Recent content by maenad

Are you talking about a kit which also requires you to add sugar? I assume not but...

I started wine in a 19-litre carboy, with a mix of kit wine extract and my own juice. I left a LOT of headspace, planning to top it up on day 3-4 with juice that had the same original gravity as what's in the carboy. (1.078). Real life intervened and it's now day 8, and fermentation is mostly...

Wine kits (those for making 30 bottles) usually seem to provide about 4 litres of thick juice, which you top up with water and a kg of sugar. However, I've just realised that the ones from Wilko (UK) have only about 1 litre of juice, and require 3 kg of sugar for topping up. I'm assuming this...

My friend in another town bought his first wine kit and, following my instructions & the instructions on the box, made the wine. (White chardonnay.) He tasted it when he added the finings and confirmed that so far it tasted like "really cheap crap wine." We agreed to leave it to age for a couple...

My primary fermenter doesn't have an airlock - it's just a bucket with a not-tight lid. (Similar tightness to a garbage can.) I started a white-mulberry and dried-elderberry wine in it, here's recipe and the time line: Recipe: 3kg of white mulberries, 100gr dried elderberries, water and sugar...

Following the instructions, I did the following. What do I do now? 1. Made up the kit, let it ferment, checked SG twice and it was .997 or .998, added potassium sorbate (or something - it was for stopping fermentation), then tasted the wine. It tasted like your standard...

You were right, guys! It did nothing for almost two days but this morning it was bubbling again! I used lalvin D47. Lesson learnt - I won't do that again. Hopefully the towel won't affect the pectic enzyme - I don't have much of that left, and getting more is a real hassle!

I made plum wine successfully last year, and followed the same recipe this year. It started at 1.090 and fermented away happily in the primary but it was 1.025 when I realized it needed to go into the secondary. Here's where the problem started. I had lent someone my usual mesh bag, so I just...

Update: yes, it was full of preservatives. I tried a few different yeasts and did them with starters, and they all died as soon as I added the juice.

It's pomegranate I want, not grape. :) The problem with grape juice in Turkey is that they don't list certain preservatives in the ingredients, so you have to test it out first. Pekmez is very cheap - only about 3 USD for a litre. (Side note: most foreign cooks in Turkey mix pekmez into white...

Yeah, honey's expensive in my country so I'll give mead a miss. I'll try making a very small batch and see what happens. Will update in a couple of months!

Has anyone ever tried using pekmez as the basis for wine? I live in Turkey and it's widely available. I can't imagine why it wouldn't work, unless if the boiling-down process changes the sugar negatively somehow. I've never seen it made, but basically people do this: 1. Get fruit and stomp on...

Update from the OP: it fermented beautifully and I've taken the first second-carboy SG this evening.

Thank you!

I'm making plum wine and have already put the juice, sugar, water, yeast, and yeast energizer into the primary. Everything was clean but I'm sometimes careless about putting things down and then using them without cleaning them again. ... And after the yeast was in, I realized I forgot the...