Best wine recipe with the least bit of effort?

[AnonymouslyBrewing]

Hello all, new here.
I live in a country where alcohol is illegal and I have simply had enough of it, I want to brew my own wine and let some age and drink some every now and then.

These are my obstacles:
- For now, cannot seem to be able to import any brewing yeast, but I shall risk if there is no other way.
- I am a beginner.
- I want the sweet spot of the best wine in terms of taste and alcohol content to make the minimalist of effort.

I have no problem with making kits from scratch or to try and import things that do not seem like they are for brewing.

Currently I make really basic wine with bread yeast, table sugar and juice.
Let it sit for 2 weeks when it stops fizzying I would wait til the sediment clears and bottle it up.

Any minimalist improvements/hacks that make a significant difference would be what im looking for.

If I can use supermarket products as agents or nutrients for the yeast that would be amazing.

I understand newbies like me come here alot but I would like you to know that your help is deeply appreciated.

Many thanks in advance.

 

[lukebuz]

Here is a tip, if you can successfully import or have somebody mail you a few packets of wine yeast, you can keep that same batch of yeast alive for really, unlimited number of batches. Just be sure to wash the yeast when you are done and save it in the fridge. If you use it within a few weeks you can restart it in a yeast starter and you can go to town!

 

[jtratcliff]

Easiest with super market ingredients and bread yeast is a honey wine... Also called mead...

The recipe is here and also other places in the web... It's known as JAOM. Which stands for Joe's Ancient Orange Mead...

It's dead simple... Uses only stuff you can find in a grocery store... And is ready to bottle in about 2 months. It's drinkable then as well but gets better with age.

It's a sweet mead but can be around 12% abv

 

[bernardsmith]

Hi AnonymouslyBrewing and welcome.
A couple of quick thoughts: You might trying culturing your own wine yeasts by taking a handful of raisins, and blending them for a few seconds in a blender with some chlorine-free water (about 500 ml). The raisins are likely covered in yeast and that yeast will ferment. Assuming such things as airlocks and hydrometers are not easily available, you might look for a child's balloon and prick a hole in the end and use that to monitor the fermentation. This is NOT for your wine but for your yeast source because what you will want to do when the balloon has begun to deflate after about two weeks is to allow the yeast to settle towards the bottom and so pour off the liquid (you can drink it but it won't be very good). The sludge at the bottom is a batch of yeast.
But you also may find fruit covered in a bloom that is also yeast. Here, blueberries locally harvested are often covered in yeast, as are raspberries and cherries, but figs are likely to be covered in yeast as will dates.
and you can use these fruits to grow a yeast culture. But bread yeast works too.

To make wine (country wines) you might simply look for fruit juices sold in supermarkets or markets. Remove a cup of the juice and ferment in the containers in which the juice was sold. You can cover the top with cotton wool to allow the CO2 gas to escape and prevent dirt and flies from entering or you can use a condom or balloon as your airlock (again, make sure to puncture either: yeast will transform half the sugars (by weight) into carbon dioxide and half into alcohol so there will be a very large volume of CO2 produced. About two weeks after you added the yeast the fermentation will have ceased. You may want/need to back sweeten this wine (country wines tend to need some sweetness to balance the acidity and alcohol) and if you cannot obtain chemicals to stop the yeast from fermenting any sugar you add to sweeten this wine you may want to pasteurize is to kill the yeast. Depending on the volume of wine you can pasteurize wines at temperatures below boiling (around 160 F) but you will need to check Prof. Google to determine how long at lower temperatures you will need to maintain that temperature in order to kill every last yeast cell.
Good luck - and if alcohol production and consumption is illegal in the country you are in please be very careful.

 

[AnonymouslyBrewing]

Deleted post

 

[AnonymouslyBrewing]

Hi AnonymouslyBrewing and welcome.
A couple of quick thoughts: You might trying culturing your own wine yeasts by taking a handful of raisins, and blending them for a few seconds in a blender with some chlorine-free water (about 500 ml). The raisins are likely covered in yeast and that yeast will ferment. Assuming such things as airlocks and hydrometers are not easily available, you might look for a child's balloon and prick a hole in the end and use that to monitor the fermentation. This is NOT for your wine but for your yeast source because what you will want to do when the balloon has begun to deflate after about two weeks is to allow the yeast to settle towards the bottom and so pour off the liquid (you can drink it but it won't be very good). The sludge at the bottom is a batch of yeast.
But you also may find fruit covered in a bloom that is also yeast. Here, blueberries locally harvested are often covered in yeast, as are raspberries and cherries, but figs are likely to be covered in yeast as will dates.
and you can use these fruits to grow a yeast culture. But bread yeast works too.

