Kit Winemaking Tutorial

[vintner]

Hey hardhat22 Good to see you again. How did that kudzu (sp) wine turn out? Sorry I can't help you w/a recipe.
Weezard: Wish I had a second fridge just for wine. I'd be in hog heaven LOL. I like your vodka idea. I use potasium metabisulfite for all my sanitizing. It's cheep, and I don't like the bleach based products.

 

[Tolpan]

Whatz up Brothers!

Hope your glass is always full

I had a very good harvest this year, with topnotch pinot noir and pinot gris!

They are almost done and will go into nice burgundy barriques from Berthomieu and Remond!

I love my work, haha

 

[vintner]

Congrats on such a great harvest Tolpan May your glass always be full as well my friend.
Stay safe n high

 

[Tolpan]

Thanks vintner:friends:

Pinot Gris in the barriques

 

[vintner]

6 gallons of merlot bottled 10/14/09

Not as dry as I expected, but a bit tart, and fruity. Should be mighty fine in a few years :friends:
Stay safe n high my friends.

 

[vintner]

:friends:

:friends:

6 gallons o White Zin bottled 10/30/09

Me Best Bro (13 yrs old) likes it too LOL.

Up next in the primary

:friends:

 

[ehonda187]

Excellent thread !

Excellent thread !

Nice thread Vitner. I see you stay busy with your hobby as I do! I have 25 pounds of black raspberries I picked this year in the freezer waiting for a cold winters day to be turned into wine. I tried the Dandelion wine this year and it is aging away in the basement as we speak. Been busy with some other wines though, straight off the presses within the last month or so...

http://www.icmag.com/ic/album.php?albumid=10697​

This year I have made : (in the pic) 3g Baco Noir, 3g Foch, 6g Aurora, 5g Cherry)(Out of the pics) - 5g Niagra, 5g Diamond ,6g Concord. Also made a strawberry wine this year as well as a Wicked Hard cider and holiday spiced cider.
It is a great time of year.. I also picked up 5 gallons of Riesling juice that I froze to make later on in the winter. Gotta love mother nature this time of year, who else is going to cold stabilize all this damn white wine I made!

 

[vintner]

Thanks for the props ehonda187. Yes, I've got four 6 gallon carboys. Used to be 5 And a multitude of 4Lt jugs. Aint no sense in having them if you're not going to keep them full Looks like you feel the same LOL. I've got several more clearing that will be wedding gifts next summer. Lately my wife's been a bit more involved helping me wash bottles once in a while which I greatly appreciate. I hate washing bottles! After the shiraz, I plan to make a red zin, then a riesling. I'm starting to run out of room in my crawl space though LOL. Not such a bad thing, but when we move, I'm going to have a boat load of wine to haul around LOL.
Stay safe n high

 

[ehonda187]

As far as my Carboy collection goes, Right now I have
1- 7 gallon
2 -6.5 gallon
3 -6 gallon
8 -5 gallon
2 -3 gallons
20 -1 gallon.
I'm doing a lot of red wine this year and some of those have Malolactic Cultures applied to them so they are in a heated area to finish the process. The problem with that is that now my carboys are getting filled and have to be left that way for a couple of years to bulk age. That takes equipment out of the loop!
I feel ya on the washing bottles part....I hate it mang. My Nieghbor works at a recycling center so I have been getting cases and cases of free bottles from down the road from my house. Anything from gallon jugs to rare flip tops.
I had to move my collection last year when I moved....It took many trips up the cellar stairs with cases of wine to realize that I may have been too eager the last couple years on the vino makin!

 

[vintner]

ehonda187: That's a lot of jugs man! I don't know much about malolactic fermentation or adding oak and such things to reds. Why do you bulk age for so long?
I like workin w/these wine kits. They're pretty much fool proof, and put out a pretty good product. But, I'd like to start makin wine from scratch soon. There are a lot of small vineyards in my area. I'm sure I can find one that will sell me a few buckets of crushed and stemmed grapes. Over the winter, I plan to keep playing around w/the welches recipe I posted here a while back. Addin strawberries, peaches, pears...
Stay safe n high man

 

[ehonda187]

Many people do not realize how tasty welches grape concentrate wine is....I love it. I make a bunch of it at the beginning of the summer to guzzle during the holidays!
I made a gallon of welches white grape and blended it with some of my leftover cherry wine that I used for topping off. Still aging and has a beautiful deep rose color.
Fortunately, I am blessed with wineries close by that you can buy their juices right off the bladder presses. They will even throw in the skins to macerate during fermentation.
Oh and on the malolactic fermentation. It is a process in which you innoculate the wine after primary fermentation is complete with a bacteria culture that converts malic acid into a soft buttery lactic acid. I use it to round out a red wine as well as drop the acid a little since this year the acids were off due to the inclimate weather.
I only bulk age the red wines before bottling because a friend that owns a winery instructed me to do it that way years ago. By leaving it in a bulk container you can pop the bung and check the acids and such...when you do this you expose the reds to a little oxygen and that is what a heavily tannic red wine needs to soften it up. White wines do not benefit from bulk aging.
I will have to dig up the welches thread mang and check it out.

