Any advice on taking the next step?
I’ve noticed that each time I make grape juice (aka prison) wine, the first night or two, the wine is like “Cisco” with bubbles. But after a night or two, it somehow turns into a smooth, drinkable wine.
I’m obviously a primate, a gibbon, in the world of booze making. What should be my next step? Which wine making kits should I try?
Age of the product is your friend.
homebrewer here, so not really a winemaker.
Are you trying to make a decent grape wine or just drinkable booze?
I am sure these fine folks can help you out and there is a wealth of information just sitting on their message board complete with recipe and beginner forums: https://www.winemakingtalk.com
Full disclosure, I don’t know jack about them but this Dragon Blood recipe is in my very long “to ferment someday” list.
Ciders are in the drinkable booze category: Ed Wort Apfelwen (german hard cider). And here is one for Graffthat I have made (and it’s definately drinkable but more work than the Apfelwen). Or you can just buy a couple gallons of costco juice, add a couple of pounds of honey and yeast, and let that ferment for 2 weeks and voila cyser
Your quality will prolly go up considerably if you have some okay fermentation equipment. Here’s a starter kit that includes concentrated wine grapes that you add yeast to. As a beer brewer I use the Big Mouth Bubbler that’s in the kit. If you want to spend more, the Speidel is my favorite before you start getting into the pricy aluminum fermenters.
Anyhoo, if you could flesh out a little more of what you’re shooting for, I’m sure others on the board can help out with more suggestions.
Find a kit you like and follow the directions on the box. Also ask for advice from your brewing supplier as they would have gone through the process with the kit many times before (and other kits like it a thousand times over).
Something closer to “decent.” What I make is drinkable - eventually. The first night is rough though. Perhaps as was said in the first reply, maybe I’m too impatient and not letting it age and I reckon I don’t have the best equipment either.
I’m trying to get to the point where I don’t have bubbly wine when I first open up the container. Bubbles seem to go away after the container is opened.
I’m actually surprised you have anything drinkable that quickly. One of my good friends makes wine every year (from actual grapes) and it takes at least six months before you have anything that starts tasting good. I mean, the primary fermentation takes several days (around 3-7 days.) My main experience is in beer and cider and, with the former, you can have something decent after about two or three weeks if you’re really impatient. With the cider, I find at least six months before it’s really good. I mean, it’s drinkable after three weeks, but it’s still pretty “green” until it sits for awhile.
For cider, do you use real apples or just juice you get from the store?
I’ve used both. Normally real apples, because the juice in the store is usually sorbated which keeps the yeast from fermenting properly. In my experience, it actually will ferment, despite literature to the contrary, but it just … is different. Occasionally, I have found unsorbated apple juice and used that, but real apples or juice from an orchard, typically.
When I making Ciders or cysers in a hurry I’ll got to Whole Foods and spend the big bucks for the unpreserved juice. It tastes pretty good with a quality ale yeast but it takes about two weeks.
Wine takes a while and good wine even longer. If you’re just buying juice I would focus on white wine since you won’t be able to get the good extraction from the skins. An easy recipe would be a chardonnay like this and then if you wanted to start playing with oak or maturation you could pretty easily.
I’ve still got a bottle of a cyser I made 10 years ago laying around and I need to make more since I’m not willing to drink it until I can make more but I did a 6 month fermentation on that one and racked three times. Honey is slow in general and getting god tannin extraction from the apple skins takes about a month with the home equipment.
The fastest homebrew stuff tends to be beer. It’ll take you a day to brew 3-5 days to ferment and then another day in brite and you can be drinking it a week later. If you really want speed and don’t mind the illegality rum is fast too and you can push it out in about 4 days as long as you like white rum, you could turn it to good gin in another day.
I eventually want to get into brewing beer but it seems a little trickier than wine-making. I have no patience. 
Beer is quicker if you want a decent, drinkable product. But we’re looking at 3 weeks, I would say, at the minimum.
If you can make yeast bread, you can make drinkable beer even your first try. You can make pretty decent beer pretty quickly. There is a saying from the father of homebrewing Charlie Papazian “relax, don’t worry, have a homebrew.” Drinkable beer is really forgiving in that more/less malt, more/less hops, etc will change the nature of the beer but won’t wreck it and can even be a pleasant surprise. And you can drink it in a month out of the bottle (and as short as a week if it’s a low alcohol and use a keg). As pulykamell says 3 weeks minimum in a bottle. IMHO 4 weeks is pretty good and further aging doesn’t improve by much for your average 4-6% alcohol beers.
You do need to find yourself a LHBS (local homebrew store). Generally speaking the proprietor will have made hundreds if not thousands of batches of beer, wine, cider, cyser and probably distilled spirits. On top of that, they usually *enjoy *teaching people how to ferment and are very patient with beginners and can help you avoid tons of pitfalls. They may try to oversell you on the equipment needed and we can give you advice on that stuff (for example, I don’t use secondary fermentation nor a bottling bucket). They also have simple recipe kits that are pretty fool proof to make something drinkable and usually malt extract, a steeping grain, the hops and yeast. After a couple of batches you can move into all grain (effectively make your own malt extract) using a real simple method called “brew in a bag.” BIAB is literally a fine mesh bag that you dump all the grains into, place it in a big stewpot (put somethng on the bottom so you don’t scorch it), then heat at ~150F for 30 to 60 minutes.
My understanding is that wine is a lot more involved, and takes a lot longer. The link I gave earlier has wine kits with juice from wine grapes.
For cyser (apple juice and honey): I use 2 gallons of costco apple juice (check to make sure there are no preservatives), a couple pounds of costco honey, and can even add a gallon or two of water. Nottingham dry yeast works pretty well. For under $20, you can make 4 gallons of drinkable cyser. Tehn you can play with tannins or fresh squeezed apple juice or an almost endless possibility. Some folks use brown sugar instead of honey.
There are plenty of brewers on the Dope that give pretty good advice and happy to help.
In high school we used to make what we called apple jack. We would get the big plastic bottle of apple juice and fortify it with some/a lot of extra sugar. We would add some champagne yeast and put a balloon on top. We would put it in the closet for 2 weeks and periodically release the gas from the balloon.
After two weeks we would either drink it, or if was winter we might put it outside, let it freeze and skim the ice.
If you are making something similar my advise is to get a good quality yeast and give it time to work. Also, be prepared for the hangover. It’s a killer.
Here’s a step by step guide to Dragon’s Blood: http://brulosophy.com/2020/04/16/bru-it-yourself-dragon-blood-wine/#more-125493
Good find! THanks!
I live in a small apartment so I don’t have room for a lot of equipment. Assuming we don’t get our accounts cleaned by the virus and economic crash, we’re hoping to move into a single fam home later in the year and hopefully I’ll have some space then. That’s why I’ve felt limited to cheap wine-making
Okay. What is your biggest cookpot you have now? 3 gallons, 4 gallons? That’s enough to boil up on a stovetop and end up with 5 gallons or so of beer. .
What kind of vessel are you using to ferment your current wine?
Your biggest space issue on beer will be a fermentation vessel plus bottles and/or keg in a small apartment. 2 gallons of beer is aprx a case of 24 12 oz bottles. But you can stack up a few boxes. 3’ x 3’ space will give enough room for a fermentation vessel, stack up bottles, and store a few bags of supplies or your cook pot. Do you have that much space?
If you’re just trying to make a drink for the sake of drinking, there’s always kilju: Finnish “sugar wine”. It’s just sugary water that’s fermented. To make a legal endrun in Finland, you add two raisins. Now it’s “flavoured”!
That’s a drink associated with punks, hooligans and ne’er-do-wells, and the English puns you can make off the name “kilju” practically write themselves.
A 3-litre bottle of Frosty Jack can be had for £3, and local moonshine or cheap vodka is never expensive, so the skinflint hooligans seem pretty well covered, and anyone going to the trouble of making such drinks themselves is probably looking to produce something actually drinkable.
I was using a carboy, but I don’t have it handy (misplaced it). I’m limiting my trips outside my place, too, so I’ve just been using the containers themselves and then racking after primary fermentation using cleaned & sanitized containers of a similar size and composition (a half gallon to a gallon in size)
There’s a *LOT *of fertile ground to be sown in extract-only and extract & specialty grains brews before you even THINK of going all-grain, even BIAB.
I mean, you need to get sanitation down pat, you need to understand the basic brewing process steps - boiling, cooling, fermenting, aging, etc… before starting to fool around with mashing and sparging.
And most of that commentary about extract beers being inferior is old news from back in the days when LHBSes had cans of extract of dubious vintage, and extract manufacturing techniques were not so good. Modern day extracts are tremendously good- you CAN make a perfectly good light/pilsner style lager if you have decent skill at brewing and the right equipment, like a chest fridge, temp controller, plate chiller, and a huge yeast starter. (I’ve done it).
Personally, I’d recommend going extract-only with something like a pale ale or amber ale, and see if you like the process. For me, the biggest sticking point is bottling; dealing with around 50 glass bottles that have to be individually washed, sanitized, filled and capped is almost not worth the beer inside. I used to have a gizmo that let me fill up these plastic bottles with beer and dispense with a CO2 cartridge, but I don’t even know if those are made anymore.