Wassail follow up

I stirred the wassail for about five minutes to aireate tonight.

I was doing some reading in the wine making book that I have and found that you should almost always have a Specific gravity close to, if not above, 1.100 to start. That way you have a potential alcohol content of 10%. That 10% is needed if the wine is going to be stored long term (like longer than a couple of months)

I went back to the wassail to re-evaluate this. It's still not bubbling very much, and it being a day later I'm a bit concerned. So I measured it again, and it still reads 1.052. Now, there is some fruit pulp floating around in there and I know that that can throw an SG reading off a bit, but I'm not sure which way. I don't have a whole lot of space in the jug to add simple sugar water (syrup), but I'm gonna try.

I mixed up ~4 cups of sugar in ~2 cups of water on the stove and heated slowly. It took a lot of stirring and time to get it all to dissolve.

I tried (laughingly) to get an SG measurement of this mixture and it was so off the charts that I thought it was a Beatles album. (nothing? OK, I'll leave out the bad puns that makes no cents)(whups) I'm *guessing* it was somewhere above 1.200. I did some convoluted math to try to estimate how that would translate when diluted out to the five gallon total.

200 in 1/4 gallon cut to four gallons would be 200 / 8 = 25 or 1.025.

I realize now that I'm shooting for five gallons, but this was cowboy'd to death already, why not take it a little further? Seeing as 1.052 (initial reading) plus an estimated 1.025 only got me 1.077, I thought I needed to go a little further. I managed to get 3 more cups of sugar to disolve into the syrup, and holy crap it is thick and syrupy.

Anyone know how much sugar you can disolve in water at 100F?

Anyway, this stuff was much hotter than that, so I killed the heat, covered it, and cooled it quickly by wrapping it in a cold wet towel and blowing a fan at it. While cooling, I used a turkey baster (poor man's wine thief) to suck some must off and put it into a plastic beer bottle, to make room for the syrup. (I'll keep this as a "top up" supply for when I rack this) Once the syrup cooled to about125F, I poured it into the carboy with the rest of the must and it filled it very close to the top.

My yeasties love me! It wasn't but 5 minutes later that I checked it and the bubbling had taken off like mad.

I'm gonna have to vent the plastic bottle every day or so and I'll keep it right next to the 5-gal jug until I need it so that it's temperature exposure is pretty much the same as the rest of the must.