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How To Make Wine at Home
How To Make Wine at Home
by
Mike Carraway
www.HomeMadeWineRecipesClub.com 1
How to Make Wine at Home
Publisher's Note
The author represents that he/she has the sole legal right to
the material and to publish the material. If you believe this to
be incorrect, please contact the publisher.
Birmingham, Alabama
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How to Make Wine at Home
CONTENTS
1. Foreword............................................................4
2. How to Make Wine at Home..................................5
3. A Special Note About Sugar and Fruit.....................6
4. Patience is a Virtue..............................................8
5. Before We Get Started........................................10
6. OK, Let's Gather What We Need...........................11
7. Cleanliness is Next to Godliness...........................12
8. Fermentation Vessels..........................................14
9. Let's Get Started................................................15
10. Primary Fermentation - The First Stage.................17
11. Racking Your Wine..............................................19
12. Secondary Fermentation - The Second Stage.........20
13. Stabilizing Your Wine..........................................21
14. Bottling Your Wine..............................................22
15. Wrapping it All Up..............................................24
16. BONUS – A Few EXCELLENT Wine RECIPES............26
17. Where to Go From Here?.....................................30
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How to Make Wine at Home
FOREWORD
This book will show anyone how to get a very good start on
making quality wine from home. No need to keep paying
huge prices, AND, you can make all you want…sort of.
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How to Make Wine at Home
You could use Baker's yeast and it would work. Feel free to
do so if you do not have access to a local wine or brew shop.
Or, you can go to an online store and order some EC-1118
winemakers yeast.
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How to Make Wine at Home
If you use grapes from the store, you will need to check the
sugar content with a hydrometer (see equipment chapter)
and you will probably need to add quite a bit of sugar.
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How to Make Wine at Home
If you are going to buy Fruit Juices at the store, use natural
whole juices with NO PRESERVATIVES. Preservatives will KILL
YEAST – that's what they are there for.
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How to Make Wine at Home
Patience is a Virtue
However, no one else but you will drink it. It will not taste
good to anyone else but you (and YOU will usually think it
tastes bad, too). Sorry.
Can you make wine fast and bolster the alcohol content so
that it is 18% or more?
ABSOLUTLEY!
If you ever feel like you have to hurry, you are doing
something wrong. You will read over and over that it's BAD to
expose your wine to AIR. Yes, that's true.
But we are talking hours and hours – that's bad, not just the
few minutes it takes to rack the wine from the primary
fermentor to the secondary.
So, don't worry about letting your wine come into contact
with the air for a few minutes, it's not going to hurt it.
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How to Make Wine at Home
You should PLAN what you are going to make. You should
PREPARE everything in advance. This way, you will not get
caught in the middle of doing something and not have what
you need.
You should also PLAN where your work area will be. Sure,
you could do this in your kitchen, but it's a lot nicer to have a
spot staked out that is your “WINEMAKING” area.
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How to Make Wine at Home
Before you ever crush the first grape, process the first peach,
or open the first can of frozen concentrate, get everything
you are going to need. This includes corks, bottles and a
corker. It also includes siphon tubing, chemicals, and primary
and secondary fermentation vessels.
Read and then re-read the recipe to make sure you have
everything before you get started. There's nothing quite like
having your juice in the primary and realizing that you don't
have any Campden (potassium or sodium metabisulfite)
tablets.
Oh, and it's Sunday afternoon and the wine shop isn't open.
Great.
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How to Make Wine at Home
Did you ever wonder how those scientists get bacteria and
other little bugs to grow?
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How to Make Wine at Home
Fermentation Vessels
You can use milk jugs, sanitized of course, or you can also
use 1 gallon wine jugs. The wine jugs actually work pretty
good and it's easy to find stoppers to fit in the top of them.
The one gallon milk jugs could cause your wine to have an
“off taste” or a plastic odor. Yuck.
