JaimesBeam
Active Member
I’ve been making wine successfully for several years, but I thought it would be useful to share and get any feedback on some details on the way I do things.
First I make large batches of wine, typically 50 gallon barrels, mostly mead, cider and fruit wines. I typically start a batch off with a quart of sterilized juice and hydrated yeast, then use my basic wine recipe to multiply the size of the batch to a gallon, then five gallon, then fifty gallons. This way I always have a strong yeast culture because I don’t use sulfates for sterilize the fruit before fermenting them. Usually I am using frozen fruit.
I use Star-San as a sanitizer. Great stuff, you don’t need to rinse it, but I usually do. The foam can be a bit of a pain to rinse, but I like that it keeps surfaces wetter longer. I wash stuff with dish soap and sponge scrubber and rinse before sanitizing, but do you really need to if it is already clean, IE no visible dirt? What if it’s been sitting a week, and flies have ‘landed’ on it?
I also have a hard time thinking of Star-San as a kills ANYTHING sanitizer, say the equivalent to Clorox. It is basically phosphoric acid, like in Coke. Is it really a kills ANYTHING sanitizer, or a kills-most-yeast&bacteria-found-on-winemaking-equipment sanitizer? Hydrogen Peroxide would be an alternative, but I don’t want to use Clorox, Iodine, or C-Brite; too much chemicals.
Occasionally I will use PBW to clean the inside of closed barrels, but if I can reach it, plain dish soap does it for me. It’s hard to know if you are wasting your time do overkill in cleaning. While working on wine, I generally have three buckets, one of water to rinse still off, one of Star-San, and a second bucket of water to rinse Star-San off, or backup rinse water in case the first bucket gets dirty. I use distilled water to make the Star-San, so it stays effective for days instead of having it get cloudy in a couple hours and needing to make more Star-San.
I keep any equipment I am not using in the Star-San, and dip my hands in Star-San occasionally. I take a shower and get clean clothes before doing any winemaking, and I keep stuff clean and wipe/mop up any spills, but don’t specifically clean/sanitize tables/floors before winemaking. I assume my great well water is clean. I get it tested each year, but it really is not really “sanitized."?
Now I imagine 90% of the time, 50% of this is overkill. People were making wine for millions of years in primitive circumstances without many problems. After you are making wine for a while you develop a good wine culture in your environment that helps prevent any bad infections getting into your wine. The thing is that historically the wine did not always end up being very good wine. We want it to be good wine all the time, so we use specific wine yeasts and sanitizer. Historically, the really good wine was rare and sought after and expensive. Now a days even the cheapest wine is better then what the common folk drank.
So... say I am making Blueberry wine, with frozen blueberries... what I usually do is mix up five gallon batches of wine in a bucket repeatedly and dump it in the barrel. I start with three gallons of hot water, as hot as I can get it out of the faucet. Sometimes I will heat it further if the temperature of my batch is running colder. I will mix eight lbs of sugar into the hot water; the hot water makes it easy to dissolve the sugar. Then I take ten lbs of blueberries and add enough of the hot water to partly thaw the blueberries to make a slurry. I used to thaw the blueberries and mash them with a potatoe masher, but it was time consuming and messy. Now I flash thaw them with hot sugar water and blend them with an immersion blender. And the result ends up getting quickly to 65F, so I can pitch in my previous starter wine/yeast batch.
I weight the ingredients of each minibatch, and total them up as I go. I want to end up with 150-200 lbs lbs of blueberries, and adjust the %Sugar to 24-25% toward the end of the barrel. The original recipe that I got from a book was three lbs of blueberries/ bilberries and 2.25 lbs of sugar per gallon, which is WAY less sugar then I use! I end up using 2-2/3 lbs of sugar per gallon or more at the end to get the %Sugar up to 24%. The only reason I can think for that some of the Sugar gets used in bringing the sugar level of the blueberry juice up to 24% sugar. I figure that the (dry-non-Juice) part of the fruit pulp is irrelevant .
This is getting long, so I’ll just say I ferment in Food-Grade Barrells with sealed lids. I will punch them down as needed for the first week or so. I will leave the fruit in for quite a while, at least a month, and then siphon off the wine, rack a few times and bottle...
