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I have read countless articles and conflicting info. What is your alls take on whether or not to use pectic powder in the freshly squeezed melon juice. Today I squeezed out about 6 gallons of pure watermelon juice. DO I NEED TO ADD PECTIC POWDER DIRECTLY TO THE JUICE TO BREAK DOWN ANY COMPLEX SUGARS??? I am really stoked about this brandy! It took 10 small and 4 large watermelons to produce the 6 gallons. I have some special brandy yeast coming in tomorrow.

One final question....if I use sugar, would you use plain sugar or pure sugar cane sugar? All opinions are most definitely welcome!!! Thanks everyone in advance!

A quick Google search suggest that watermelons are not particularly rich in pectin. You can add the powder if you want but you're probably not going to get much of a bump in yield.

I would avoid adding sugar of any sort. Watermelon is a pretty subtle flavour and I don't know how well it'll carry over through distillation. You don't want to start diluting that with sugar.

That was my hopes to not use sugar. This evening I pickup 5 - 1 gallon of Arizona Watermelon fruit drink. It has no preservatives and kinda has a cherry note to it. It's made out of cherry,watermelon,kiwi,pear concentrate. I may incorporate this into the fermentation and also in the thumper in distillation. Also may add some Watermelon liquor to thumper and get an abv bump.

So I find the best way to carry flavor over is to do a stripping run of a sugar wash then add whatever to the liw wines for a week before spirit runs

I fermented 15 gallons last September with an initial brix of 8. No sugar. I stripped with steam and have about 1.5 gallons of low wines. Not a lot of flavor.

I'm hoping to have good harvest this year and try to get enough low wines for a larger spirit run

There's a thread I could not find that recommended k meta for fermentation to avoid infections.

zach wrote: ↑Sun Jun 16, 2024 12:05 pm There's a thread I could not find that recommended k meta for fermentation to avoid infections.

It might have been from a newbie who didn’t know that it shouldn’t be used for washes for distilling because the stink is hard to get rid of.

NZChris wrote: ↑Sun Jun 16, 2024 3:27 pm

zach wrote: ↑Sun Jun 16, 2024 12:05 pm There's a thread I could not find that recommended k meta for fermentation to avoid infections.

It might have been from a newbie who didn’t know that it shouldn’t be used for washes for distilling because the stink is hard to get rid of.

No.

It was a site member with experience that understands the downside of kmeta.

He was kind of enough to post the details of his success . (HighSpirits Dec 5 2019)

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