Stage 3 Fill The Demijohn
Now that the yeast has gained a strong hold over your must, we need to seal it away from dangerous oxygen that which once fed your yeast could now ruin your wine. Removing oxygen forces yeast to produce alcohol and stops bacteria from turning that alcohol into acetic acid, or vinegar. Transfer your must to a sterile demijohn using a large funnel and an old but clean tea-towel to filter out the fruit pulp.
Once you’ve filtered it, have a taste. Hopefully you have a sweet fruity liquid with a hint of alcohol. If there is any space left in the demijohn, fill it up to just below the neck with clean water. When the demijohn is full put an airlock in the top this will let the carbon dioxide escape but keep the oxygen out.
Preparing To Cut The Vinyl
Select Vinyl on the materials, take the cutting mat and load it into the machine. Once complete, unload your mat, take your scraper tool and burnish over the vinyl. Then using your Cricut TrueControl knife, cut off the excess.
You can now start weeding. Burnishing it before we weed it will help adhere all the letters down really well. Sometimes when we weed vinyl, we find that our letters want to come up. Burnishing beforehand helps to prevent that.
Now weve cut a piece of transfer tape and were going to peel the backing off of it and apply it on to our weeded images. Again, grab your burnishing tool and burnish it.
Once you remove your weeded images from the mat, you will be very tempted to go ahead and put your vinyl on to your glasses but I urge you to take this extra step.
Have some rubbing alcohol on hand and put some on a piece of paper towel to wipe off the area before you apply vinyl onto your wine glasses. This helps take off all the dirt from your hands and the oil from your fingertips or any dust that could have accumulated over time.
How Is Wine Made
This wouldnt be our guide on how to make wine without talking about how wine is made. The most basic explanation of how wine made is really simple. You take fruit juice and ferment it by adding yeast. In fact, you dont really even need to add yeast to grapes to create wine. In the old days, they would simply crush the grapes and let them sit. Natural yeast will start the process of fermentation. Today we use specialized wine making yeast that will ensure you get a quality result.
Yeast is really the most important element in turning fruit juice into wine. Yeast will consume the sugars within the juice and turn them into alcohol and carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide gas escapes the wine while the alcohol stays creating a delicious elixir from the gods. Yeast colonies will grow in the wine while it is fermenting. Eventually, there will not be enough sugar to feed the entire colony and some of the yeast will die off. The alcohol level rises while the yeast consumes the sugar. This rising level of alcohol also kills off the yeast as they can not survive in higher levels of alcohol. Eventually, all of your yeast will die off and you will be left with wine.
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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.
How To Tell When The Grapes Are Ready To Make Wine
The grapes are ready to make your own wine at home when they are ripe, but not too sweet. If they taste bitter they aren’t ready yet. You can go by taste but I tend to check the sugar level by measuring the density using a hydrometer . You want the starting starting specific gravity between 1.070 and 1.100 so the grapes need to be somewhere near this. When you add the sugar the SG will increase. Mine was 1.062. Water has an SG of 1.000 the measurements are relative to this. Sugar is denser than water, alcohol is lighter. This means you can calculate the alcohol content by measuring the density at the beginning, after the addition of sugar, and at the end of fermentation. The density at the end was 0.990. There are various online calculators you can use , I calculated the alcohol content of my wine to be 9.8. I am happy with this as it tastes excellent you can get a higher alcohol content if you want by adding more sugar.
There is a lot written on the internet about how to check when grapes are ready, all of them say something different! I would suggest reading around it and doing what feels right for you.
Wash your hands thoroughly, twice, up to your elbows before handling any of the grapes or equipment which will come into contact with them. Wash them again if you touch anything else door handles/kettle/dog etc.
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Optional Items For Wine Making
This are items that you might want to change out in the future or even right now!
- Heating Belt used when the fermentation is in a cooler place. Instead of heating up a hole area you can just use this handy tool
- Degasser Mixing by hand is a way of the past! There is now plastic and metal degassers which attach to any power drill.
