New homebrewer

Hi, Just to start off, i'm 22 and recently got interested in home-brewing after my grandpa gave me some wine he made. He has a large plastic bucket and made orange wine from his orange tree. I've never liked wine in my life and would rather drink a beer, but his was so good that I could drink it like I would orange juice. The way he brewed his though and some things i've read have made me wonder which is really the proper way. For example:

His plastic bucket has a large mouth to it, and he just had a cheesecloth rubber-band attached to it. He had it open to the air like this for several months before siphoning it out into mason jars. Is it really OK to leave it open to air this long? Would it have turned out better if he would have air-locked it eventually?

He didn't use any special equipment and didn't even use yeast. He just boiled oranges in water and put that in to the bucket and let it sit. It turned out very sweet and with quite a bite to it. Would it have taken less time or turned out better if he used wine yeast?

Also his had a slight vinegar taste to it. Is this normal for home-brewed drinks?

Anyway, I went to a local store and bought some welch's grape juice and a 3 pack of bakers yeast and started a gallon of my own grape wine in a 1 gallon milk jug. I don't expect it to be nearly half as good as my grandpa's was, but this seems like something I will enjoy and eventually buy proper equipment for. So hello everyone!

I've heard of two kinds of wine made with oranges

Both of which Ive been promising myself to brew every orange season but never have

More info here http://www.easy-wine.net/making-homemade-orange-wine.htm

But this sounds more like hooch. Ive heard of open fermentation to increase ester production but this is never a long term thing.

Lots of things are brewed with wild yeast. Especially wines and cider because the yeast are abundant on the skins of fruits. But you will almost always get a better result if you kill the wild yeast and pitch a known good yeast.

Vinegar taste is often as a result of wild (unwanted) yeast

If your going to brew wine at home I would definitly not use anything from the supermarket. ESPECIALLY bakers yeast. It will taste really bad.

Hit up your local home brew store and they can hook you up with everything you need for a small batch of wine. On the cheap to.

Agreed, The bakers yeast will not do what you want. And the preservatives in the juice may also cause problems.

I suggest buying proper equipment and a good wine ingredient kit. I have done a couple and they have been as good as or better than most commercial wines.

Welcome to the forum. You are starting down a road that most of us have been through. Relative gives some good home made wine and we try to do it ourselves and after several months we find ouselves up to our necks in carboys.

Your grandpa used spontaneous fermentation for his wine which may or may not be a good thing in most places. Yeast are all around us all the time. If you live in regions where wine making is common then often those wineries in eons past would dump good yeast cakes out in the vineyards to help cultivate good wild yeast. Here in the states where I live and our land is very young compared to the rest of the world in relation to wine making so our wild yeast is very random and often not as strong.

Another problem with spontaneous fermentation is that there is more than just yeast around us. All sorts of bacteria can infect a wine. When yeast get to cultivating they can usually out compete many bacteria and keep them from causing an infection as long as the bacteria is not too plentiful. But with spontaneous fermentation some bacteria can take hold before the yeast does and add some off flavors. But then the yeast start to roll and it evens out. Adding your own yeast up front cuts out that lag time and helps keep the bacteria from causing damage.

Using a wine yeast will dry out a wine like this a lot more and it will not be as sweet.

The cheese cloth method can work for a long time if used properly. CO2 produced by the yeast is heavier than oxygen so a layer of it will sit on top of the wine and keep it from oxidizing. So as long as you leave it alone then in theory it should be fine for a couple months but the CO2 will eventually escape and so for long term aging it is recommended to have a small neck carboy with airlock.

Have fun with the Welche's wine with bread yeast. You will learn a lot. Small bit of advice is that bread yeast is hard to settle out of a wine. So after about 3 weeks put your wine in the fridge. It should help settle it out into the bottom so you do not have as much of a yeasty taste to your wine.

Stick around and let us know if you have any other questions.

NickL said:

If your going to brew wine at home I would definitly not use anything from the supermarket. ESPECIALLY bakers yeast. It will taste really BAD!

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kh54s10 said:

Agreed, The bakers yeast will not do what you want. And the preservatives in the juice may also cause problems.

I suggest buying proper equipment and a good wine ingredient kit. I have done a couple and they have been as good as or better than most commercial wines.

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I do not want to open a can of worms here but I also do not want the OP discouraged. Bread yeast does not always give the best results. But that does not mean for a first timer you can't make a wine that you will not smile at.

Also to say to not use anything from the supermarket is not a fare thing to say. In the Mead world the fabled "JAOM" (Joe's Ancient Orange Mead) only uses super market ingredients and also uses bread yeast. I make that all the time and it is great. I also make a mean Welche's White Grape Peach wine that will knock the socks off most wines. I do use proper wine yeast and yeast nutrient from the HBS but the rest of the ingredients are supermarket stuff.

So to the OP. like I said in the prior post. The biggest problem with bread yeast is it not wanting to clear and so you have suspended yeast in the wine and that does taste bad. Putting it in the fridge for a week. Decanting the clear liquid and repeating this step a few times helps that a lot.

