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About a year ago I cultured the dregs from a particularly good 12% ABV wild fermented beer that I brewed over a year prior. All I did was pitch the dregs into a mason jar of wort and it was fermenting beautifully in a couple of days. A few weeks later I pitched the starter into a 1.030 wort and...

Welcome! For sanitation, I sometimes use starsan and iodophor on carboys, and 50-70% alcohol on some smaller items or surfaces that are easy to wipe down (e.g. brewbuckets, bungs, etc) because they are available. For glass bottles, I usually just sanitize them in the oven at 80-90 C. For...

That just seems like a stylistic preference. I have a friend who loves pale ales and wheat beers but I gave him a 9% ABV Belgian beer once and he hated it. Cider is generally lighter on the palate and more subtle than wine. Have you tried any lighter sparkling white wines like Spanish Cava...

Technically, even apple cider is a type of wine.

Have you gotten into roasting your own coffee yet?

Have you ever ordered yeast from Label Peelers? They offer free shipping on dry yeast.

I placed an order with Midwest on 9/4/22. On 9/9/22 they sent me an apology and a coupon, then my order arrived on 9/16/22. By current standards that is extremely slow, but when they have their $49 free shipping sales, I can get Dingemans pilsner malt for substantially cheaper than anywhere...

It seems like we have a very similar philosophy about beer, wine, cider and mead. I wouldn’t say that your minimalist approach is lazy. For everyone’s sake, I’m going to refrain from going on a rant about needlessly adding synthetic chemicals to food and drink. Instead I’ll just limit myself to...

Sorry, as soon as I mentioned my plight with BIAB, this whole thing just went off the rails

I believe there are a couple of species of grapes often referred to as “Frost grapes” One of them is vitis riparia (also known as riverbank grape), the other is Vitis Vulpina. To me those look like Vitis riparia due to the leaves and the fact that the grapes appear to have red flesh. I have made...

Exactly! Great wine can be a thing of unrivaled beauty and haunting, otherworldly complexity. But you just summed up the entire reason I make (and drink) mostly beer.

Yeah a pulley would be the logical thing to do, but since I can technically get by without one on 5 gallon batches, I’m probably going to keep abusing myself in this way for the foreseeable future.

I will say BIAB can get pretty rough when I have to pull a steaming brew bag full of grain out of the pot of sparge water, then hold it there while it slowly drains and burns my forearms. In retrospect, maybe I’ve been doing everything the hard way.

I’ve never made a kit wine, so typically for a 5-6 gallon batch of wine I will harvest, crush, de-stem and press 60-100 lbs of grapes by hand. While I would definitely agree with anyone who says that this is a more labor intensive and physically demanding process than making beer, I don’t add...

If you like meads, try making a pyment with some local wine grapes.

I just noticed on your profile that you live in Central Iowa, where do you live? I’m in Des Moines and we can't grow vinifera grapes here, but if you’re ok with cold hardy hybrids there are quite a few vineyards in central Iowa and most of them will sell you grapes for relatively cheap.

Yeah I’m not an expert, but I would guess it ferments cleaner than a spontaneous all malt beer because by the time you add the wine must to the wort it is already a pretty active yeast fermentation with a moderate alcohol content and a low ph, so many of the enteric bacteria and other funky...

Everyone here has expressed valid points, and I agree with all of them in some way or another. Personally, I mostly make beer, but I am grateful for the practices and instincts that I gained from making wine, and I use grapes in much of the beer that I make. I started out making wine before...

If you already make wine, and want to try making beer, why not make a beer/wine hybrid. Every year in late summer/fall, I make a few beers by crushing about 15lbs grapes and letting it spontaneously ferment on the skins for 5-10 days, at that point, I gently press the must and add the actively...

Can you think of anything about your brewing, fermentation or packaging routine that has changed since the 90s? How long do you generally ferment in primary before transferring, and what was your fermentation temp? Your mention of acetaldehyde also makes me think of excessive oxygen exposure...