Actually, even the cavendish bananas don't have enough sugars and acids to make good wine, that is why sugars are added in order to achieve a biologically stable wine content of at least 11% ABV. But bananas make decent beer. Bananas are recommended to be hydrolyzed (aka cooking in weak acid) even if they are the sweetest cavendish, it is necessary to hydrolyze the starches and other complex carbs and then add enzymes to yield more sugar for fermentation. If you don't cook even the sweet bananas and treat with enzymes, you will have hazy wines. Simply hydrolyzing it, will make clear wine wonders from bananas.
From the most reliable nutrition data ever (
http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts-C00001-01c20Tm.html), a fresh banana fruit without the peel, a serving is 225 grams and contains 28 grams of sugar, and that is only 12.4% sugar content, and if you include the peel, the sugar content would be dramatically lower. The 12.4% sugar content and without adding any water to banana pulp, and assuming we ferment this, would only yield 5.3% potential alcohol (PA) by volume, using the UC Davis formula: PA=((Brix-3)×SG)×0.59
Most literature from the sites that do not have scientific credibility or non-peer reviewed lists the banana as having a sugar content of 17%, but even so, the PA would translate to 7.8% abv, still a very unstable wine.
That is why you have to add sugar to all kinds of bananas to bring the Specific Gravity of your broth to at least 1.085 to achieve a PA of 11.1%. This is a no-brainer thing to do when adjusting sugar content of the actual cultivar you are using, if you have a hydrometer, which I do when making wines from fresh fruits.
With respect to starchy plantain types, the process is more involved as you will have to use amylaze to break down the starches into sugars and then ferment the broth. At any rate, the typical sugar content would be 12%, unless you lose a lot of water in the specific processing you chose, and in that case, the sugar becomes more concentrated, and flavors too, and your wine better. You will always have to add acid blend to make good banana wines.
Here's a guide on how to determine the potential alcohol content from various sugar content of the solution:
http://www.brsquared.org/wine/CalcInfo/HydSugAl.htm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gabe15
I dont know what these recipes call for but the bananas used to make beer and wine are a specialzed group of African bananas that you cant just go buy plants of, much less fruit. I would imagine standard Cavendish are much too sweet for that use, the ones in that group actually are not even reffered to as "Dessert", "Cooking", or "Plantain" but as "Beer", although they are usually within and derived from cooking and plantain bananas.
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