What do you think?
First I make large batches of wine, typically 50 gallon barrels, mostly mead, cider and fruit wines. I typically start a batch off with a quart of sterilized juice and hydrated yeast, then use my basic wine recipe to multiply the size of the batch to a gallon, then five gallon, then fifty gallons. This way I always have a strong yeast culture because I don’t use sulfates for sterilize the fruit before fermenting them. Usually I am using frozen fruit.
I use Star-San as a sanitizer. Great stuff, you don’t need to rinse it, but I usually do. The foam can be a bit of a pain to rinse, but I like that it keeps surfaces wetter longer. I wash stuff with dish soap and sponge scrubber and rinse before sanitizing, but do you really need to if it is already clean, IE no visible dirt? What if it’s been sitting a week, and flies have ‘landed’ on it?
I also have a hard time thinking of Star-San as a kills ANYTHING sanitizer, say the equivalent to Clorox. It is basically phosphoric acid, like in Coke. Is it really a kills ANYTHING sanitizer, or a kills-most-yeast&bacteria-found-on-winemaking-equipment sanitizer? Hydrogen Peroxide would be an alternative, but I don’t want to use Clorox, Iodine, or C-Brite; too much chemicals.
Occasionally I will use PBW to clean the inside of closed barrels, but if I can reach it, plain dish soap does it for me. It’s hard to know if you are wasting your time do overkill in cleaning. While working on wine, I generally have three buckets, one of water to rinse still off, one of Star-San, and a second bucket of water to rinse Star-San off, or backup rinse water in case the first bucket gets dirty. I use distilled water to make the Star-San, so it stays effective for days instead of having it get cloudy in a couple hours and needing to make more Star-San.
I keep any equipment I am not using in the Star-San, and dip my hands in Star-San occasionally. I take a shower and get clean clothes before doing any winemaking, and I keep stuff clean and wipe/mop up any spills, but don’t specifically clean/sanitize tables/floors before winemaking. I assume my great well water is clean. I get it tested each year, but it really is not really “sanitized."?
Now I imagine 90% of the time, 50% of this is overkill. People were making wine for millions of years in primitive circumstances without many problems. After you are making wine for a while you develop a good wine culture in your environment that helps prevent any bad infections getting into your wine. The thing is that historically the wine did not always end up being very good wine. We want it to be good wine all the time, so we use specific wine yeasts and sanitizer. Historically, the really good wine was rare and sought after and expensive. Now a days even the cheapest wine is better then what the common folk drank.
So... say I am making Blueberry wine, with frozen blueberries... what I usually do is mix up five gallon batches of wine in a bucket repeatedly and dump it in the barrel. I start with three gallons of hot water, as hot as I can get it out of the faucet. Sometimes I will heat it further if the temperature of my batch is running colder. I will mix eight lbs of sugar into the hot water; the hot water makes it easy to dissolve the sugar. Then I take ten lbs of blueberries and add enough of the hot water to partly thaw the blueberries to make a slurry. I used to thaw the blueberries and mash them with a potatoe masher, but it was time consuming and messy. Now I flash thaw them with hot sugar water and blend them with an immersion blender. And the result ends up getting quickly to 65F, so I can pitch in my previous starter wine/yeast batch.
I weight the ingredients of each minibatch, and total them up as I go. I want to end up with 150-200 lbs lbs of blueberries, and adjust the %Sugar to 24-25% toward the end of the barrel. The original recipe that I got from a book was three lbs of blueberries/ bilberries and 2.25 lbs of sugar per gallon, which is WAY less sugar then I use! I end up using 2-2/3 lbs of sugar per gallon or more at the end to get the %Sugar up to 24%. The only reason I can think for that some of the Sugar gets used in bringing the sugar level of the blueberry juice up to 24% sugar. I figure that the (dry-non-Juice) part of the fruit pulp is irrelevant .
This is getting long, so I’ll just say I ferment in Food-Grade Barrells with sealed lids. I will punch them down as needed for the first week or so. I will leave the fruit in for quite a while, at least a month, and then siphon off the wine, rack a few times and bottle...
What do you think?