Home winemaking -- anybody else?

[Red Squirrel]

I've always been curious to make moonshine, the process just seems kind of cool. I think I would make some if I had an off grid property, I could use it as antifreeze for boiler based heat. Probably more environmentally friendly than glycol if there is a leak.

 

[UsandThem]

I've made this recipe before and it's quite good. Not the Pruno they taught you how make in prison.

Mmmmm......nothing beats a good toilet wine.

 

[OccamsToothbrush]

I made beer and was extremely successful in all but 2 batches out of may 35. I decided to try my hand at meade and did a bad job balancing sugar.

Wine, I would imagine needs the right yeast strains and allowing ample time for it to ferment. My mother made some blackberry wine that turned sparkling in the bottle. Despite being decent, the pH was still off a little.

I've done beer and mead too. Great results with the beer, I focused on easier styles like pale ales and porters because that's what my friends and I drink most. Never produced a batch that was a failure. Mead is tough, without the big flavors of bitter beers there's nowhere to hide. Anything that's a little off shows up in the final product, always for the worse, so you have to be very precise. I did a couple of mediocre-ish batches and then one very good one. But unless you're doing a renaissance fair and want something authentic it's not worth the effort. You can half-ass your way to a very good beer or work your ass off for a mead of equal caliber. I'm lazy, so beer it is.

 

[ultimatebob]

I've always been curious to make moonshine, the process just seems kind of cool. I think I would make some if I had an off grid property, I could use it as antifreeze for boiler based heat. Probably more environmentally friendly than glycol if there is a leak.

Yeah, if I'm going to try making an adult beverage again, I'm making my own Vodka

 

[Cerpin Taxt]

our wines from this year: according the the usda cider is up to 8% the pear is 10.5% and the apple is 15%.

we have several large apple trees, a large pear and a crab apple tree on our property. 2018 we produced about 250 lbs of apples and figure that was about half of the actual, as it was our first year and we did not know what we were doing.

this past season we hade like 25 lbs of apples due to a late frost and about 75 lb of perfect ripe pears. out of that we got about 8 gallons of bottled wine.
we grind the fruit using a 1hp garbage disposer, and press in a converted Harbor Freight hydraulic press in cloth bags with racks between. collect and pasteurize the cider, add what we want, and then mass ferment in brewers buckets. we used dry white wine yeast and cider yeast combo. transferred to carboys. cold crashed and racked once after about a month, and then aged for another couple months. bottled just after new years. a case of bottles like in the picture and the rest in growlers with polyseal caps with some carb tabs.

the pear is like a fruitier champagne with a little more body when carbed. we need to open up a apple and see how its doing. it was a full bodied and a little bitter ( like the apple skin) when bottled. but very easy to drink even at 15%. labels were illustrated /designed by my wife, with the help of 2 or 3 of our dogos.

Nice labels! I'm debating labeling mine, but since I'm pretty strict about getting bottles back and re-using them, I'm a bit hesitant to create a label removal job for myself.

I consider myself pretty fortunate for the blackberries I have available with basically no effort at all apart from harvest, and blackberry makes some outstanding wine in my opinion -- though you need to control your acids. I'd love to have some fruit trees, and here in washington apples can be had in bulk pretty easily, although I have yet to make an apple wine.

I'm kinda curious about your DIY press equipment. Since most of my fruit is berry-like rather than solid like apples and pears, it's been enough for me to simply mash them up in the fermenter with one end of a 3-foot 2x4. If I was gonna do apples or pears like you though I think I'd want some kind of press.

Do you backsweeten those wines at all?

 

[Cerpin Taxt]

I've always been curious to make moonshine, the process just seems kind of cool. I think I would make some if I had an off grid property, I could use it as antifreeze for boiler based heat. Probably more environmentally friendly than glycol if there is a leak.

I get it. I'm probably gonna DIY some kind of rig just in case I have a batch go bad, I can distill it to get something at least usable. The fact is that when it comes to distillation, the yield is (to my mind) astonishingly small, so you really need to start with a huge volume to yield something that makes it worth the effort, and even then it tends to come out a little "angry."

 

[herm0016]

Nice labels! I'm debating labeling mine, but since I'm pretty strict about getting bottles back and re-using them, I'm a bit hesitant to create a label removal job for myself.

The labels come off easy after a soak in starsan when you go to re-use them. they are just paper labels.

Do you backsweeten those wines at all?

the apple had brown sugar and cinnamon added at pasteurization. otherwise, nothing else, just a a few of the little tabs at bottling for the sparkling.

used sink from habit restore, came with faucet. garbage disposer hooked up to that, just put a bucket at the outlet.

mash in the right bucket, cider streaming into the left bucket. the racks are 1x2 pine. and the pan on the bottom is a bacon pan from walmart, perfect because it has the ribs in it and the trough around the edge. mash is put in nylon filter bags, fold the end under and then stacked up with a bag between each rack. then press the heck out of it.


the pear and apple harvest in 2019. this is like 10 lbs of apples, we should have had a couple hundred lbs, but late frost got the buds. pears were prefect ripeness.

 

[Cerpin Taxt]

Just for kicks I hit the market and got 6.5gals of apple juice and 6.5gals of grape juice and started a couple more batches. These will be the no-frills, easy drinking, bring to the cookout, burgers and steaks wines for the summer. Maybe even hold back the apple and spice it up with cinnamon and cloves for the fall.