A question borne of ignorance but, what are you going to use it for?
Are you still making wine these days, or are all your efforts focused on brewing beers?
I understand.. Sadly, I understand. And if if you have a cellar-full of wine then you might want to slow down when it comes to native grapes, but what about country wines or mead? Not perhaps a Syrah or a Pinot Noir but Skeeter Pee can be very drinkable as can be elderflower or elderberry. And I have a gallon of parsnip wine nicely clearing while I recently started a rhubarb wine and am about to pitch yeast into a few gallons of dandelion must. Waiting for our mulberry tree to bear fruit and will make a few gallons of mulberry wine (quite delicious - made my first batch last year. Don't get me wrong: I like a good dark beer but beer fills me up in a way that a wine does not.
Trying to make sense of the image. This is a filter, yes? But it is holding the wart with no seepage? There is no glass container that the filter is sitting inside, yes? How does this work? Magic?
aha! I thought that you were brewing the wort in that filter and that lighter area towards the top was fermentation but now I understand that you had drained the wort and were about to sparge the grains to extract every last ounce of sugar from the grains. Truth be told, I don't brew very much and when I do I brew a gallon or two at a time and only use BIAB methods. I use a 2 gallon bucket whose bottom I have drilled with holes for sparging.
That's the kind of "efficiency" that was more common in the middle ages. Why is your ability to extract sugars so relatively inefficient. Is it the kind of grains you need to use to get a gluten free beer? Is there any value in the use of amylase to help break down the starches?
Jim,Bernard, I have not made wine in 6 years, since I had a cellar full of my past creations (I still have ~ 130 bottles) and I am extremely limited down here in what I can get to make it from. This an all-craft beer area, so juice buckets, grapes, etc. – nobody has them, can get them, or even knows what you are talking about. There are no winemaking clubs to put together an order (lots of beer clubs). So I was limited to fruit wines and native grapes. I do love scuppernong and muscadine wines, but that's about all I could do here from grapes.
As my tastes have expanded over the years, I began to really enjoy French Bordeaux and many Australian wines, especially their shiraz. It just got to be easier to buy those and cellar them, though I kept looking for sources of grapes and buckets, etc., here. Zilch.
Interestingly, I happened across a 2017 post on this site just the other day about Walker's, and I am again contemplating making some wine from juice. I hope to order some juice from them soon to eventually create my own red blend. I wish I had a way to get the California and Chilean buckets, or even better the grapes, but alas, there is none I have found unless I want to invest 12 or more hours driving both ways.
Here's a link to the thread about them here, where a few of us are discussing them: Finer Wine Kits | Winemaking Talk - Winemaking Forum
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