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This past weekend was an adventure in feta! I used 2 gallons of whole milk from some grocery store brand. I figure why use the ultra fancypants stuff on a first batch in case something goes terribly wrong. The whole process took a few days (I started on Sunday and finished up Wednesday), but...

Hi everyone! I've been away for a bit, but now I'm glad to be back on the forum. It's nice to see some familiar names are still around! Anyways, life events a few years ago caused me to sell all my wonderful beer and wine making gear. Now that life is normal, I'd like to get back on the...

It looks like life shifted in an unexpected direction and I'm out of the wine hobby. Here's what we have (links are craigslist): Italian floor corker and a nearly full bag of #9 corks $110 This corker is amazing. I've used her once and she took some hassle out of bottling day...

My little Nissan Sentra turned 100k miles a few weeks ago, and it's time to either get her serviced or do some of the stuff myself. At the moment, I'm opting to learn more about the car and do a few things myself. First off is changing the spark plugs. It costs an arm and a leg to have it...

I've heard the folks who seemed to have learned the hard way that smoking your very first turkey on Thanksgiving is generally a bad idea. It seemed like sage advice, so this week I hunted down a frozen turkey at the grocery store and smoked it. After poking around some sites and looking for...

Has anyone used DME in their wine making? After some reading, I've heard people sometimes use 1 lb extra light DME per gallon of wine, but I'm having trouble finding the outcome of these batches. From what I understand, DME adds body and mouth feel, and a bit of residual un-fermentable...

I'm trying to clean out my freezer from last year's fruit picking frenzy. It was my intention to start a blackberry blueberry mead, but I just took an inventory of my freezer fruit, and I also have strawberries and raspberries, in addition to the other two fruits. Pretty sure I have at least 8...

I whipped up a batch of dried fruit wine tonight. Elderberries, blueberries, and some raisins. Tell me what you think of this 2 gallon batch: 10 oz dried blueberries (dried them myself this past summer) 5 oz dried elderberries (bought at store) 4 oz raisins 2 oz bentonite in primary to...

I was considering buying a FoodSaver or Mity Vac to degas a few batches of wine, but all my wines are currently in 3 gallon Better Bottles, and I don't own any class carboys. Has anyone successfully (read: without the carboys imploding and making a mess) degassed wine in a Better Bottle using...

If so, how did it come out? I was browsing around the bulk food section of the grocery store the other day and found dried rose hips, and I thought it would make a fun wine or mead, but I have no idea what these things taste like. For those of you who've tried it, is it good? Any opinions are...

I just opened up some of JAOM I bottled one year ago. It's good, but it has a distinct soy sauce flavor. A few other wines I've made have the soy sauce flavor as well; these are all my first few batches of wine/mead that I'm referring to. I'm pretty good with sanitizing everything, and...

I came across 25 pounds of pears the other day and decided a pear cider would be a tasty fun experiment. After a bit of searching, I found absolutely nothing that would help me with a recipe, so I pretended I knew what I was doing and made it up as I went along. Yesterday the pears were...

I'm really getting into Port lately, and I thought it would be fun to make a few 1 gallon batches of some fruit port. Here's what I have so far for a peach recipe: Ingredients: Yeast (not sure what kind yet) 6 lbs peaches 1 Can White Welch's Grape Juice Concentrate Sugar go SG 1.090...

I found a good price in cherries today (sweet cherries), and I'm thinking of making a 3 gallon batch of cherry cider. Here's my recipe so far: 3 Gallons Tree Top Apple Cider Nutrients as needed 1 T pectic enzyme 3 Campden tabs 6 lb cherries in the primary (not pitted, just frozen and...

I have a Ginger Peach Mead that's been sitting around for about 10 months, and a Rhubarb wine that's been around for a while as well. They both had a bit of haze, so I threw in some bentonite (I want to bottle them soon to free up the carboys). After 3 days I didn't see any noticeable...

I just had the pleasure of opening a bottle of Plum wine I started back in August 2008 and bottled in Feb 09. The sticky I stuck on the bottle said to wait until August, but I just couldn't wait anymore. I was really scared it would be oxygenated or taste terrible, but omg it's amazing! It...

I'm just starting a one gallon batch of lilac wine (from Jack Keller's site), but I'm having some trouble determining exactly how many grams 3.5 quarts is (or how to measure quarts at all). I picked 180 grams of flowers, so I'm starting the batch off that way, but I'm not too far along now that...

I had an interesting idea the other day, and I thought I’d run it by everyone else to get their take on it. If you were to make up a gallon of wine (something fruity like pineapple or mango) and bulk age it for a while. When bottling time comes around, throw in some potassium sorbate to...

Hi everyone! I've trolled for weeks and I thought it was time to sign up and say hi to the brewin' crowd. I'm into wine, mead, and cider. I started a batch of JAOM, apfelwein, Welch's grape juice mead, and Welch's grape juice wine this past weekend. The Welch's wine wasn't planned; it was...