Is making homemade wine safe/palatable?

Factual Questions
21

Waitaminnite…

[QUOTE=Wikipedia’s “Ethanol” entry]
Ethanol for use in alcoholic beverages, and the vast majority of ethanol for use as fuel, is produced by fermentation. When certain species of yeast (e.g., Saccharomyces cerevisiae) metabolize sugar in the absence of oxygen, they produce ethanol and carbon dioxide. … The fermentation process must exclude oxygen. If oxygen is present, yeast undergo aerobic respiration which produces carbon dioxide and water rather than ethanol.
[/QUOTE]
Huh? Now I’m all confuzzled.

22

“Turnip? Mmmm…repulsive.”

23

The danger in home distillation – equipment contamination aside – is the takeoff point of the distillate. When distilling, what you’re doing in essence is boiling off the alcohol, and recondensing it so you can drink it. Start with 10% ABV beer, condense it to 50% ABV whiskey. But different alchohols have different vaporization and recondensation temperatures. A properly designed still will capture only the good alchol, and leave the bad stuff behind. My educate guess would be this: if you completely distilled and condensed 12 oz of beer, you’d end up with approximately 12 oz of flat, cooked beer that would be no dangerous to you than before. I don’t believe distillation involves chemical reactions that create new alchols. So, if you were to distill 12 oz of 10% ABV beer into pure, 1.2 oz. of alchol (no losses, let’s say), it shouldn’t be any worse for you that the orginal beer. The danger is from over drinking it, which could happen with regular beer.

I undestand the mechanics of still and separation of the alcohols – anyone in the know care to correct or confirm all of my “I believe’s”?

24

I’m confused too. We need August West.

I know that aeration of fresh, cooled wort when pitching the yeast is an important part of homebrewing.

25

The yeast does its reproductive stage in the oxygenated wort – then goes into the fermentation stage, at which point oxygen is a no no.

26

Thank you Turble. Ignorance fought.

To the OP - see, you can make drinkable beer at home, without even knowing what the heck is going on!

27

Making wine at home is a popular passtime in Saudi. AFAIK, no one has ever hurt themselves by fermenting grape juice and drinking the results. The taste varies from pretty fair to downright horrible, but you don’t hurt yourself (aside from your taste-buds!) by drinking it.
People HAVE hurt themselves when distilling though. The results can be blindness, deafness, both, or even death. Another little gotcha with distilling is the chance of a substantial explosion and fire. You are, after all, boiling a very high concentrate of alcohol.

My understanding of the blindness and other issues with methanol poisoning are as follows.
When yeast digests sugars, especially fructose or sucrose, they mainly produce ethanol with tiny amounts of other alcohols. The best home-distillers here use pure sucrose and yeast to avoid producing too many additional alcohols.

When distilling, you gradually bring your mash up to a certain temperature (about 185 degrees F) and start collecting the output of the condenser. You continue to keep the condensate until you reach about 205 degrees F and then stop. You throw away the mash and then re-distill the condensate you collected in the first step. This can be repeated up to 4 times for an ultra pure ethanol that has hardly any taste at all.
If you keep condensate collected at the wrong temperatures, you are purifying alcohols other than ethanol and may poison yourself.

Regards

Testy

28

I have no idea why anyone would want to try this beause you can buy a 5 l box of California wine for well under $10 and whatever you make at home is probably going to be crap anyway. I’d rather buy the wine and dedicate my time to better things. I do not think you can economically make passably good wine at home cheaper than the industrial wineries can do it.

Also, I once tried growing tomatoes in my yard just for fun. After many many hours of work over the weeks I got a few tiny, inedible, tomatoes. Unless you are poor, unemployed, starving and have nothing better to dot makes more sense to buy the groceries at the store.

29

Obligatory Steve, don’t it link. But this is a guy that will eat (drink) just about anything.

30

Cheap ass crappy commercial beer being your staple tells me that you have no place talking about home brew beers being crap. I’m a micro brew kind of guy; heck, the SFBC sponsors our rugby team. Of all the batches of beer my buddies have made, there’s been maybe three our four batches that were undrinkable. To be fair, there were only three or four that were really, really good. The rest varied from really good to not bad.

I feel bad that you can consider yourself a beer drinker when you’re limiting your options so narrowly.

31

I agree, at least as far as beer goes (haven’t made wine but I have made yummy mead). Any reasonably careful person can make beer at home that is at least as good as any commercialy available beer.

billfish tell your friends they are doing it wrong. Either that or your tastebuds are so used to cheap commercial swill beer they don’t recognize what good beer is supposed to taste like.

32

I made cider this year (hard cider, to those across the pond). It was really incredibly easy - press apple juice and leave it alone - the natural yeasts on the apple skins ferment it into cider.

It’s quite possible for things to go wrong with it - for example, you can end up culturing bacteria as well as (or instead of) yeasts - and in fact the batch I made on natural yeasts succumbed to this - it went ‘ropey’. The 5 gallon batch I kick-started with a wine yeast culture was really pretty good.