- Wine Filter Machines the Mini Jet filter system is a good for the home wine maker making your wine come out crystal clear
- Auto-Siphon J tube – just pump this sophisticated j-tube to prevent contamination
How Many Grapes To Make Wine
If you decided to enter in the magical world of winemaking, you will soon realize that there is always some new information to add to your knowledge, some new technique to learn or something to improve in the way youre making your wine.
To become an expert in this field, you must stay in close contact with the news of this ever-expanding industry. And while some might consider wine and winemaking just a subject of pleasant conversation, others consider winemaking a true passion that is fueled by the acquisition of information, knowledge, and experience.
Nevertheless, when you decide to become a winemaker, you will find yourself standing in the middle of a maze of questions about winemaking techniques. One of the most frequent questions is: how many grapes to make wine? Lets discover the importance of quantities, doses and numbers.
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Transfer To The Final Bottle
Once a good 6 months have passed, check on your country wine.
When there arent bubbles moving through the airlock or at the top of the wine, you can siphon the clear wine into the glass bottles, just in time for your anniversary or date night.
Hot Tip: Store the bottle longer for a richer taste that is if youre willing to wait.
A Carboy For Secondary Fermentation:
This is simply a big ole glass jug! We brew almost exclusively in one gallon batches at our house, so we have an entire fleet of one gallon carboys. You can purchase them in a bundle with an airlock and cork. They also come in much larger sizes if you want to do big batchesfive gallon is a common carboy size. The shape of the carboy is importantthe narrow neck reduces the surface area of wine exposed to oxygen during secondary fermentation, which is good!
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Use Of The Wrong Container
If you are putting together your own homemade kit, keep in mind to acquire a food-grade container . If you dont check whether or not your container is food grade, it can actually contaminate your wine.
In very rare cases you may actually get very sick or even get lead poisoning if not checking whether or not your plastic/metal container is suited for winemaking.
How Do You Know When Its Finished Fermenting
Its finished fermenting when you tap the edge of the glass and no bubbles appear. However, this is not a hard and fast rule. Fermenting can stop or slow greatly due to fluctuations in temperatures.
A cold spell can slow fermenting, while a sudden warm-up can kick start it once more. This can lead to blowing corks in bottled wine, but you shouldnt have that problem if youre using the balloons or plastic wrap.
And there you have it, a cheap and easy way to make wine at home with very little money and no fancy equipment. Once youve tried making wine from fruit juice, then try your hand at making wine from fruit, flowers or even herbs. With a little imagination and experimentation, you can create your own wines to enjoy for years to come.
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Blueberry Wine Recipe Full
This Blueberry wine recipe is the perfect choice for the beginning winemaker, it also produces a fantastic wine that is full of the flavour of Blueberries, what could be better than that.
When you look at the blueberry it does almost look like a small grape, that is not to say it blueberries have the same qualities as grapes do for making wine they need a little help from you the winemaker.
What blueberries do have though is lots of flavour and colour. This wine recipe makes a rich dark wine similar in colour to a Bordeaux or Syrah.
This deep dark colour comes from the skins of the blueberries just as would come from the skins in a grape wine.
If you cut a blueberry in half you will notice the inside of the berry has a green hue. The result of this blueberry wine recipe, however, is a deep, dark violet.
The colour is extracted from the skins as they sit in the fermenter macerating. Yeast and a slowly increasing alcohol content both help this process along as well as drawing the flavour and sugar from the fruit.
Fermenting Wine Grape Juice
The juices we carry already include the wine yeast and are fully balanced , if the juice does not include anything:
- Yeast Packages Generally 1 pkg for 5 gallons and there are a wide variety of wine yeast available.
- Bentonite which promotes clearing in the fermentation stage
- Acid Blend, Malic Acid, Tataric Acid and Wine Tannin which help boost the acidity of the wine.
