Holiday Wine
In the spirit of the holidays, I decided to make some holiday spirits of my own. How hard could that be?
If you go online there are lots of videos on how to do this. I suggest that you watch a few of those. At that point, you will probably want to go to the store and buy some wine, because you will soon realize how much work this is. For years that was my routine.
But if you still want to make your own wine, I suggest that you watch some more videos, so that you will change your mind.
Okay, I did warn you.
Some First Attempts
My first attempt to make wine, was to get baker’s yeast from the grocery store, mix it with apple juice and let it sit. This is not a good idea, because pressure will build up and blow off the top. I hesitate to guess what might happen if the cap didn’t give way. Loosening the cap isn’t much of a help, because then it just spews out gradually instead of suddenly. In my defense, I would like to say that technically this did work. I got fermented juice. It was just messy and not very good tasting. For the record, baker’s yeast is the wrong type of yeast. It will ferment, but if everything goes well, you’ll have something about the strength of beer, not wine.
Another attempt that I’m a little embarrassed about was table sugar, water, and baker’s yeast. On that attempt, I did not keep the oxygen out. Allowing oxygen into the mixture, is the difference between “rotting” and “fermenting”. You will be able to smell this mistake pretty quickly. I would not recommend drinking it. However, if you are trying to design a new emetic, this might be a good starting point.
So now you know 2 important requirements about making your own brew.
1.You absolutely have to keep the oxygen out, or it tastes and smells foul.
2.And you absolutely have to let the carbon dioxide out or it explodes.
I have a great story about my grandfather who used an alternative method to make his own root beer in the basement. He would add yeast and let it ferment right in the bottles, with no gas exchange. Just cap them tight. This works if you get exactly the right amount of sugar and yeast in the bottle. One day, his wife was watching and pointed out, “You added too much yeast to those. They will probably explode.” (Editor’s Note: They did. And once begun, it was sort of a messy chain reaction.)A better way to address these 2 requirements, is to get a cork with a hole in it, for your fermenting container, and put a tube from the cork to a glass of water. Leave a few inches of gas space at the top; don’t fill up the container. This also lets you monitor the bubbling of carbon dioxide out of the fermentor and will let you know when it is finished fermenting (no more CO2 bubbles).
Buy a kit.
After various trials and errors, and continually needing supplies and parts that I did not have, I bought a wine-making kit. If this is your first attempt, this will save you a lot of headaches.
My kit contained a giant 5 gallon glass jug, a huge white plastic container, wine yeast, a hand pump that I never quite learned how to use, which makes a big mess all over the kitchen. It also had stirrers, and lots of sanitizer.
One thing about making wine, (or anything in biology), is that everything has to be as clean as you can make it. You will start every session by cleaning and cleaning and cleaning. If that doesn’t sound like fun, do it anyway. You don’t want to grind up a bunch of apples, a long laborious process, and then wonder if you cleaned that grinder first. (not that I ever did that)
You don’t want to get to the end of the process with contaminated wine. Or left wondering whether you should drink it or not. (Did I just add sanitizer or vitamins?) Worse yet, the wine might smell fine and taste fine, but over time it ‘goes bad’ because whatever contamination you allowed in, only gets worse with time. Remember that microbes love sugar, and many of them can grow without oxygen. Keeping the oxygen away will eliminate many potential contaminating microbes, but not all of them. So you have to be very hygienic.
Winemaker suppliers sell all kinds of cleaners like potassium metabisulfite that is a little less toxic than many other cleaners. (I still wouldn’t drink it though)
After reading and cleaning and cleaning, I was finally ready to make some wine with my kit.
It did not go well. 5 gallon jugs are heavy when full, and if you mess it up, you’ve wasted a lot of ingredients. I had various containers of vitamins, sanitizer, fining agents, etc. I had mixed but not labeled these. So I would add some more caveates to my list of things-to-do and things-not-to-do: Don’t drink wine while making wine. Do label things. You don’t want to find yourself wondering if you just added vitamins or sanitizer? Don’t start with huge amounts - start with a gallon.
However, I did eventually get some wine. It was very cloudy and full of yeast, which is probably full of vitamins. So, the next step obviously is to get rid of all of that yeast.
Everyone agrees on this fact: Wine is better without yeast. We want it to be crystal clear and full of ethanol, and no healthy yeast with B vitamins and proteins.
Clarify
So logically the next steps are to clarify the wine. You can do that by letting it settle, adding fining chemicals, filtering, etc. There are lots of ways to do this. I can imagine the many erudite conversations about this at wine making conventions.
Winest #1: “How did you remove the healthy yeast?”
Winest #2: “Well, old chap, I used extra potassium metabisulfite in step 1. Then ultra gamma radiation to kill the yeast, followed by ultracentrifugation and several traditional fining chemicals.”
Winest #1: “Excellent. I hate wine that is full of healthy yeast.”
But if you follow those various fining steps carefully, you will soon (days or weeks) have some oh-so-healthy-wine, with none of that nutritious yeast floating around in it, to offend the eye!
Cheers!
Wow cool! How interesting!