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You can also obtain what are called carbonation drops. These are candy-like pieces of sugar made with a very specific amount of fermentable sugar - just enough to produce a known amount of carbon dioxide when the yeast ferments that sugar. Note, when you add these "drops" in an appropriate...

And an added plus is that you up-cycled what is usually a waste-product. Seriously. You might share your recipe with local corn farmers. In NY, there is provision for those who grow crops to make wines (and I think spirits) from locally grown crops. This might be additional income for the...

I may be the contrarian but front -loading acids in any wine seems to me to foolish and when you make a mead front loading is nuts! Re mead - honey has no chemical buffers so the pH can be all over the map and if you add acids at the beginning, the pH can scrape the floor. But in any event...

Language is funny. I grew up in Glasgow and all flavored sodas were called "lemonade" - so you could by a cola lemonade and a ginger lemonade , American cream soda lemonade.. We never drank squeezed lemons with added water and sugar, so I never realized until I was very much older that...

Strongly agree with cmason1957. Seems like a lot of novice wine makers act as if tasting the wine at any stage other than months after bottling is anathema. But if we actually taste our wines every time we touch them, we really begin to understand better the process the fruits go through and how...

You are very welcome - In fact I just this morning made a version of that infusion - using 400 ml of vodka, 4 T of caraway seeds, 4 T of coriander and 2 T of Fennel.

Not certain he actually made a wine from grass clippings because he mentioned the clippings in the context of a question: just because you CAN ferment something, should you? And grass clippings might fall into that category of "should you"? Caraway seeds are the main ingredient of a European...

Concord grapes have a flavor that I enjoy so I have absolutely no experience with wine making using these grapes. But I wonder, and no one seems to have spoken to this point. The fact that neither of the yeasts used were able to pull this wine any closer to brut dryness than 1.006 suggests to me...

Easiest approach is to use scissors and cut the petals where they are surrounded by the green (not sure what the correct botanical name is for that green cover, but think it's the involucre). Basically, you are left with only the petals. I generally use about a packed gallon bag for each gallon...

Not clear from the OP if they had tried back sweetening the mead. That might mean stabilizing and adding MORE of the same honey or adding a different varietal that is less intensely flavored. Often, upping the finished sweetness greatly improves the balance of the mead or wine and helps bring to...

Welcome aboard, TheSeed. Gotta tell you that wines made from fruits and vegetables (and even honey) have a very, very long history and while country wines were often made at home by women and not by professional wine makers, (and so in a gendered society, country wines may not always have had...

If I take a reading before I add sugar, the whey is usually around 1.020. I generally get about 1lb 4 oz of cheese from a gallon of milk and about 7 pints of whey. I gotta say that I work hard to get most of the solids out of the milk into the cheese, so that when I make my hard cheese, I cannot...

I gotta think - and I am speaking for myself - apart from Advocaat (a Dutch egg based brandy,) I find it hard to imagine enjoying a wine whose viscosity is similar to whole milk., but yeast that produce glucoside, (DV 10, for example) or a sweeter wine will have more viscosity - but I wonder if...

Not sure that K. marxianus is sold to home wine makers. It is found in Kefir grains and I use kefir from my grains to inoculate my milk when I make cheese. (see for example, David Asher's The Art of Natural Cheesemaking (Chelsea Green 2015). but I have no lab skills and no tools to isolate K...

I think you are imagining that AI at both the input side and the output side has far more agency than in fact exists. The corporation behind Chat GPT apparently spent BILLIONS of $$$ purchasing billions of pages published online and that is the database that this program uses. When you ask it a...

Really delightful. Would have made another batch last spring but the weather killed the flowers before I could harvest any. Hopefully, this year, we'll have a good harvest and I will be able to make a another couple of gallons.

I am most definitely not a chemist, but I wonder if the distilled water might be the problem. Did you check its pH? I see from Prof Google that when distilled water is exposed to air the pH can range from 5.5 to 6.9 , so if the water was more acidic, would that prevent the base from hitting 14?

Welcome , Monkeyhead. You'll find everyone on this forum always happy to answer any questions and offer answers to questions you may not have even wanted to ask - :-) , and that said, not at all certain that country wines (wines made from fruit other than wine grapes) really support alcohol...

Here's the thing: every varietal honey - from orange blossom to Tupelo , from meadow foam to heather, has its own unique flavor (and aroma). Some honey - clover and wildflower, in my humble, are more like spear carriers than soloists. They are great vehicles for other flavors (fruit, herbs...

Again, I most definitely do not consider myself an expert on wine kits but my sense is that you get what you pay for, and because kits really do hold your hand as you make them. Instructions are clear and all ingredients have been measured and included based on the kit manufacturer's knowledge...