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What Is The Difference Between Cooking Wine And Regular Wine
The difference between the two wines is the quality of the drink. Regular wine is finer, more flavorful, and will have a stronger taste in your dishes. Cooking wine is a go-to wine that will add the flavor you need, but will not be enjoyable to drink, as the flavors it will bring wont be as potent.
General Guide To Making Wine From Juice
Making Wine From a 6 Gallon Pail of Juice
Preparation and Primary Fermentation:
Cleaning/Sterilization: Before starting make sure all equipment is clean and sterilized prior to use. Dirty or contaminated equipment can ruin the quality of the juice and the ending product. To remove dust or stains that may be present, clean with your brush and B-Brite or PBW . Once cleaned, sterilize all your equipment, containers, bottles and corks with a Star San or potassium metabisulfite solution. Do this immediately to a few hours before use. After sterilizing drain well but do not rinse, it does not have to be dry to use.
Mixing and recording pre fermentation parameters: Carefully remove the bucket lid by removing the safety seal and pry off the lid. Apply the adhesive thermometer to the exterior of the bucket. Let juice warm up to room or cellar temperature and mix juice well from the bottom up with a long spoon or paddle. Next, measure and record the Brix or Specific Gravity reading with your triple scale hydrometer and record temperature to establish a fermentation starting point. Record your Brix and temperature in a log. Typical Brix readings will be between 20.0 and 26.0 . This reading will tell you what the % alcohol of your wine will be when fermentation is completed. See attached sheet on how to read your hydrometer. If you are looking to make a sweet wine, please refer to the last sections of this document.
Northeastwinemaking.com
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Homemade Wine Making Equipment List
Equipment includes all of the things you make the wine in, from airlocks to fermenters. Glass is always best for containers because it won’t impart flavors to the wine. However, if you are new to winemaking and not sure if you’ll enjoy the hobby, you can always start with plastic and move up into glass when you’re sure it’s a fit.
Stage 2 Open Fermentation
Before we can start fermentation we need to add sugar to the must. The type of sugar you use depends on which kind of flavour you’re after: cane sugar, beet sugar and brown sugar will all produce different effects. Whichever you choose, the yeast will work its way through the sugar until it is used up or until so much alcohol is produced that the yeast dies. This recipe will give a wine with about 13-15% alcohol. You are now ready to add your yeast, the miracle that makes wine work.
Once you have added, or pitched, the yeast into the must give it a good stir. Over the next 24 hours you can watch as the calm wine-dark sea is disturbed by bubbles of carbon dioxide coming to the surface. Yeast can live with or without oxygen but it can create much more energy with it, so we start our fermentation open to allow the yeast to multiply and completely take over the must.
As the yeast cells respire, a stormy raft of bubbles will form and a dark earthy smell will erupt from the depths. You should leave this mixture for 5-7 days in a warm place , stir it each day and watch as the yeast makes it “boil”. It is this process that gives fermentation its name, from the Latin word fervere, “to boil”. There are many species of yeast but most winemaking is done using the reliable Saccharomyces cerevisiae. There are hundreds of strains of C cerevisiae, each releasing different flavours and surviving different amounts of alcohol, so the choice is yours.
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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
Is Rice Wine And Cooking Wine The Same
Shaoxing Wine is also known as Chinese Cooking Wine, Shao-hsing or Shaohsing Wine. I call it Chinese Cooking Wine in almost all my recipes. Chinese Cooking Wine is a rice wine that is made specifically for cooking. Along with soy sauce, it is probablythe most important ingredient in Chinese cooking.
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Preparation Of Fruit Must
Only sound and ripe fruit can be used to make wine. Wash and sort the fruit. Remove twigs and stems. Grain fruit, such as apples and pears, should be grated or crushed into smaller pieces. Seed fruit, such as strawberries, blackberries or currants, should be slightly crushed. Add the Pektopol enzyme preparation to the pulp – it facilitates the release of juice from the fruit pulp. Cover the mixture and set aside for a dozen or so hours. To separate the released juice you can use a non-metal sieve covered with gauze, or a comfortable wooden press.
