Brix

And in that, I do any adjustments I need.

If the Brix was super high, I would add water.

If it needed tartaric acid because the pH was too high and or the TA was too low, I would do that here.

You want to do all these additions before you start fermentation.

And like I said, 10% of the recommended dosage, you can save some money here.

My ML fermentations are usually done at the same time my wines are sugar dry, done with primary fermentation, less than two grams per liter, sugar, glucose, fructose.

How many other ways can I say it? I just wanna bring home the point that Brix does not tell you dryness.

I can't say this enough.

In 500 liter punch-ins, no new oak.

And basically this fruit came in at a 19.9 Brix, which is practically like sparkling wine levels.

It is sparkling

wine levels.

So we started going down the levels or the ladder of desired food sources.

what happens in a plant that doesn't necessarily have surplus levels of nitrates, but all of a sudden its sugar levels are no longer adequate? It's not photosynthesizing well, Brix levels start dropping.

What happens to the endophytes within, to the fusarium that is endophytically within that plant?

So once it runs out of the sugars, aldehydes, and alcohols and aldehydes, it will go and search for nitrate.

So if you have plant sap meters, and many growers do buy them, you could on-farm in real time actually squeeze the sap out of either fruit or leaf petioles, and that would identify the nutrient makeup in the plant sap.

And for instance, you can use your EC, your electrical conductivity, and your Briggs measurements, because if the EC goes up, Your nitrogen goes up in the plant and your Brix goes down, which means less fuel tolerance to diseases and insects.

You get soft growth and you often have compromised fruit quality.

So all those tools together then paint the bigger picture.

But the other thing is the animal health.

In Africa, there's... well, dairy farms we're doing there, we're doing SAP analysis, send it up to Nova Crop Control, and in there we're finding that the- Total nitrogen in the plant sap is higher by 20 to 24% to date, but also the Brix or the sugar level is a lot higher.

And also, the proportion of, uh, total nitrogen that's in the form of ammonia and nitrate is way down, which is a good thing.

Mm.

And that's probably why the Brix is higher, because the plant's not having to turn ammonia and nitrate, which is what you get from urea-

Mm

... and use energy to turn it into amino acids.

Um, and then another one that I have used to help with powdery mildew is this, um, I don't have the container with me, but it's called Armor.

And it's basically, it's helping your plant raise the Brix level.

And they say it's, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of science that goes back and forth depending on what side of the line you're on in, um, in research.

But, uh, there's one amazing, highly intelligent researcher, Heber Hall, and he is, uh, saying, "Get your Brix above at least an eight and you won't have bug problems." Um-

What's a Brix? What's a Brix level?

A Brix is, like, the sugar, the sweetness.

Hmm.

So when you think of maple syrup-