Recent content by Captive

You can stop an active ferment with temperature. Either warm it up enough to kill the yeast or chill it enough to make them inactive. If you go the chill route, it will only stay inactive as long as it is chilled. When you say you added stabilizer, what was that? Was it a potassium sorbate...

Apple_Jacker: Serving with mint has become a mainstay for us. Mint is really easy to grow and my patch has gotten larger every year. I make Mint Granita which is kinda like a sweetened mint slushie. I keep a constant supply in a container in the freezer. When it's time for a Skeeter, I take...

It could just be off-gassing. Take an accurate hydrometer reading and watch for movement over the next day or so. Rapid airlock activity would obviously be cause for concern. From what I understand, sorbate does have a shelf life of about a year. Any change your sorbate was outdated?

Don't ship it through the post office, you getta bigga trouble. Ship is as marinade, fruit preserves, or seasoning via another method. Make sure you package it really well and triple bag it so if breakage happens, you don't ruin someone's white cashmere sweater being shipped in the package...

I make vinegar with some of my wine. I make both white and red wine vinegar. Used Braggs apple cider vinegar to get it started. Once you have a good mother established, all you have to do is add some wine once in a while. I don't dilute my wine additions with water, so the vinegar is much...

If this is a kit, and you added the supplied clearing agent, and it cleared, then it will likely clear again in the bottle. Store your bottles on their sides, the sediment should fall out again. Be careful when you move the bottle to open it so as not to stir up the sediment again. Carefully...

Grapefruit has a lot of complex flavor. There are even some bitter elements to it. Deciding when to remove the solids from the liquid is sometimes an factor of how much flavor extraction you want. Almost like making tea, if you leave the tea bag in longer, you're likely to get a stronger tea...

Here are my rules of thumb: 1) When bottling a batch, I try to use all the same color/style bottle if possible. It makes it easier to keep them together and identify them in the wine cellar. 2) Dark wines don't really benefit from clear bottles because you can't see through the wine anyway...

Personally, I would use the pectic enzyme if I wanted the finished product to clear. You may have trouble getting the enzyme to work while the ferment is going. You may be better off at this point to wait until the ferment completes, and then add the PE.

When making invert sugar, what you are doing is taking a long chain sugar (sucrose) and breaking it in "half" to form two shorter chain sugars (fructose and glucose). Yeast cannot digest sucrose. They do have an enzyme within themselves to break the sucrose down into the two shorter sugars...

Be cautious using wine conditioner. It's not a bad product, you just need to understand how it works. The sorbate in a bottle of wine conditioner is a measured amount dissolved into the total contents. You'll need to make sure you use enough wine conditioner to properly but not over medicate...

Use your nose as a guide. If you get any bad smells coming off the batch, the yeast are likely stressed. In an emergency, you can cool your batch with ice bombs. Take a couple of clean water bottles, fill them 7/8 full of water, cap and freeze them. You can now float these in your batch...

I don't top mine off when it is like yours. The lemon doesn't oxidize as fast as some other juices, and I like to leave room for the sugar addition when it is time to sweeten before bottling.

If you're going to make wine on a regular basis, you might want to go with vacuum degassing. I bought a brake bleeder pump from Harbor Freight Tools for something like $30. Been using it for over 5 years now without problem. I simply attach the vac pump to a piece of racking hose that is...

Dave, Skeeter Pee is a fun and delicious drink for hot weather consumption, especially for those who don't have beer as their first choice. While your quest may not produce optimal results, I think we can get you something to share. See my responses below. Good luck, if I were in your...