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Congratulations on your new house, and space! My setup is very far from fancy. Fermentation happens in the water heater closet, on shelves. Aging happens in a metal footlocker in the basement. Equipment is stored wherever I can find space. Although I used to make batches as big as 5 gallons, it...

Thank you for correcting me. Sometimes I get potassium metabisulphite and potassium sorbate confused.

If you're not sure of the answers to RPh_Guy's questions, here are a few of the options you can use to avoid potential problems: - Open the bottles, degas again, and re-bottle them. This will remove carbonation, but add the risk of oxidation and other contaminants entering the mead. - Open the...

I have never had a ready-to-go liquid yeast work. Ever. This may have been due to how the liquid yeasts were stored and/or shipped before I bought them, but every single time, they failed. As a result, I use dry yeasts. When it's time to add the yeast to the must, I reconstitute the dry yeast...

None this year, as I alternate seasonally between wines and meads. Last year I made 4 gallons: - 2 gallons fru-fru organic honey, organically spiced mead - 2 gallons el cheapo honey, McCormic spiced mead Still aging. It's an experiment to see if all the fancy, more expensive ingredients are...

Might try bumping up the ambient temperature for the must. When I make juice wines, I've found that they like to start fermenting at around 73-75 F. Right now, I'm working on an Ocean Spray Cran-Peach wine. It's 1 gallon of juice, 3.5 pounds of sugar added (to get to 12% PA), then added acid...

Congratulations on your first batch! Every, single batch we make is a learning process; from the first to the thousandth. The key is to retain that knowledge, and use it on future batches. That would be a lot of water to add to the wine. Almost a whole gallon! @_@ I'm not an expert - but adding...

To help prevent this, I use a small file to smooth out that ridge. Not deep enough to go all the way through the plastic, but enough so that the surface is more even on he outside. Where I get them from, they're $1 each, so if I accidentally mess one up, it's not that big of a deal. It's much...

I stopped using that kind of airlock, for similar reasons. Constantly having to check on its liquid level, leakage, and other problems made me gather them all up, and toss them into the garbage. Now, I will only use the one-piece, S-curve ones (they look like the plumbing under a sink). Never...

Thank you for the welcome! Upstate woods, around the Stokes State Park area. I've been to the Pine Barrens, though; it's like another ecosystem in there.

Bubbles (even tiny ones) are a good sign that fermentation is happening. The yeast is eating the sugars in the honey, and burping out both alcohol and carbon dioxide. A slower fermentation will help preserve whatever flavors you have in the honey, while a faster, more volatile fermentation can...

Hello from one of the many forests of New Jersey! We still have nice, untamed patches of wilderness, if you look hard enough, and know where to look. One of the reasons I started making wine was because I was tired of store-bought wine. There are red, white, blush, and sparkling wines. That's...

Duckduckgo.com. Was looking for an online web forum for wine making that was well organized and at least somewhat polite. The only other one (besides this one) I could find was based in the UK, so I opted for the more local group.