The company’s website is a bit confusing. It says original drink was unused local pears. Then it says a local Switzerland pear, ‘Wasser’ was necessary for natural carbonation. But it was grafted to another perry pear to produce the current production pear.
Sounds more like Madison Ave adman copy than factual, anyone here know the true production for BabyCham?
My brief research into the topic makes it appear they ferment a base made from pear juice concentrate and add carbonated water for the bubbles. The historical article about it made it sound like the brewer used a readily available pear juice, probably popular in processing.
Presumably they filter the cleared pear wine and counterpressure fill the bottles with it and carbonated water. Seeing it was 6% I didn’t think they were going to hit 6% ABV from any pear juice pressed normally while adding enough carbonated water for much in the way of fizz. They might ferment a very strong pear wine (~18% and go 1:2 or more normal strength ~12% and go 1:1).
I think it was supposed to be sweet, so unless they’re adding artificial sweetener I don’t think they’re adding pear juice to ferment in the bottle to carbonate it (plus there would be yeast sediment). Bottling not particularly high ABV sweet wine (i.e. not finished/got stuck fermenting) usually results in glass hand grenades.
2 Likes