Wow, the thought of fermenting fruit juice in an entirely closed keg scares the heck out of me. I sure hope it has a good pressure-release safety valve! From making beer and cider, I ferment a batch in a 5 gallon glass carboy, with a bubbling airlock to keep it sterile. But I ferment it until all fermentation has ended, then stir in 1.5 cups of corn sugar (or 1.3 cups white sugar) and bottle it, which yields about 22-one litre bottles or 66 beer bottles. That added sugar then ferments in the bottles and carbonates the brew. The amount of sugar I add is actually about double what most recipes call for because I like a lot of carbonation. You are obviously using far more sugar than me if you are fermenting the fresh juice in a pressure vessel. Why you lose that carbonation is a bit of mystery to me because home-brewed beer and cider keep their carbonation as well as commercial brews. Sometimes brewers add "heading agents" to their beer if they have trouble maintaining carbonation. The problem is due to a lack of proteins in the brew, as proteins seem to be needed to hold onto the gas bubbles. Maybe that is your problem... lack of proteins in the fruit juice? Anyway, thought I'd mention it in case you wanted to look it up a little more or talk to someone at one of the local homebrew stores. One other thought... are you using a commercial wine yeast to ferment the juice? Or relying on natural yeasts that get onto the fruit? I'm not sure that would have any effect on the final carbonation, but a commercial yeast would give a more consistent product.

Here some pics.... In the foreground my fruits This is the Juiceing set up, made allot of Juice...yummy

I assume agave nectar could be used but I have no recipes for that. Other members of the forum may have some ideas. Certainly fruit juice can be used instead of sugar to sweeten, though these "jams" are more properly called spreads. Their characteristics differ from jams. The mouth feel will not be the same as jams made with sugar, they will be less glossy and once opened their "shelf life" in the refrigerator is shorter. Some recipes for fruit-juice-sweetened spreads have been posted on the forum, but if a search doesn't bring up what you need, let us know. Unfortunately, I don't know of any formula of equivalents. The kind of fruit juice you use and the amount varies depending upon the base fruit you're working with. The Bernardin book, unlike the Ball Book, has several of the recipes you're looking for, and I could certainly post if your search is unsuccessful. There's a spreadable mixed fruit (strawberries, apples, cherries and raspberries) sweetened with apple juice; a spreadable blueberries with grape juice, a spiced peach with apple juice, a strawberry-rhubarb with apple juice and a strawberry-apple. Also keep in mind that many forum members who want to limit their sugar like Pomona Pectin; that can be used with or without sugar, with fruit juice, purely according to your taste. That would probably offer the most reliable results and it seems reasonable agave nectar could be used with that. I hope this helps. Carol

Thanks everyone for your help.....And Carol that peach and pepper relish looks great and may be up next for some trial runs. Here is what I ended up with (my heavily amended hab gold recipe..;)) 4 cups peach nectar (45%fruit juice) 4 cups apricot nectar (45% fruit juice) 1 cup black cherry extract 1 cup each diced finely (used food processer for finer dice) of dried peaches, dried apricots, and dried tart cherries 2 cup finely chopped onion 1/2 cup finely chopped fatalli peppers 3 cups vinegar 7 cups sugar *still let sit overnight like original recipe* I let the fruit juices simmer while I did the chopping and that reduced their volumes a bit. I found that using the food processor on the dried fruit worked wonderfully. I eliminated the red bell pepper because with the addition of all that fruit the flavor was lost plus I wanted to make sure you got some onion flavor and this allowed me to increase my onion amount. I used fatalli pepper which is awesomely hot (one of the very hottest habaneros) but with all that sugar which counteracts the capsaicin, it is actually only reasonably hot. I left the pectin out because with all that sugar I was able to just cook to 225 degrees or so and it turned out just syrupy/glazy just like I wanted. Plus the extra fruit juices added some volume so this batch was not soooo chunky and full as the last batch. Tried some on some shrimp last night and it was wonderful. We just used it as a glaze in the last few minutes of cooking time. I was licking my fingers the whole time. Thanks everyone again for your help Kendra