To make wine (country wines) you might simply look for fruit juices sold in supermarkets or markets. Remove a cup of the juice and ferment in the containers in which the juice was sold. You can cover the top with cotton wool to allow the CO2 gas to escape and prevent dirt and flies from entering or you can use a condom or balloon as your airlock (again, make sure to puncture either: yeast will transform half the sugars (by weight) into carbon dioxide and half into alcohol so there will be a very large volume of CO2 produced. About two weeks after you added the yeast the fermentation will have ceased. You may want/need to back sweeten this wine (country wines tend to need some sweetness to balance the acidity and alcohol) and if you cannot obtain chemicals to stop the yeast from fermenting any sugar you add to sweeten this wine you may want to pasteurize is to kill the yeast. Depending on the volume of wine you can pasteurize wines at temperatures below boiling (around 160 F) but you will need to check Prof. Google to determine how long at lower temperatures you will need to maintain that temperature in order to kill every last yeast cell.
Good luck - and if alcohol production and consumption is illegal in the country you are in please be very careful.

Bernard Smith those are very helpful tips, especially how to stop the yeast fermentation, I'll definitely look into that, do you have any tios on how I can clear the wine of sediments?

I have a bottle of wine that stopped fermenting and I want to clear it and bottle it up but I have no access to any clearing agents, I heard about the egg shells but that seems to take a whole week and in all honesty I have a feeling it doesnt work or I will somehow miss it up as the integrity of egg production here is at doubt, so many things could go wrong, I have thought about siphoning the wine but I cant find anything to ship here.
If you have any hacks regarding the processes (clearing, siphoning, racking, etc) I would love to hear more.

And thank you very much for your concern youre response was greatly informative

 

[bernardsmith]

Not so much egg shells as egg whites but the truth is that all other things being equal, wine will clear on its own if you allow it to age long enough AND you remove the CO2 that will keep particles suspended. Two other issues can cause haziness and one is the use of bread yeast. Bread yeast has never been developed to drop out of solution - no need when you are baking bread. Commercial wine yeast does flocculate and the weight of the gathered cells is enough for gravity to pull the cells to the bottom of your vessel.
The other issue is pectins. Fruit high in pectins will not clear because the proteins are suspended throughout the wine. To help clear pectins you might want to see if you can find or buy pectic enzymes to break down these proteins. Using very hot (or hot ) water can help set pectins (think jam) so the cooler the water you use when making a fruit wine the clearer the wine will finish.

 

[TkmLinus]

Check out Jack Keller's winemaking website. While the site is down, it is archived(link below). If you get your hands on some wine yeast you should be all set https://web.archive.org/web/20200112155930/http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/

 

[Abhishek Dewan]

Bernard Smith those are very helpful tips, especially how to stop the yeast fermentation, I'll definitely look into that, do you have any tios on how I can clear the wine of sediments?

I have a bottle of wine that stopped fermenting and I want to clear it and bottle it up but I have no access to any clearing agents, I heard about the egg shells but that seems to take a whole week and in all honesty I have a feeling it doesnt work or I will somehow miss it up as the integrity of egg production here is at doubt, so many things could go wrong, I have thought about siphoning the wine but I cant find anything to ship here.
If you have any hacks regarding the processes (clearing, siphoning, racking, etc) I would love to hear more.

And thank you very much for your concern youre response was greatly informative

Super cool it to 2c for 48 hours, everything drops by then. Or use a filter cloth with decanter on the day of drinking, the old fashion way.

 

[Erik the Awful]

Having wine yeast shows intent. Bread yeast does not.

My first wine was rough, and the pectin haze was thick. I forgot about it and left it in the back of the fridge for a couple years. When I pulled it out - with the intent of throwing it away - it had clarified and turned out fairly nice.

Without campden tablets you will likely lose about 1/3 of your wine batches. Alternatively, you can pasteurize your ingredients before adding the yeast, but that will cause pectin haze.

Pasteurizing after fermentation isn't a bad idea and won't cause pectin haze. Typically I just add enough sugar that the yeast top out their alcohol production before the sugar runs out. The normal way of stopping fermentation is to add enough campden tablets to kill the yeast.

 

[Maylar]

The normal way of stopping fermentation is to add enough campden tablets to kill the yeast.

Campden tablets do not kill yeast.

 

[bernardsmith]

Campden tablets do not kill yeast.

The can kill a small colony of lab cultured yeast towards the end of aging after multiple rackings and are often used to kill indigenous yeast that have not been cultivated to resist the SO2