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Microbes .. or yeast cells? You can easily observe yeast cells using an inexpensive microscope . Most yeast cells are between 3 and 4 micometers (1/1000 of a mm). There are relatively simple ways to grow yeast cells in a petri dish and then isolate the specific cells you are interested in and...

K-meta will kill a small colony of weakened yeast cells, but most lab cultured yeast is pretty immune to this. The idea is that if you have racked several times as you age , then when you stabilize there are really very few viable yeast cells remaining. K-sorbate, however, prevents those cells...

My experience - and I use only bread yeast for making whey wine - is that it has no problem reaching 12-14 % ABV. The bigger problem with wine yeast is that it has not been cultured by labs to flocculate in the way that wine makers and brewers need the yeast to drop out of solution. For me this...

Short answer is , Yes. But if you buy your barley from a LHBS or buy DME or LME the barley has already been malted. Barley for food or barley flour is not malted but barley for brewing, will have been, unless you are growing or buying your own grains to malt.

Malting is simply allowing the grains to sprout for a few days. You might soak the berries for a two or three days and then allow them to drain but keep them wet but not covered in water. After another three days or so, they will have sprouted and produced tiny roots hat sprouting activates the...

That is precisely my understanding. If you don't have any malted grains (and barley has a high enough diastatic power to break down the complex sugars of other low diastatic grains) then you need to add amylase enzyme to do the work of producing simple sugars that yeast can ferment. If you...

Just a point of clarification. To make a WINE from barley - or indeed, any grain, you simply use the grains as the flavor element. You ferment ON the barley but you are not fermenting the grains, you are fermenting simple sugars that you add to the must. To make a barley wine , you need to have...

I wonder how you are finding the taste of this wine? I tend to find that OJ contains too much acid (TA) to be a pleasant drink and so what I have tended to do is use the zest of oranges - none of the white pith, and only the outside of the peel. The zest contains incredibly flavor-rich...

The more complex the mixture , the better the wine will be - sweet apples, tart apples, high tannin apples, bitter apples, and aromatic apples. But I think you really need to treat them as if you are going to make cider. So you begin by pressing them. There may be folk near you who routinely...

I gotta add a critical opinion here. There is a world of difference between an accredited school whose teachers must have a recognized degree at a level which the accrediting authorities agree the teachers must have to teach a subject and an online forum where anyone can present themselves as...

Like I suggest, many people who publish recipes for country wines were /are allergic to fruit in fruit wines. No one adds a drop of water to grapes when they crush and press that fruit but they don't hesitate to drown most other fruits in water. It's as if they are looking for a miracle that...

That's a pretty serious approach to marketing, Dawg. You could really hurt that way. :)

Simplest approach is to reduce the amount of water you use to dilute the fruit juice and add more fruit to the must. Contrarian that I am, in my opinion, most people who make country wines are allergic to the idea that the flavor is in the fruit. They seem to imagine that the more water they use...

If you are sanitizing your hydrometer and test cylinders then pour your wine back. Wine ain't beer and beer is what is likely to sour when exposed to bacteria in the air, so sanitization is not necessarily sufficient to prevent "spoilage" (fear quotes for spoilage because some brewers actively...

It COULD be complete. There are many reasons why yeast may quit fermenting before the hydrometer shows that the gravity to be below 1.000 but if the wine is stable at 1.000 for say, three readings over , say 2 weeks you can be pretty confident that fermentation has ceased - but to be clear, if...

Thanks, but I sorta kinda wrote this for offthehipevents. If someone wants to post this elsewhere, feel free, but I think it might need some more clarification when it is posted without any context.

I think SG is very simple: water is given a nominal density (another term for specific gravity ) of 1.000. Sugar, when added to water, or as in juice is in water, increases the density - if you dissolve 1 lb of sugar in water to make a TOTAL volume of 1 US gallon (not an imperial gallon which is...

Not sure I follow, but that may be my ignorance. The percentage is a one use metric. Before you pitch (add) your yeast , your measurement using that scale tells you (by converting the specific gravity into ABV) the potential ABV of your must. Pitch the yeast and five minutes later (It could be...

If you would like to share the recipe and the quantities of ingredients you used we can estimate the true ABV A gravity of 1.1000 means that your apple wine has more than 2lbs of unfermented sugar in every gallon. That is very sweet. I am not sure that our bodies can detect more sweetness than...

True...Daft question, I agree... but we live in daft times so, for example, Vintner's Best fruit juices contain far more sugar and grape juice than the fruit named on the jug. And yes, I will name the guilty to protect the innocent.