Home Brewing Pro

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1. What are the top five rookie mistakes to avoid in winemaking?

Jennifer Scott
Brooklyn, New York

That’s a great request. Just like anything in life, having a concentrated, bullet-pointed list of the essence of a thing is very important. So here goes:

Top five rookie mistakes:

1. Picking too early or too late: I can’t say this enough — it all starts with the raw material. Pick too early and your Cabernet will never lose that nasty green bell pepper aroma. Pick too late and your delicate Malvasia Bianca will be a flabby, high pH flop with 15.0% alcohol. Making the pick call is the single most important decision a fresh grape winemaker will make in a wine’s life — be sure you make it right. Do be informed by analysis (Brix, pH and TA) but even more importantly, use your taste buds.

   If you’re a home winemaker getting someone’s second crop, try to let it hang on the vine as long as you can to lose some of that acid and get to the flavor profile you’re looking for.

2. Inappropriate must adjustment: Acid, water, enzymes, nutrients, tannins, bentonite, sulfur dioxide. The list of things we can add to our freshly-crushed grapes is too long to enumerate. Many beginning winemakers believe that the more “tweaks” and additions they make, the better their wine will be.

   I try to keep my winemaking minimalist and think about using additives only when the grapes really call for it. The idea is to get such good grapes that you don’t have to add anything at all.

3. Not understanding the destructive power of oxygen and spoilage microbes: After the carbon dioxide from the primary and secondary fermentation blows off, your wine is vulnerable to attack by oxygen and spoilage yeast and bacteria. Leaving wine uncovered, untopped or unprotected by insufficient sulfur dioxide is asking for trouble. When a wine is actively fermenting it can be roughed up, left uncovered and moved around without much worry. Once a wine goes still, it’s critical to protect it.

4. Not understanding the constructive power of oxygen and good microbes: Believe it or not, oxygen is critical for a wine’s early development. A healthy fermentation actually needs oxygen to perform its best and young wines can benefit from an aerative racking in the first months of life. Good microbes like yeast and certain strains of lactic acid bacteria are your partners in the fine winemaking process. Learn how to actively manage their interactions with your wine.

5. Keeping inadequate records: So much in winemaking seems to happen by chance — the weather influences the grapes, a cold cellar can slow down a fermentation and a random spoilage yeast can invade a perfectly good wine. To maximize the level of control you have over your wines, keep good records during the winemaking process. Only by logging in dates, treatments, wine analysis and tasting notes do we learn what works, what doesn’t and how to improve.

Sometimes it can be hard to pick enough fruit blackberries or wild grapes for home wine making. I was wondering if anyone has had any luck making wine with store bought grapes or berries. If so what types. I am using a 6 gallon kit and i am a beginner. Thanks in advance.

For making wine, I wouldn’t recommend the store bought grapes, since they’re more for eating and not wine. if you plan to use store bought grapes, I would suggest making sure you leave more of the residual sugars. as for blackberries, it shouldn’t be a problem as much. i would just try and shop at a local farmers’ market if you live in an area that grows either fruit and avoid the chain grocery stores. this way you make sure the fruit are getting is fresh, and with grapes, your wine will be a good representative of the area.

I have been experimenting with several home recipes. if I drink 3 or 4 glasses of some of the fruit wines, i get a headache the next day that’s worse than a whole bottle of jack daniels.

what is it about homebrew that is so wrong in the chemistry?

I agree that it’s probably too sweet. Back off on the sugar content or use a champagne yeast that will use more of the sugar.

Tui Beer advertisement. This is why they only allow women to brew beer.

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this will allow you to experiment with making a type of wine from juice that you buy in the supermarket and stuff you probably have around the house or can easily obtain. It’s what got me into making actual wine because it taught me how simple it is to turn some sweet juice into wine.

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I have often heard that store bought beer ,which is filtered or otherwise sterilized to have no yeast in it, doesn’t keep so long. On the other hand home brew is said to get better with age, presumably due to the presence of live, though, dormant yeast.

With all DUE respect to TheMan, home brew does improve with age if it is decent to start with. I brew some that I will not open for the first several months, until it mellows out properly. The stronger and darker the beer, the better it will age. Barleywines and double bocks are good examples. Like wine, beer improves with age, then declines. It is more a matter of style than “store bought” vs “home brew”. I suspect that the last brewing of Sam Adams Utopias is still well-worth drinking. This is in contrast to the mega-brews that weren’t worth drinking to start with.

Technorati Tags: Beer Recipes, Wine Information

Getting yourself in the wine business can be challenging and encouraging. However, you can’t compare a bottle of fine wine to one from your own winery. For those who have successfully established themselves in the wine industry, they may consider their business as their lifestyle.

According to most wine entrepreneurs, they say that wine business is one of the strongest growing industries today. It is also promising for starters because it is fast developing and outpacing the growth of the economy of some wine producing countries.

It is also considered as a highly fragmented market with immense growth potential according to Vic motto, a wine business analyst at Motto Kryla and Fischer LLP from the state of California. He said that many who would like to be in wine business could easily succeed and grow as long they have the finances and knowledge on how to stat up a winery.

Finding a marketable place in the country or in other countries could be one challenge you will face. Starting a winery and a vineyard also requires large capital-incentives. Your patience and financing should be tested from the planting up to the time you harvest and age your wine before manufacturing your very first bottle.

The alternative way for beginners is to purchase grapes from those existing and large vineyards to shortcut the whole procedure from storing, labeling, aging, and selling your own wine brand. Starting with your own vinery can take you years before selling your first bottle. Nevertheless, you have the option to operate what you have started on or worked first and invest in wine collecting.

Don’t let the long years of waiting stop you from achieving your goals. You could also try out other avenues for profit like starting out with a wine periphery business. You may begin with a publishing company that will design, publish, and write about wine education. You can sell them at bookstores, gift shops and wine shops.

You may also try designing and creating fashionable wine storage units for those who want to start as well in selling wines. You may even open a wine distributorship shop. You could even promote wine education to the places you visit as a wine educator or a speaker.

There are many interesting ideas you can try in the wine industry. Always remember to be well equipped and carefully study the niche you want to penetrate. It doesn’t matter whether you are a wine seller, collector, educator, bottle designer, or president of your own winery. You will surely enjoy and succeed in your chosen field of the wine industry.

Jerry Shannon
http://www.articlesbase.com/food-and-beverage-articles/getting-into-the-wine-business-711601.html

Is there one or does anyone have a good homebrew recipe?

Rum and diet Coke

Learn tips and techniques for bottling home brewed beer with expert beer tips in this free home brewing video clip.

Expert: Eddie Leal
Bio: Eddie Leal is an award winning Master Brewer at the Steelhead Brewing Company in Irvine, California.
Filmmaker: Joseph Mann

Duration : 0:2:1

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