So we’ve got a new fermenter full of cranberry wine doing the whole primary fermentation thing. Hopefully it’ll turn out as good as the last batch…
Sunday evening I started the whole washing/sorting/crushing routine, using the big winepress to flatten the cranberries, half a bag at a time.
This was an incredibly slow process.
Mostly the problem was that the crushed berries on the top and bottom of the stack would form a protective layer for the berries in the middle. And, unfortunately, I didn’t use a mesh bag. If I had, I could have easily fished the whole disc of mush out, rolled it around, and then popped it back in for recompression.
After it took about half an hour to do one bag of berries, I gave up on the wine press and switched over to using the blender. This took about another half hour to finish off the other seven bags of berries. Unfortunately, the seven bags of berries also managed to finish off the blender.
When I next go appliance shopping, I’ll have to look for something which won’t start smoking after chopping fourteen half-pitchers of berries over half an hour.
Either that or I’ll have to really step up the pace of winemaking to justify getting one of the $400 hand cranked crushers from E. C. Kraus. Anything rated for processing over 7/8 of a ton of grapes per hour wouldn’t have any trouble with sixteen pounds of cranberries.