Also expect that the wine may be a little acidic since the grapes Welche's uses are not wine grapes. Just right before serving mix with some ginger ale or a little sugar and that helps a lot. Or you may like the original taste. Read up on Stabilizing and back sweetening. With future batches or even this one if you like can help balance out acidic or bitter notes in dry wines. This batch can go fine and future batches as you learn will be twice as good.

Lots of people have made wine for a long time with supermarket bread yeast... Go for it! What's the worst that will happen?

Agate said:

Go for it! What's the worst that will happen?

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Agreed! Fermenting is fun.

Here's a couple more questions..

If I buy a 5 gallon carboy, will I need 2? Once the primary fermentation is done in the first and I siphon it out.

How do you stir the everything in the beginning, when it's in the primary 5 gallon? It's easy to pick up and shake a 1 gallon plastic jug, but what about a heavy 5 gallon?

It is easier to have two 5 gallon carboys. Just so you can rack off sediment and in the secondary it usually drops more sediment. You can keep racking back and forth till no more sediment drops.

You can get what is called a wine whip to stir the wine. Also many HBS or supermarkets sell plastic or stainless long handled spoons you can fit in the neck of a carboy. I like whipping my wines with a drill early on so I went super cheap and just took a coat hanger, straitened it out, bent it in odd directions in two places and checked it into a drill. Keep it clean and it works great!

I went to a local brew shop and bought a their wine kit. It came with a 7 gallon bucket primary and a 5 gallon glass carboy. I spent more than I probably should have for someone who's so new to this all (around $90) but I think i'll enjoy this as a hobby.

I've read thousands of posts on here and other sites and still hear different answers. On my bucket, the lid will lock down very tight and it has a small hole with rubber. If I am doing an open-air primary, am I supposed to completely lock down the lid like this and leave the hole open to the world? Should I just let the lid rest on the bucket? Or should I not use the lid at all and cover it with a cloth/similar?

Also I didn't feel like buying one of their $50 wine box kits or whatever they were, so now i'm sitting here looking at a pretty carboy with nothing to use it for

For a bucket primary just use cheese cloth or a thin towel that has been sterilized and draped over the top. Then take the lid and slightly tap it over the top so it is snug but not on tight. That works fine for primary fermentation. I hope your kit came with a hydrometer. You just use that and once the wine gets as low as 1.010 or lower you can siphon it into the carboy then if you already have a lot of lees or pulp at the bottom or wait a little longer till you have some sediment and then siphon over to the carboy.

What kind of wine do you want to try next? Want to attempt to duplicate grandpa's except for traditional home brew shop wine additives and yeast? Or would you like to try another type of fruit wine?

Welcome to your new obsession. Make a six gallon batch next. This will give you a little extra for filling up the carboy (topping off). Try a cider or welchs batch next. Get yeast, nutrient and energizer from your brew store. Be careful with straight citrus, learn the basics first. Take notes with dates and other specifics. Have fun. Be sanitary. Have fun. Buy another carboy. Have fun and be sanitary. There's a wealth of information and experience out there and a lot of it within this community. When you make good brew, it is very, very rewarding. When you get to share with others and they are as impressed as you obviously were, it is truly gratifying. But, it's better than most hobbies, because you get to taylor your booze to your liking. Did I mention sanitation? Have fun!

My first wine was made from welches frozen concentrate. There are a lot of recipes out there and is cheap to make. Keep good notes on dates and gravity and so on. If it turns out good you can repeat it.

Welcome to this addicting hobby. I got started with welches concentrate wines and bread yeast. Just out of curiosity and to see if I really could make my own alcohol/wine that easily.. After that first gallon batch, I was hooked. Now I have a stock of carboys, buckets and equipment. It's a VERY rewarding hobby and the possibilities are endless. The hardest part is learning patience.. Good luck man.

I followed a welch's 100% grape juice frozen concentrate guide on here that was for 1 gallon, but multiplied everything by 5.

I added 1/4 tsp of potassium metabisulfite to about 6 gallons of the must.

How long should I wait before pitching the yeast to it? And when should I start preparing the yeast?

Thanks for all the help!

Wait at least 24 hours before yeast pitch. If using a dry yeast just rehydrate in warm water for about 10 minutes and pitch. Liquid yeasts you can make a starter a couple hours before pitching yeast.

It's been a month since I started 5 gallons in my starting bucket. I siphoned it into my glass carboy today and it's the first time I've had a chance to see how clear it is. It isn't clear at all, it looks like soda.

The starting gravity was 1.098 and it's 1.038 right now with EC-1118 yeast and it's been 30 days. Shouldn't it be even a little clear right now?

Is it still bubbling? The yeast is stillworking until gravity reaches .996. At that your abv will be 15%. It will clear when yeast is done.

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Also, did you give it any yeast nutrient? What temp did you ferment at? EC-1118 is a beast as far as alc tolerance & temp range, but it does have it limits without proper nutrition...