JoeReal

One of the problems of making banana wine is that bananas will lose their aroma once you process them into wine. Here's my technique of making banana wine that retains its aroma.

Per one gallon wine:

4 lbs bananas, Chiquita or Dole
2.25 lbs brown sugar
3 tsp acid blend
1 tsp Yeast nutrient
1 packet complete enzyme
1 packet wine yeast, Lalvin D47
enough clean cold water

Peel off bananas and place unto large pressure cooker. Add 2 tsp acid blend, and mash it. Add 1 cup water. Seal off pressure cooker and put on high heat until the relief valve pops up. Then set to medium heat and cook for 15 minutes. Then take pressure cooker to kitchen sink and quickly cool down by running cold tap water over pressure cooker for 5 minutes. Remove cover, add 2 cups clean cold water, mix, then add 1 tsp acid blend and 1 packet complete enzyme. Place cover back, and let stand for 2 hours.

Explanation: The above steps has not been done by any wine makers that I know of, and if they did, they must have read my recipe or posting elsewhere. The above steps illustrates a simple acid hydrolysis using ordinary kitchen tools. We know that bananas already have sugar but it still has a lot of complex carbohydrates that can make wine cloudy. The low acid at high temperature and pressure breaks down the starches and other complex carbohydrates in the banana into sugars, increasing the yield of sugar. The next step where we have added complete enzyme (composed of amylase, pectic enzyme and amylo-glucosidase) will further breakdown other starches and carbohydrates and pectins to help make very clear wine, and also increase yield of sugars from banana's complex carbohydrate components, those that have escaped acid hydrolysis step. The enzymatic reactions using amylases are best done at temperature of 122 deg F, and the above step of cooling down should end up at that range of temperature. The resulting mixture would be pinkish in color with very strong banana aroma.

Open pressure cooker, add 2.25 lbs of sugar, and enough clean water to make one gallon and 1 pint. Stir to dissolve the sugar. You may need to warm up slightly to dissolve the sugar as you stir. Cover and let it cool until as warm as body temperature.

Transfer the contents unto your primary fermenter, add 1 tsp yeast nutrient, the yeast, and stir. Cover the primary fermenter to keep out flies, then after 5 days transfer unto the secondary fermenter that has an air trap. Rack off after a month, and then rack off again after 2 more months. The wine should be drinkable at this stage, but one year after you started fermentation, it would taste really good. (Primary and secondary fermenters are not to be confused with alcoholic and malo-lactic fermentation. To understand these terms, check out Jack Keller's site: http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/glossary.asp)

Note that there is no need to use any sulfites or campden tablets as we basically have sterilized the bananas during the pressure cooking process. This makes for a wine that is drinkable in quicker time, and the only sulfites on it will be naturally coming from bananas. Minimum sulfite content, are good for the 2% of the population who are sensitive to sulfites.

MediaHound

Sherry wine tips from Joe in this thread:
http://www.bananas.org/showthread.php?p=5541