Hey, let's ferment these. Hi I'm Charles and welcome to DIY Fermentation, your site for doing fermentation on a shoestring budget. If you like what you see here then please click on the subscribe notify buttons below and I will try and do one of these once a week. For this recipe we're going to be using approximately four pounds of dark sweet pitted cherries. We've got one lemon, yeast, about four cups of sugar, about a gallon of water, straining bag, potato masher, and something to ferment it in.
Let's begin the process of extracting the juice and sterilizing the cherries at the same time. Let's go ahead and begin emptying our cherries. And let's go ahead and add our water. I'm only going to add about half the amount of water, say half a gallon. I'm going to go ahead and spring that to a boil.
And the reason why I'm only using half a gallon of water to start is that the cherries themselves are going to have a fair amount of juice. And since we're only making a one-gallon batch, I want to make sure that I don't add too much water. That basically is going to end up being potential wine that I'll have to discard. So we'll bring that to a boil.
Okay, it's been a good 15 minutes. Let's see how we're doing. Okay, not bad.
Nice good boil. Let's go ahead and turn the heat off. And yeah, we can go ahead and add our sugar at this time.
I'm going to go ahead and switch spoons for a hot second. I just want to check out the color of this juice. Not bad. Not bad at all.
Go ahead and let that come down to room temperature and then we'll move on to step, to the next step. Now that our cherries have come down to room temperature, close enough, we're just going to go ahead and strain it. And then we want to begin to squeeze out as much juice as possible before we put everything through a straining bag. If you have a fine mesh strainer, good for you. But all I've got is this strainer and one that's a little bit finer but not big enough.
So I'm just going to mash up these berries just a bit. All right that looks good enough. Let's remove the mashed cherries off to the side a little bit. Come back to these later. And the next thing we want to do is go ahead and put this in our fermenter.
Let's see if I am good enough to be able to pour all of this in without spilling it all over the place. So far, so good. Not bad.
I have to congratulate myself on that. Now with all of these skins that we just had, done. Go ahead and put those in the strainer bag as well.
Alright, now that everything's in the straining bag, let's see if we can go ahead and tie this off. Squeeze a little bit. Give it a little room to work with. Good enough.
Okay, that's done. Now normally in my earlier videos you would have seen me do this little pour operation over my dining room table, but with this cherry just being the way it is, I'm glad I did this in the sink because there is quite a bit of a little bit of splatter around the back of the sink. So now I'm just going to add enough water just to bring my volume up to one gallon-ish. That's about right. Still had, still had, oh, just a little bit more than a quarter of the water left.
I can make adjustments later if I need to adjust my original gravity reading for more or less sweetness. Let's go ahead and add our lemon juice. And just give that a quick little stir. I took a gravity reading at this point and came up with 1.112.
All that remains to be done now is simply adding in our yeast or pitching our yeast as some would have it and all you want to do for the most part is just sprinkle it around. Put your cap back on nice and tight and then just put it away.