month to release the gasses.

5. Secondary racking: After a month, rack off unto another 5-gallon carboy and this time add whatever wine you have recovered from the bottled sediments you saved earlier, also add the remaining flavored vodka or gin for topping off, mix with a fresh batch of espresso or strong coffee from ground coffee, maintain the same volume of Vodka and Coffee. If you want more flavor, add the vanilla beans or cinnanom sticks directly inside the carboy. If you want a double or triple the caffeine, it is a good time to add at this stage also, follow recommendations on the rate of caffeine powder that you would need, excessive usage of additional caffeine can induce palpitations, nervousness and other caffeine related problems, so it is your responsibility to do the calculations right. You can buy caffeine powder from eBay merchants. Remove the airlock and replace this with a silicon bung, or solid rubber stopper, secure with duct tape or wire or both, and stash away in your cellar to age until it is one year from the date you started fermentation.

6. Final racking and sweetening: After one year from fermentation start date, rack off and sweeten to taste. Wait one week and then bottle the coffee wine.