Search results

Much of what folk on Youtube present, they present with very little real knowledge and with very little experience as competitors in wine making competitions. In short, they may have never exposed their wines to objective assessment. Every country wine SHOULD taste very different: wines made...

This is Cellarmasters of LA? They run a really good competition. I have always found their feedback excellent - and very helpful.

A tricky but easy wine to make is Skeeter Pee. This is essentially an alcoholic lemonade made using 3 bottles of supermarket lemon juice (Real Lemon, for example) to make 5 gallons. The tricky part is that almost all reputable store bought lemon juice is made with preservatives that prevent the...

Where grapes grew, wine was made from grapes. Where other fruits were available, wine was made from those fruits. Grapes are easy to ferment but are hellish to grow and cultivate. Stone fruit is easier to grow and berries take care of themselves. Country wines have been made for hundreds if not...

Many thanks. That's very helpful.

I want to add some peppery notes from grains of paradise to a batch of beer I am about to make. Have never used GofP before. Per gallon, how much should I add and should I boil these peppers before adding, and if so, for how long to extract flavors? Thanks

There have been at least two posts on Youtube from Clawhammer, a manufacturer of home distillation equipment about this legal ruling, and while the first post suggested that the legal opinion might begin to open the door to make home distilling legal, a second more nuanced video suggested that...

Apologies - coming to your post a wee bit late in the day. You refer to preservatives in the syrup. What kinds of preservatives? If the manufacturer simply adds acids to decrease the pH, that may not be a problem that dousing with baking soda won't resolve - although yeast can happily ferment...

:-) Anecdotes are always fun to read but anecdotes are often atypical. Most neophyte wine or mead makers have already begun oxidation before they pitch the yeast and like with most cars, a tiny scratch 10 years ago is more than likely to result in rust (AKA oxidation) today. So, sure I have no...

You could reasonably discount the amount of sugar available from strawberries. You will need too add about 2 lbs of table sugar to make a gallon of liquid (whether water or juice) for every gallon in your carboy to make a wine with a starting gravity of 1.090 which then has the potential for a...

Not certain how many pounds of apples you might need to express about a gallon of juice. I am thinking about 15 lbs or more. If you have many apple trees and trees with tart apples. sweet apples, apples with lots of tannins then I would suggest you use those apples. If you don't but you have...

The truth is that bubbling tells you nothing. A wine can stop bubbling because the seal between the bung and the airlock or the bung and the carboy is poor, so the CO2 is escaping not through the liquid but through the tiny gap in the seals. On the other hand bubbles can simply occur if there...

If you know the ingredients and you know the starting volume, then it is easy to estimate your starting gravity. Here's the rule of thumb: one pound of honey dissolved in water to make 1 US gallon of must will increase the gravity of the water by 35 points - and so give you reading of 1.035. Two...

Yeah , brewers tend to go for Safale yeasts, but 71B has an affinity for malic acid - the predominant acid found in apples. Its' a harsh acid and 71B chews about 40% up and transforms it into lactic - a far more smoother acid, one that wine grape makers prefer but they need to add bacteria to...

Not gone down the path of batonnage, but pitching 71B and allowing the cider to sit for a year changes what you normally drink as a caterpillar into a butterfly. Much or the malic is transformed into a softer,smoother lactic acid and the transformation is like night and day. You might also try...

Pectic enzyme will remove a pectic haze but that is not the only reason why a wine or cider looks torpid. If you don't degas, the CO2 that is saturating the liquid will keep fruit and yeast and all kinds of particulates in suspension. Sure, your cider will eventually self -degas, but that can...

Hi dirigiboy - and welcome. Loved your tale about making cider 40 years ago. My guess is that the cider you made was probably around 6-7 % alcohol by volume. Most apples have about a pound of sugar in a gallon of pressed juice so the starting gravity (density) would be about 1.050. A cider at 6...

I decided to avoid the problem altogether, and got about 12 gallons of monitored spring water from the local state park

Sorry, not clear. There is no boiling or heating anything when making wine. That's why only beer making is referred to as brewing, not wine.

Trying to repair my ignorance: in wine making, I won't use my municipal water - although it tastes fine for drinking, making coffee, baking and cooking - because it does contain chlorine. I use spring water. But when it comes to making a wash for distilling spirits, how critical is it that the...