Fresh apple juice really wants to be cider - if you don’t stop it by pasteurising or some other method of preservation, it just happens.

I’ve also got a batch of apple and rosehip wine blooping away on the desk right next to me as I type this.

33

I agree that buying fruit and making wine out of the juice is going to cost more and take a lot more effort than buying a cheap box wine from Trader Joe’s. It doesn’t make economic sense unless you really enjoy doing it as a hobby. If you spend some time you can make something pretty good, but when you total up your expenses and factor in your time there’s no way you can compete against the price of two buck chuck even if you get the fruit for free.

But if you’re living in Saudi Arabia or some such it’s easy and safe to turn any sugary liquid into a drinkable alcoholic beverage. As Mangetout says any unpastuerized fruit juice will naturally ferment because of the yeasts that live on the fruit. But unless you protect the alcohol from the air you’ll get acetobacters that turn alcohol into acetic acid and you’ll have vinegar instead of wine.

But I’ve got to disagree with you about the tomatoes. Tomatoes sold in grocery stores here in the US are picked green and ripened by ethylene gas and are usually tasteless and hard. Homegrown tomatoes are a completely different thing. Same with strawberries, you really can’t find strawberries at a grocery store that can compare to homegrown. I suppose if you compare the price of farmstand heirloom tomatoes to homegrown it might be more economical to pay $5.00/pound or more than to grown your own, but for many people there are no such farmstands where they live and it’s homegrown tomatoes or orange tennis balls.

34

I drink the cheap stuff because its CHEAP. If I won the lottery things would change.

My handful of aquintances that were beer conosewers that made their own beer seemed to make it mostly for the sake of making it, because it was pretty rare that they were more than mildly pleased with any particular batch. I always got the impression that it it wasnt for the money and time invested in it they wouldnt even bother to drink their own stuff half the time.

On the other hand, the handful of wine winers, seemed to generally be happier with the results they got.

Now you pretty much know everything I could tell you about the topic.

Anyone care for a Pabst Blue Ribbon?

35 
   Boiled, and thus deoxygenated, wort needs oxygen uptake for yeast growth, but that's not necessary for a freshly pressed must.
36

I’ve been considering getting one of these kits.

Dose anybody know if it’s really as easy as they say?

37

It’s not so much that you get “better” product than you can get commercially, at least for me, though some of my beers are at least as good as the microbrews available in my area.

What I get out of it is the ability to do things that you CAN’T get otherwise. For example, I have a clone recipe for Magic Hat #9. It’s an apricot flavored beer, but I replace the apricot flavor, with cherry, and bump the alcohol content up a bit.

Remember, many of the microbrewers started out as homebrewers, and their large batch recipes are simply larger versions of what they were doing at home.

It also is a way for me to make/get beer that I simply can’t get in my area without special ordering. Anchor steam is tough to get, Sleeman steam is impossible to get in NH (as far as I can tell), and Ipswich Ale (from my hometown), is only sold in a very few places across the border in NH, but I have clone recipes for all of these, and more, including foreign beers. I make my own version of Ipswich Ale, that I’ve tweaked over about 10 batches, so it’s similar, but not entirely the same as the commercial product. My Ipswich Ale recipe is by far my favorite, and even if I had a 6er of the “real stuff” in the fridge, I’d reach for one of my own long before picking up the bottles from the brewery. Those that like microbrews, LOVE my beer. Those that drink BMC (Bud, Miller, Coors) HATE my beer.

I also make mead, cider, and hard lemonade, all of which have flavors & alcohol content that I can’t find in commercial versions.

It’s similar to making tomato sauce from scratch. You can be fed by a jar of Ragu, but there is something special about making your own from scratch, and flavoring it with herbs/spices/garlic/wine to exactly your tastes.

38

I used to get some decent tomatoes in a co-op just across the MD line and also at Fresh Fields. I agree with Garrison Keillor that store bought tomatoes are “only for decoration”. Years ago I recorded a Lake Wobegon piece of his where he reminisces about how tomatoes bring back all the memories of childhood. It is a great piece and I still listen to it sometimes.

39

I think butlers point is the best. For beer or wine.

You get to try all sorts of stuff you just aint gonna find anywhere period.

Of course it helps to do things right and get an understanding of how things work. Much better to be more like the Swedish Chef in the Kitchen than Animal the drum player.

40

Well, if you’re confused, wasn’t it presumptious to correct me? :dubious:

If you want your yeast to turn sugar into alcohol it must be denied oxygen. Otherwise it’ll make carbon dioxide and water like any sensible organism would, and avoid poisoning itself with its own waste products. You and I, when short of oxygen (in a 100m dash, for instance) turn glucose into lactic acid - not intoxicating, but causes fatigue symptoms quickly. Yeast doesn’t.

Sure, a little aerobic respiration gets the yeast breeding quickly, but it’s all wasted sugar otherwise.