Rhubarb champagne?

[montjoye]

scaled up from Sally Wise

1.5kg rhubarb, washed and chopped
1.5kg sugar
2 small lemons, sliced
375ml cider vinegar
8.6L water

mix* in a food safe bucket, put a clean cloth over, leave 48 hrs. Strain
Here is where I plan to deviate from the recipe. One is suppose to bottle at this point and rely on wild yeast to ferment or partially ferment the sugar. The downside of this method is the fairly high chance of burst bottles.

So my experiment is to strain into the fermenter, add champagne yeast, ferment, then bottle like beer with a sugar charge for controlled carbonation. It might be horrid, it might be nice, but I think it is a worthy experiment and a reasonable plan for the rhubarb I needed to harvest in order to move the plant.

8.6L looks pretty lonely in a 30L fermenter. Prettily pink even. Starting density is 1.060 at 13deg.




* I used a hot kettle worth of the water to help dissolve the sugar, house was at ~13deg.