Recent content by roberto188

After about $500 bucks and 20 hours later, I have completed my fully insulated DIY wine cellar with "coolbot" style temperature controller and AC unit. Holds a perfect 50F. Was wondering if there was any interest in me writing a DIY tutorial on this, or at the very least the temperature...

BTW, I've brewed a number of wines and gotten sulfur smell, and bad. The way to fix it, is when you rack it, to simply put a thin copper tube in your racking line and when the wine goes over the copper tube, it reacts the sulfur and the smell is gone. It's like magic.

Just as a follow up. My latest batch is now about 6 months old from primary and it is significantly better than say 3,4,5 months. This wine definitely smooths out and the mango flavor really starts to come out. I would suggest a minimum bottle aging period of 6 months.

I have rubber band holding it airtight. I do it on my plastic jugs. I then squeeze them and can see the airlock move assuring it's airtight. Thanks for the info on CO2.

+1 on the Montrachet yeast. Great flavor.

I made this about a year ago with a slight variation on Jack's Website to use orange and lemon zests. As most people said, it was like rocket fuel when done. But once back-sweetened ever so slightly, and aged 6 months+ it was a buttery smooth white with hints of banana. Delicious! Also, I had...

I have about 3.5 gallons of mango wine already clarified aging in a 5 gallon carboy. I use one of these to seal the top. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064OED86/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20 I put the cap on, fit an airlock then in the blowoff connection put my airhose and use the CO2 from my...

Yooper: Good point on the malic acid and good point on the "balance" of wine. I'm certainly not trying to make alcohol juice. Pumpinkman: Thanks for the additional input. One thing about the malic acid though, is this is frozen juice concentrate I'm going to be using and my experience is that...

Yes I understand, but at what cost? Fruits with intense flavor I see chaptalization as a cheaper way of making the wine while retaining good flavor (I did this with banana and peach wine and came out perfect), but for something not so intense like apple, wouldn't it benefit from just using more...

Do you have a recommended ABV for apple wine that would be drinkable in a 6 months - year? I was going to go to 22.5 BRIX ( about 12.5% ABV). Some people think 10% is high for wine, so when you say you made one with high ABV, what was it exactly? Also, I can get apple concentrate for 1.18 a can...

Has anyone done an all fruit concentrate wine? In otherwords, there are tons of recipes that use apple, grape, peach etc frozen concentrates to make wine, but they all add white sugar to up the % ABV. I was looking at doing a frozen apple concentrate wine, but the cost of the concentrate is very...

I have a large headroom in my carboy now. I sparged the carboy with CO2 before racking and then put some more CO2 on top once done racking. I think I'm going to remove the airlock at this point and screw the cap on for an airtight seal. Does anyone think I will get oxidation from this setup?

Eeeek. Maybe I'll try putting the pulp in a fine mesh bag for primary next time and try and "lift" most of it out after the initial flurry of fermentation is over. Yeah gonna loose about 1/3 :(

Did anyone figure out a way to filter this stuff? I just racked from primary after about two weeks and I lost about a fifth of my brew. This stuff seems very difficult to separate.

Never mind. After the first bottle, for whatever reason the bitter taste went away. Maybe it was residuals in my keg line, but all is well now. Thanks!