Winemaking

Making Wine at Home

So I was bitten by the bug to ferment one day. I blame Dwarf Fortress and the countless barrels of wine I shipped out of my forts.

I had the itch to make some deliciously intoxicating beverages and decided to tackle a small batch of wine.

Alcoholic fermentation occurs when yeast consumes sugar; they produce both alcohol and carbon dioxide. If you keep both around, you'll wind up with bubbly wine (or a huge mess on the floor after your bottles explode), but generally you're just after one of those two. ;-)

I had decided to make a nice strawberry wine, since they were in their prime and cheap. I really enjoy them as a berry, and thought that I'd see what sort of wine they'd produce and if any significant amount of their original flavor remained.

I first needed some equipment:

reusables: - glass jugs. since I was making a small batch I used 1 gallon jugs. The larger, 5 gallon glass jugs are usually called 'carboys', for your googling benefit - rubber tubing. I needed to be able to siphon fluid from one container to another. You often want only the liquid at the top of a batch and none of the settled-out gunk on the bottom. There is a particular set of siphons and 'racking tubes' available, but the general goal is for siphoning. - airlocks. Airlocks are a special little item that let you fill it partly with water to produce a seal that lets gas vent from the inside-out, but not the other way 'round. They are super-cheap and help ensure no nasty bacteria get into your wine, so spend the buck or two on the proper ones. - rubber stoppers. These had to fit the glass jugs I used, and need to have a hole in their center large enough to snugly fit the bottom of the airlock.

reagents: - sterilizing agent. Popular choice is star-san, but I went for the cheaper iodophor, an iodine-based agent. You mix this stuff with water and use it to sterilize your tools, containers, etc, so as not to introduce unwelcome bacteria into your batch. - campden tablets. These are tablets that sterilize liquid for drinking, but are often used by the homebrewer. Crushed and sprinkled into a vat of stuff, it helps keep unwelcome bacteria from growing in your sugary solution (see a theme?) before you're ready to add your preferred organism (yeasties) - acid blend, tannin, etc. The other ingredients depends on your recipe, what fruits you use as your base, etc. Grapes need no tannin added to the mix since they have it naturally, it gives their wine a bit of a bite to it. Other fruits may not have tannins and you may want to get that crispness by adding grape tannin extract, or some people use tea bags to supposedly nice effect. acid blend is another mixture of powdered acids (citric, etc) designed to improve results by manipulating the pH - pectin. This helps break up fruit tissue to try and extract more flavor - most importantly: YEAST. This was a standard wine yeast. I went to MidsouthMalts where the owner/operator listened to what I was doing and helped me pick out some materials.

I started my wine on August 23rd with about 5 pounds of strawberries. I cleaned them, hulled them, and tried to keep only the ripest parts of the fruit. Some particularly delicious berries, sadly, did not make it beyond the washing stage. Their sacrifices to my stomach were for the greater good.

After I had my berry chunks, I put it all in a paintbrush-washing mesh bag (looks like a giant laundry sack for delicates) that I'd sterilized and threw it in a sterile 3 gallon bucket from Lowe's. I added a ton of sugar and filled with water up to 1 gallon (I'm shooting for 1 gallon or so the whole way through, which is my jug size). I mashed and mashed to break up the fruit with a sterile potato masher. After my arm was worn out, I was ready to let it sit for a day or so with the lid just loosely on.

The next day, I added my yeast to the "must", this big sweet sticky mixture in the bucket. I stirred gently and put the lid back on loosely. After awhile this mixture was really active with fermenting-- there was so much yeast smell in the air it was like we lived in a sourdough loaf. I had to put the bucket in a closed-off closet (it likes to be away from the light anyway). :( I continued to jostle and stir this stuff daily with the lid just loosely on for about a week until the fermentation slowed down a fair bit.

At this point, the mix was pretty well alcoholic, but contained a lot of floating bits and chunks and was super cloudy. I began the process of "racking", or transferring the wine from one container to another in order to leave behind impurities. For the first time, I had my wine in a proper glass jug. I took note of a few vitals like the date and the specific gravity of my batch (specific gravity is an indicator to let you know how much sugar is left to convert into alcohol and how much may have already been turned into it), then capped the jug with the airlock, and let the whole shebang sit off in a dark closet by itself.

This week, I will be racking my wine again to another glass jug. It has cleared up significantly. I'll be checking the specific gravity, the taste, and the sweetness, and making adjustments like adding sugar if needed.