Home Wine and Beer Making

Home wine and beer making - a summary

Home Wine Making

Minimum Supplies

2 5-Gallon Glass Carboys + air locks
1 hose
25 Bottles (with screw caps, or alternatively regular bottles with corks and a corker)

Helpful Supplies

Racking siphon
Racking Pail (to ease bottling)
Bottling wand
6-gallon primary fermenter (bucket or glass carboy)
Hygrometer to measure sugar content

Ingredients

Grape Juice
Yeast
Potassium Metabisulfite Powder

Sanatization

Cleanliness is next to Godliness
The production of alcoholic beverages is an organic process. If you introduce organic nasties (like bacteria), it will negatively affect the product.

The “must”

Unfermented juice is known as “must”
Types you can obtain (from easiest to hardest)

Juice Concentrate: this can be obtained year-round and usually comes in a box. You must add water to get “juice from concentrate”
Fresh Juice: This can be obtained seasonally when the harvest comes in the Fall.
Fresh Grapes: This is a lot of extra work and requires additional equipment. For most home vintners, this is considered out of scope. However, it can be done.

Pitching the Yeast

Once you have obtained your juice, the next step is simply to put the yeast into the must.
Most yeast comes in packets (just like bread yeast) and must be re-hydrated in water before being added to the must.
You don’t want to use any old yeast. Wine yeast is specially formulated.
Though there is often residual yeast that grows naturally on the grapes that will do the job if you are using fresh juice or grapes, it is usually best to purchase yeast made for winemaking. It is cheap and more reliable than residual yeast.

Fermentation: Must to Wine

Yeast eats the sugar in the must and converts it to alcohol + carbon dioxide. This process can be seen visually and results in bubbling and the release of carbon dioxide.
After the yeast does its work, it settles to the bottom of fermenting vessel, leaving a noticeable amount of sediment.

Racking

After the most vigorous fermentation occurs (usually after 4 or 5 days), you will want to rack the wine from one carboy to another. This gets the wine away from the sedimentary yeast that can impart an undesirable “yeasty” flavor to your wine.
To do this, you simply put a SANITIZED empty carboy below the one with the wine and get a siphon of wine going from one carboy to the other.

Fermentation complete

Within a week or two, you will notice that fermentation has ceased. You can confirm this by taking multiple hygrometer readings over the course of a few days and noticing that the readings do not change and remain below 1 (denoting that there is no more sugar left in the wine to be fermented).
You will also notice that the wine should start to clear at this point. It will take months to completely clear (unless you add clarifier), but you should notice an immediate difference once fermentation is complete.
When fermentation is complete, do another racking, but for this racking and all subsequent rackings, add about ¼ tsp of Sulfite (dissolved in water) to the clean carboy.

“Contains Sulfites”

Sufites (generally Potassium Metabisulfite) is a chemical used to kill bacteria and absorb oxygen and is used in two aspects of winemaking

Equipment Sanitization: It is essential to soak all equipment that will come in contact with your wine in a solution of ¼ tsp sulfite + 1 gallon of water for several minutes before use. You don’t need to rinse with water before putting the wine in because the residual is actually good for your wine once it has completed fermentation.
Added to wine during racking: Each time you rack (except the first time), you should add ¼ tsp of sulfite dissolved in water. This will ensure that your wine does not become overly-oxidized in the racking process, which could cause it to taste more like vinegar than fine wine.

You do not want to add sulfites to the wine during your first racking, as this will inhibit your yeast and can result in a “stuck” fermentation. Also, some people suggest adding sulfites to the juice before pitching the yeast to kill off wild yeasts. I personally have not had much luck with this approach as I’ve noticed it to inhibit fermentation.

After your second racking when fermentation is complete, you have officially made wine. You could bottle it now, but it will greatly improve if you wait a few months (or better yet, up to a year) to allow it to fully mature (as well as remove all sediment) . During the aging process, you can add oak chips to it to impart an oaky flavor to the wine if you wish. Mainly though, you will want to rack it as you notice a lot of sediment on the bottom. However, most importantly, there is no hurry. Winemaking is about taking your time and enjoying yourself. There is no urgency in winemaking.

Bottling

Bottling should commence in the same way as racking. If you have a racking pail, you will want to rack the wine into it (with some sulfite solution) and then bottle from the pail using a bottling wand.
Make sure your bottles are scrubbed clean and SANITIZED with sulfite water.
Once bottled, you can let your wine further age before drinking as long (or as short) as you wish.

Home Brewing
Additional Ingredients

A brew kettle for brewing t

Home brewing is very similar to wine making except for three key differences

Cleanliness is even more important
You must brew before fermenting
Beer is carbonated, so there is an extra step at the end

Ingredients

Malt: Any combination of malted grains (like roasted barley), malt syrup (like molasses), and/or dry malt powder (like in your chocolate malt)
Hops: To add aroma and flavor
Water
Yeast

Malting

You could go through the trouble of picking your grains from a field, soaking them in water, germinating them, and then drying them, but just like starting out with grapes is usually too much trouble for a home vintner, starting out with fresh grains is not worth the effort for the home brewer.
Instead, you should start out with grains that are already prepared for you, or better yet, malt syrup and/or drymalt powder.

Brewing to wort

Just like “must” is unfermented wine, unfermented beer is known as “wort”
Start with a couple of gallons of water in your brewkettle.
If you are using grains, you must first steep the grains at about 150 degrees to release the good stuff locked inside. If you are using only extract and powder, you can skip this step.
Once finished steeping, remove the spent grains (like you would a tea bag) and dump in your malt extracts. Then, boil vigorously for about an hour to convert the starches to fermentable sugars.

Hopping the wort

You can add hops throughout the boiling process.
Early in the boil: Bittering Hops
Middle of the boil: Flavoring Hops
End of Boil: Aroma Hops

Cooling the Wort

You must now take the temperature of the wort down from boiling to fermentation temperature (about 75 degrees, to start). Since you will be crossing through the danger zone where nasty bacteria can flourish, it is essential that your hands and equipment are clean.

Pitching the yeast and fermenting

This process is exactly like that of wine.

Bottling

Unlike wine, there is no benefit to aging your beer. Once fermentation is complete (about 3 to 4 weeks from brewing for ale or longer for lagers), you are ready to bottle or keg your beer.

Priming/Carbonating: Two methods

You can put your non carbonated beer directly into a CO2 keg and let it carbonate that way within 48 hours
You can add more malt or sugar to the individual bottles and wait 2 more weeks. This sugar will turn into more alcohol and carbonation so your beer isn't flat.