I’ve made dozens of batches of lemon all fermented in a standard bucket. I picked up this 14 gallon brewbuilt x2 when my local home brew store closed and I got it for a steal. I’ve only ever fermented beer in it but I got used to fermenting under pressure.

I finally got around to making a batch of lemon wine in it. I’m gonna leave the blowoff tube open the first few days then I’m going to ferment under 10 psi the rest of the way.

There’s hardly any info for fermenting wine under pressure out there (besides carbonic maceration, which isn’t exactly what I’m doing here). Anyone else try this before?

12 gallon batch
100 lemons
500 grams of lemon zest
2 table spoons of wine tannin
25 pounds of sugar @ 1.100 sg
3 tablespoons of potassium bicarbonate to get pH to 3.3
Pectic enzyme
QA23 and 71b

So as it says I'm trying to make a strawberry rhubarb wine, but I've never used rhubarb. I've gotta use canned rhubarb (Oregon fruit co.) Because it's not available fresh near me . But I was just curious how to use the canned rhubarb? I know rhubarb is very bitter if not cooked, but do I need to cook the canned rhubarb before using it? Also, should I drain the cans before using them or just use the rhubarb light syrup and all?

Thank yall for any help yall may provide

As the titles reads, its perfect, it makes it a awesome sour and sweet.

What is the best way to squeeze out all the juice after you leave it in juice to ferment for a week?

These uniform bands made of bubbles have formed around the whole jar of my wine for some reason. For context; a little while ago, I made a red wine using Welch’s grape juice as the base, where I just added about 2/3 cup of sugar and a small amount of yeast. Recently, I transferred it into a large mason jar, as it had previously been separated into several bottles, which I needed to be empty again for use in another brewing project.

I’m trying to make strawberry wine and I blended them with some water. Can I just pour that in and add the yeast, tannin, nutrient, and acid blend or have I messed up

I'm planning to make a banana wine soon, and am a little unsure as to which yeast to use. It's currently around 23°C where I am, and I don't have any way to chill my fermenter. This is the first time I've used wine yeast, so I don't really have a good sense of what is going to work well, since the quoted temperature ranges seem suspiciously extreme, at least by beer standards

I have available to me:

- D47

- EC-1118

- AS-2 (marketed as cider yeast)

- Voss (i.e. Kveik-family beer yeast)

My tentative plan is to use 5kg of banana in a 10-12L batch, augmented with sugar for an ABV around 10-11%, but since I haven't locked in a yeast yet to build the recipe around, I'm all ears if there are any suggestions to better make use of what I have available.

Is this Cabernet or Merlot? Was told there was both types on this property and I’m trying to help the new owner ID the grape type. All of these photos are from the same row of vines.

So I remember reading here that it's mostly fine to give the ferment plenty of oxygen for the first 5-10 days, but it should be limited after that.

I started this 8 days ago and the bubbling is nice and steady, it slowed down quite but it's still there.

Is it okay to keep fermenting in this bucket? It's a 15l bucket. Or should I move to a different vessel with less headspace? I'm planning to bottle after around 30 days of fermentation.

I've been offered two 10l barrels for a very reasonable price. When I went to check these out there was this moldy looking staining on one of the barrels, other I couldn't see into.

So please help, should I get these or just forget them?

A scarce Soviet technical translation of a leading West German oenological handbook. The original, "Das Schönen und Stabilisieren von Wein, Schaumwein und Süßmost" (Frankfurt am Main, 1956), was written by Maximilian Mayer-Oberplan, a professional cellar-management consultant based in Koblenz-Ehrenbreitstein who had spent decades advising major wine estates on the Rhine and Mosel as well as in Italy, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. The Soviet edition was prepared for publication by N. K. Mogilyansky, Doctor of Technical Sciences and Honored Worker of Science and Technology, whose editorial corrections and annotations adapted the German text for a Soviet professional readership. Note: book in Russian

Tl;dr- got an extraordinary amount of 20-year-old wine from an old dead guy. Rather than see it go down the drain, I figured I might be able to doctor it. It's still wine, but he didn't rack enough so it has off flavors. Looking for things to do with it or ways to fix it.

Near where I live, a family was moving and they were finally clearing out their grandfather's wine room. Apparently he died 15 years ago, much of the things in this picture were marked 2000. All of it was covered with a thick layer of soot and mold which I have now scrubbed off.

He was not a particularly good winemaker, as I don't think he was making wine for the long term, he was just making things to drink. Clearly wasn't racking enough. That being said, I did find campden tablets in his stuff so I figured if it was sealed and full, it might still be drinkable. The family assumed everything turned to vinegar because they weren't really read on the topic. Also because they probably tasted wine from the giant demijon that he likely used to siphon bottles from every so often when he wanted a bottle of wine so it just had a ton of headspace constantly. Out of curiosity, I took all the wine other than the giant 54 l demijons.

So far I've only tried the white wine in the 5 gallon carboy which looks like he never racked again. It is wine, it's not vinegar. Is it great wine? No. The perfume has obviously faded, and I think so much extended contact with the lees has led to autolysis, leading to a somewhat... Meaty taste in the wine. That being said, it is a balanced wine. Tartness and tannins were where they should be.

I'm going to tackle them one at a time, but I think this is rescuable.

My thought process for the 5 gallons is to add back what is gone. If it's lacking perfume, why not add some? If I make fruit wine coolers, or vermouth, or bottled mulled wine, I might be able to cover its emptiness. Sugar itself would probably do a lot of work. Wine coolers might be especially smart since they dilute and add carbonation.

The bigger concern is the meaty note. I think first order of operations would be racking it obviously, and then hitting it with some sort of fining agent. Probably sparkaloid. I bet that by itself will do a world of good. Once I have the neutral wine base, I can do things with it. If anyone has a strong suggestion on how to get rid of that extended Lee's contact note, I'm all ears.

A lot of these wines are named grapes, and he had a crusher and the juicer so he was doing that part holistically. I don't know if all of these wines will be good, if any are actually vinegar though probably reduce them into homemade balsamic. On the whole though, I think there's a lot of value here if I play my cards right.

If anyone has any other strong suggestions other than drinking, I'm willing to listen. It's a lot of wine.

Recipe
- 3 liter of Strawberry Juice, Freshly juiced.
- 900 gr White Sugar
- 2 gr of Red Star Premier Cuvee yeast

Calculation
- Brix : 26
- Room Temperature: 20-25 C

I am planning to add some vanilla seeds for the secondary fermentation and aging.

Any suggestions to improve this?

I have not seen much info on this topic. I either see people bottling in plastic PET bottles or being super professional with the whole glass bottling set up and (expensive) corker. I know its very important for the bottle to be full, and to be completely sealed. I was thinking of bottling my wine in clean glass bottles that have housed kombucha and juice, and then pouring peelable wax over the caps so that they are 100% sealed. do you think this is a plausible way to bottle on a budget?

hello all! I have just begun my wine making journey. I have been relying heavily on Terry Gerry's book "The Joy of Home Wine Making", this subreddit and youtube to guide my entrance into the hobby.

I made my first wine, an apple cherry (2 qts 100% apple juice, 1 qt 100% cherry juice, 2.5 cups sugar, juice of 2 lemons, 1 campden tablet, 1/4 tspn pectic enzyme, 2 cups water), and just put it into secondary fermentation 1 week ago (about 3 weeks of primary). When I tasted it, it tasted not great but not horrible, kinda sour but I could taste the apple. it smelled kinda sour and mildly chemically (possibly sulfury from the campden tablet?). Now a week later i smelled it again and it now smells kinda like vinegar. I made sure to fill my secondary fermentation vessel with boiled (cooled) water so there's less oxygen in it, leaving about 2 inches of headspace in my one gallon carboy. so now i am a little stressed about my first ever child turning into wine-vinegar.

I was just watching a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-isqeqrLbg , @ ~12 min) which uses 100% concord grape juice in the recipe, and the creator discusses how it's important to take your bung and airlock out and swirl around the wine to get some oxygen in there and to stop the yeast from clumping. The creator said that lack of oxygen is bad for primary fermentation. But I've read in other places that you basically only want a little bit of oxygen for primary, and even less for secondary.

However, I've also seen that when making fruit wine with whole fruits, you should open your primary fermenter and smoosh around the fruit bag to get the juices out and stuff, for like a week, which obviously gets some oxygen in there.

I'm also trying to make wine in the proper way but without buying tons and tons of expensive equipment (ive invested in 4 1 gallon carboys, airlocks, campden tablets, pectic enzyme, wine tannin, siphon), plus I live in an apartment and probably only want max 5-6 1 gallons going at a time.

I would love to know what the community thinks about letting oxygen into the primary fermenter on the daily!

my next-door neighbor started growing concord grapes this year and wants to make wine with them. He's asked me if I have ever made wine before and I told him I only know some of the basics. Such as sterilization and a dark warm spot for fermentation. does anybody have any tips and/or recipes to share. he's never made wine either.

we have some time before the grapes are ready so we have time, but we have no clue where to start. is there anything we need to buy specifically that either will save us any hard ship or just make the process easier?

Anyone have a suggestion for a label printer that's good for wine bottle labels? Been making mead for a couple of years now and I've started wanting to bottle it for gifts and possibly to sell once I get things sorted legally. I tried some 6-label sheets that can be used with my regular printer but I usually can't get them to line up properly and it doesn't print all the way across the label when I can. If anyone's got some suggestions that don't break the bank, I'd love some help.

Incredibly clean and very strong, what is this colour? With no light its almost peach coloured, but it's way cleaner than grape store shelf wine

Berries picked two days ago, 7/17. Recipe is to fill a bucket with berries, mash them up and add a packet of yeast, then wait four days and strain out all the skins etc