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How to Make Wine at Home
All you need is some kind of fruit juice (or vegetable or spice
or pepper or whatever!) that has a sugar content high
enough to let yeast feed on it. This is what fermentation is –
it's YEAST eating SUGAR.
If the sugar content is not high enough, you will need to heat
some water on the stove and dissolve sugar in it and then
pour it into your fruit juice. You can use ice to cool it down.
Your mixture should taste sweet but not overpoweringly so.
Let this mixture, called the “MUST” sit overnight. This lets
the sulfur gas go into solution, kill the microbes, and then
come out into the air.
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How to Make Wine at Home
Once you have the sugar content right and your must
sanitized with sulfites, then all you need to do is toss in
(pitch) the yeast (some yeasts make very good wine while
others, like bakers yeast, do not).
This agitation redistributes the sugar and the yeast and will
cause even more fermentation to take place…which is exactly
what we are looking for.
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How to Make Wine at Home
Let this mixture ferment for at least 8 days with just a paper
towel or rag rubber banded over the opening of your
fermentation vessel.
The next day, you should see renewed vigor in the bubbling
department.
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How to Make Wine at Home
The reason is that you will have a LOT of DEAD YEAST (called
lees) on the bottom of the Primary vessel and it can give the
wine a bad flavor if it sits on it for days. So the purpose is to
get all the wine, and leave as much of the dead yeast, or
lees, as you can in the Primary.
Once you have racked the wine over, you may have lost a
little so top up the jug to near the top with regular tap water.
By the way, if you are using the 5 gallon food container, you
have probably figured out by now that you will have to move
that 5 gallons of wine into another 5 gallon container. If you
are making this much just starting out, you need to get a 5
gallon glass CARBOY. You can buy them at wine-shops or
online for about $25 to $40.
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How to Make Wine at Home
The wine sits unexposed to air during this second stage. The
little yeast that is still active is still turning sugar to alcohol.
Let it do it's thing. This prolonged time also lets all of the
smaller solids that can make a wine cloudy fall to the bottom.
When it's time, you will have to carefully pour off the wine
from the sediment that has settled at the bottom of your
vessel.
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How to Make Wine at Home
After you add the stabilizer, you will need to wait about 3
days for it to do it's work and then you will be ready to
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How to Make Wine at Home
Soak used wine bottles in hot soapy water until the labels
begin to fall off and then scrub them up nicely so they are
sparkly and have no label glue left on them.
Uhhh…. Okay I admit it, I have even used USED corks. But
ONLY after I soaked them in HOT, SULFITE saturated water
for about an hour.
The corks are LARGER than the hole in the top of the wine
bottle.
You will need some way to “pinch” the siphon tube to stop
the flow of wine when the bottle gets nearly full.
Fill each bottle to the bottom of it's neck. You can fill ALL the
bottles and then cork them all at the same time.
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How to Make Wine at Home
Wrapping it All Up
(If you got this eBook without signing up for the free eLetter,
you sign up for it FREE at
www.HomeMadeWineRecipesClub.com/p/g.html)
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How to Make Wine at Home
In the eLetter, you will learn more valuable tips and tricks to
making your wine better and better. In addition, there will be
questions and answers from our subscribers as well as
winemaking success stories!
Cheers!
Mike Carraway
Your 21st Century Wine-making Coach
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How to Make Wine at Home
1. Peach Wine
Category: Fruit
Yield: One Gallon US
Ingredients:
Instructions:
2. Blackberry Wine
Category: Fruit
Yield: One Gallon US
Ingredients:
Instructions:
1. Crush the fruit in the primary and pour in all the additives
and the sugar.
2. Stir well and top up to 1 gallon with hot water.
3. Let sit until cool and the sulphate (Campden) dissipates
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How to Make Wine at Home
(about 24 hours).
4. Add the yeast and start the ferment.
5. Rack clarify and bottle as per normal.
3. Strawberry Wine
Category: Fruit
Yield: Five Gallons Imperial
Ingredients:
Instructions:
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How to Make Wine at Home
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