 

[vintner]

Ah: Thanks for that info Man My welches recipe can be found on page 5 of this thread. I started this thread to teach others how easy is is to make their own wine at home, so there's probably a lot of info there you don't need LOL. I keep a couple gallons of it around for topping off my whites and fruit wines too.
Yeah, I need to find me a couple of local wineries like that. While you're bulk aging, how do you test and make changes to acids and such? Once you bottle a heavy red, how much longer do you have to age it?
Stay safe n high

 

[ehonda187]

I usually wait 2 years before drinking a bottle to see how the wine has come along. As many fine wines though, reds become better with age...The longer you can wait the better....There are red wines though that are very drinkable young and one of those i'm making this year is Foch.
As far as testing goes... I use this acid testing kit and I also check the ph, If it is too high in the beginning of bulk aging I like to treat it with Lysozyme to bring it into range. You can also check you residual sugars that are left with clinitest tablets...I'm out of those for the picture. Even though your Hydrometer will read 0 the density of the alcohol alters this reading (still roughly 2% residual sugar) so you use these to get a better reading on the vino.

​

The next 2 pics are of my handed down carboy made of pyrex. My first carboy. I thought this was a cool 5 gallon to show ya. The mouth is like 3.5 inches wide so I use it for fruit wines when I don't want to start out in my plastic brew buckets.

​

Have a good one mang.​

 

[vintner]

WOW, 3.5"! That's pretty cool. I see some kind of seal on it. Do you think it was originally made for wine making? What do you use to seal that?
Thanks again for enlightening me ehonda187. So theoretically, you could go for nearly 4 years w/out tasting a batch of wine? I've let cases of wine sit around for nearly 3 years, but that's a really long time!
Stay safe, and may your carboys always be full :friends:

 

[Hillbilly Wayne]

i have been making wine in my growroom for the past few years
CO2 went from 600ppm-900/1000ppm
works to my liking, and the wine is good too!

 

[vintner]

Hey Hillbilly Wayne: Thanks for stopin by. I'm in the process of moving my bloom room, and plan to keep some space open near by for a carboy. Maybe do a batch of mead. That usually ferments pretty long and slow.
Stay safe n high

 

[ehonda187]

I am unsure what the purpose was for this carboy was in the beginning ,the seal on the front says Pyrex on it. I have stoppers, both drilled and undrilled. Actually fairly easy to find. I only do a little with the reds..so yeah they sit for a little while before I get a taste. I do a ton of whites and they are ready fairly fast..My whites never get a chance to age properly because they get popped open during the holidays with all the family around and all! Think I'll start a Recipe Swap thread for wine, beer, liqueurs, meads and the liking. I know I have a ton to share..
Did I mention that I have access to apple, cherry, peach, and pear orchards......I culled a lot of fruit this year!!

 

[vintner]

I get a lot of my recipes and ideas from the internet. Like most, I have a tendency to keep poor records. That's one reason I started this thread. I don't have the equipment or supplies to test acid, ph... I kinda just go by taste.
Yeah, I do a lot of wine early summer to late fall for the holidays. I try to hide a case from each batch in hopes it will make it till next year LOL or longer. I have yet to do a cyder, but I tend to like things a bit more potent. I had a co-worker tell me after the fact where I could get all the blackberries I want this past summer. I went there a week or 2 too late, but the owner promised to give me a heads up next summer in exchange for a few bottles of wine.
I think a recipe thread's a good idea!
Stay safe &

 

[vintner]

Ginger Beer Anyone?

Ginger Beer Anyone?

I've had a hankerin to brew some ginger beer for several months now, and I finally got around to doin it. I couldn't find a whole lot of consistent information on about it on the web. I found many different recipes w/a varying ingredients. Everything from honey to egg whites. So, I've thrown together what I know of making wine and what I've read about making ginger beer and regular beer, & we'll see what we get :friends:
I've put together 3 separate batches w/varying amounts of ginger and other things. Each batch has 3 cups (or 1.5 pounds) of regular table sugar & the zest and juice of a lemon and a lime.
Batch #1 has 2 oz by weight of ginger.
Batch #2 has 2.5 oz of ginger and 1/4 tsp of cream of tartar.
Batch #3 has 3 oz of ginger, 1/2 tsp of cream of tartar, and 5 whole cloves.

First, I peeled and coarsely chopped the ginger.

Weighed it.

Put in in a pot w/the zest and juice of the citrus (and cream of tartar and cloves in the appropriate batches).

I filled the pot 2/3 w/tap water, brought everything to a boil, then simmered it for 20 minutes. You'd think this step would make the house smell nice and gingery... Though it wasn't toxic, it wasn't the most pleasant smell either.
Once it was done simmering, I stirred in the sugar until it was all dissolved.

When it cooled down some I strained it into a sanitized 4Lt jug.

I topped off the jug w/tap water and stirred it up.

When the last batch is cool enough later tonight, I'll take a specific gravity reading and split a packet of champaine yeast between the 3 jugs and let er rip! :friends:
BTW: I have a butt load of these 4Lt jugs if anyone's interested in them. With the right bartering tool I might even be convinced to throw in the rubber bungs and air locks

 

[vintner]

My starting SG was 1.066 which would give me an alcohol content of ~ 9% if I ferment them completely. However, I don't plan to do that. I want to leave some residual sugar in several of them. I plan to keep a close eye on the SG, and when it reaches about 1.020 I'll put one jug in my garage to cold stabilize and clear for a week or 2. The next jug will join it when the SG is ~ 1.015, and the last @ 1.010. When they're relatively clear I'll rack them into 2Lt soda bottles and bring them back inside to ferment a bit more so it's nice and bubbly After just a few days, when the bottles are rock hard w/pressure like when you buy them @ the store, they'll go back in the garage to stop fermentation and clear again. They'll have to stay refrigerated from then on so the pressure doesn't build up too much and they explode! Open (dare I say) gingerly LOL & decant slowly :friends: