Do People In Prison Really Make Toilet Wine
Pruno, hooch, juice, raisin jack, brew, chalk, moonshine, buck, jump. Toilet wine is still toilet wine, by any other name. What is toilet wine, you say? Never heard of this particular varietal? It’s a moniker that applies to any fermented alcohol brewed in prison and hidden in the top tank of a toilet. Some sentimental souls whip up a home batch in homage to the ol’ cellblock hotel. Others — say, those in between jobs or working through grad school — might also find it a handy skill .
While many of us just can’t imagine drinking wine made within the confines of a porcelain throne, that doesn’t mean others share our distaste. Many amateur vintners relish the idea of fermenting fruit into veritable viscous feasts.
If you’d like to try your hand at toilet wine, by all means, do! You’ll need 10 to 12 oranges , a can of fruit cocktail, a packet of dried yeast , three cups of sugar and a 1-gallon plastic bag with a seal .
Peel the oranges and place them in the plastic bag with the fruit cocktail, squeeze out the air and seal the bag. Mash the fruit, but take care not to pop the bag. After the fruit is mashed, add sugar. Mix. If you’re in prison, you simply run the bag under hot water. Wrap the warm bag in a towel or extra pair of prison-issue skivvies. At home, you can speed up the process by heating the bag in a double boiler on the stove for 20 to 30 minutes which will kill any bacteria and then cool it down.
Primary And Secondary Fermenting
When talking about whether wine can ferment too long, it is important to know that there often is a primary and a secondary fermentation process.
What I mentioned earlier in this blog post regarding wine not being able to ferment for too long generally applies to both fermentation processes.
You can, however, ruin your wine by exposing it to unwanted bacteria or other things for too long.
When moving your batch of wine from primary to secondary fermentation, it is important to do it correctly.
Usually what happens in terms of wine, is you transfer the primary fermented batch to another container, typically an oak barrel.
The secondary fermentation is either a sort of repeat of the primary or a newly triggered fermentation done by adding sugars.
The primary fermentation usually includes the use of some oxygen to kick off the fermentation process, however, the secondary fermentation usually uses airtight containers.
In the secondary fermentation, some winemakers add extra sugar to give the yeast more to work with and increase the alcohol potency and taste of the wine.
Racking And Secondary Fermentation
Once the primary fermentation has slowed down, its time to strain out the fruit and rack the wine into a carboy.
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So How Long Is Homemade Wine Good For
Without extra steps, your homemade wine can stay shelf stable for at least a year. If you store it out of light, in an area without temperature fluctuations, and add the extra sulfites before bottling, the longevity can increase to a few years.
Some wines age better than others, and after the five year mark, the wine can start to become a little less desirable. Drinking these wines in the first three years after making them is best.
Homemade wine does benefit from having some time in the bottle before you enjoy it, at least a month for white wines, and two months for red wines after bottling. This way, the wine has had time to get used to being in the bottle, and mellow out.
Are you ready to start making and bottle aging your own wine? Get help from a team whos well-versed in winemaking! Contact us for supplies, to purchase a wine making equipment kit, to answers questions, or anything else you need!
Things To Be Careful Of When Using Potassium Metabisulfite
There are a few things you should know about potassium metabisulfite before you use it again. First, the compounds it creates can be hazardous to your health in large quantities.
SO2 is a toxic gas to breath. It can cause breathing difficulties, swelling, rashes, and difficulty swallowing. If you feel any of these go for help.
Be careful not to breath the dust in or gas that is released when dissolving in water. Id also steer clear of sipping on any samples immediately after adding this to your wine. Give it time to bond with the oxygen.
Potassium metabisulfite is a controlled substance in food and wine preservation. There are strict legal guidelines on concentrations that are allowed in the final product.
This all sounds scary and I dont mean to come across that way but it is important to know and understand the nature of the chemicals were using in our wines. Wine kits and packages from winemaking stores dont often come with any sort of precautions or warnings. So I thought Id fill you in.
Now before you decide youre not adding this to your wine because its so nasty think about this. The compounds created by dissolving potassium metabisulfite readily bond to free-floating oxygen and create new compounds.
These new compounds are not nearly as scary. Even so the concentration of the new compounds in your finished wine will be so small that they will not be noticeable to the consumer.
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How Long Do Primary And Secondary Fermentations Last
Nearly every wine kit and wine making recipe has a different recommendation on how long primary and secondary fermentations are supposed to last. It turns out that there are a lot of variables that can affect how long each of these last. This means that theres a good chance your wine will behave differently than what the instructions or recipe youre following say should happen.
Primary fermentation is the more vigorous portion of the fermentation process during which time approximately 70% of your total amount of alcohol is produced. It will generally go by much more quickly than secondary fermentation. For more information on the differences between these two check out Primary Vs Secondary Fermentation.
So how long should each of these take?
When The Wine Is Finished
Please drink responsibly, and enjoy the fruits of your labor.
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When Is My Wine Fermentation Finished
Wine is a slow product to make. I found this out when I first took the brave step of risking a reasonable amount of home-grown fruit for a chance of making something equally tasty. Some suggested a fruit wine could be drunk as soon as one month after starting fermentation, but most worthwhile sources generally suggested far longer fermentation times. Since I was intending on making still wines and using bottles that were not built to withstand pressure, it was imperative I did not bottle before the wine fermentation was complete. So I decided I would wait as long as I needed to for the ferment to finish. I have done this many times since, and like it because it allows me to observe the process to completion. Patience also acts with the added benefit of extra age for your wine.
A Primary Fermentation Container:
This should be a big bucket, a large jar, a crock, or specifically designed fermenterwhich is what we use and will be showing in this post.
The size is important. I recommend it be at least 40% bigger in volume than what youd like your final amount of wine to be. Why? Because your primary fermentation will have fresh fruit in it, which well later filter out. Also: during the initial fermentation, the yeast can get quite overzealous, and youll need room for all the bubblesplus, extra room gives the yeast extra oxygen to work with! The strawberry wine recipe below is for a one gallon batch, so your primary fermentation container needs to be at least 1.4 gallons in size.
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How To Make Wine From Grapes: Get Your Creative Juices Flowing
McKenzie Hagan | April 19, 2021
Whether you fancy yourself a DIY savant who’s intrigued by the idea of homemade wine or an oenophile who simply wants to learn more about the art of winemaking, this guide on how to make wine from grapes has your name written all over it.
Making wine is one of those time-honored traditions that has been around for almost as long as humankind has needed a drink. But even though wine has been a common pleasure throughout the centuries and across all cultures, there’s still a bit of mystery surrounding the details of how to make it.
Well, we’d like to change that. Join us as we take you on a journey that will decode the evolution from grape to glass and give you an even greater appreciation for this magical metamorphosis.
Closing Thoughts On Making Wine
Hopefully this has given you some idea on how to make wine from grapes at home easily. Dont let the wall of text scare you though, the process is very simple- anyone can do it! If youd prefer to make wine using a pre-made kit, wed suggest checking out our guide on some of the best wine making kits that are available online.
We wish you all the best in your wine making adventures.
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How Do I Make Sparkling Wines
Country wines and fruit wines are traditionally still wines . Making a sparkling wine is a bit of an advanced technique that requires a good knowledge of how yeast works, the fermentation process, and advanced bottling techniques. We recommend tackling it only after youve mastered a still wine like this strawberry wine. When youre ready to move onto sparkling wine, Wild Wine Making has some great information about that process.
Optional Step : Back Sweetening
When your secondary fermentation is over, its time to taste that wine! In general, fruit wines need time to age before they are really delicious, so dont be too concerned about the flavor profile yet. What you are concerned about right now is sweetness. If you taste the wine and are happy with the sweetness, you can move onto Step #5!
If you taste the wine and its too dry, no worries, we can now rack the wine and back sweeten it. There are multiple ways to do this:
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Preparing Supplies And Ingredients
How Do You Sanitize All The Tools
Level of sanitization is one of those things that falls on a wide spectrum. Some folks prefer to absolutely blast their tools with synthetic chemical sanitizers before making wine to kill any yeast or bacteria that might impact the flavor of their wine. On the other end of the spectrum, some people dont even wash the spoon they use to stir so itll keep the same yeast on it from batch to batch!
Like most things in my life, I stick to the middle path. We make sure all of our tools are cleaned very well with soap and hot water. Plus we use an oxygen wash as an extra layer of sanitization before making our wine.
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Learn The 5 Steps Of The Wine Making Process
Wine making has been around for thousands of years. In its basic form, wine production is a natural process that requires very little human intervention. Mother Nature provides everything that is needed to make wine it is up to humans to embellish, improve, or totally obliterate what nature has provided, to which anyone with extensive wine tasting experience can attest.
There are five basic stages or steps to making wine: harvesting, crushing and pressing, fermentation, clarification, and then aging and bottling. Undoubtedly, one can find endless deviations and variations along the way. In fact, it is the variants and little deviations at any point in the process that make life interesting. They also make each wine unique and ultimately contribute to the greatness or ignominy of any particular wine. The steps for making white wine and red wine are basically the same, with one exception. The making of rosé wines and fortified or sparkling wines is also another matter both require additional human intervention to succeed. Learn more about wine and what goes into every bottle by reading our wine glossary index.
A Basic But Delicious Blueberry Wine
The reason this wine recipe is such a good wine to make for the beginner is the ease of the process and the resulting wine is delicious.
Many fruit wine recipes require lots of small tweaks and refining to produce a decent result whereas the blueberry wine produces a good wine even if you dont get everything just right.
There are a few additives that youll want in this blueberry wine, these are just the usual suspects of any fruit wine.
Acid blend and tannin are required for the vast majority of fruit wines and this blueberry wine is no exception. You should have these kinds of additives, along with pectic enzyme and yeast nutrients to hand for any fruit wine you intend to make.
The blueberries you use, whether they are frozen or fresh, is up to you. As long as the fruit is good quality and ripe you should be in for decent blueberry wine.
Frozen fruit tends to be picked when its riper than fresh fruit from the supermarket in this case picking the frozen fruit will result in a better wine. Freezing the fruit will also break down the cells of the fruit releasing the juices and flavour better than just mashing the fruit.
I have used frozen blueberries for this recipe. You can get them year round and they are much cheaper than fresh berries.
If you can get hold of wild blueberries you can, of course, use these, picked at their ripest and being able to choose the highest quality blueberries will make a superior wine.
- Fermenting Bucket
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When And Where Did Winemaking Begin
Before we delve into the details of how to make wine from grapes, it’ll help to get some context about its history. While France and Italy are the countries most synonymous with winemaking, archaeological records suggest that wine was first produced in China around 7000 B.C., with the countries of Armenia and Georgia following suit not too long after.
Pro tip: For the full story on the nuances between “Ancient World” wines, “Old World” wines, and “New World” wines, be sure to check out our guide to the curious and captivating history of wine.
