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ECKraus says water is "appropriate if your head-space is around a pint or less per 5 gallons of wine." PH is logarithmic, so I'm pretty sure it's not going to throw your PH off by more than a few hundredths of a point unless you're really going crazy and adding a gallon or two of water. I...

It looks like better is pretty much irrelevant. Momentary contact with either is good enough. Which is really nice to hear since sitting there like an ***** for half a minute every time I forget to presoak something in the sanitizer bucket is pretty annoying.....and I may have occasionally...

A bucket press is real simple. Just 3 buckets inside each other and drill a zilion small holes in the middle one. Bottom one catches the juice, grapes get dumped in the middle drilled one, and the top one is the press that you just push down or stand on. Some people use 3 of the same buckets...

I was surprised just how well the bucket press worked. I just did my first all grape batch this year and got 8 gallons out of 3 lugs of valdepenas. Just use 2 5 gal buckets inside a 6 gal juice bucket as the collector. Then hop right in there to get your full body weight on it...helps if...

I would point out that there are 2 kinds of airlocks. S locks suck air, while 3 piece locks suck liquid. Sanitizer is useless for the former, while it could plausibly be better for the latter to be sucking in sanitizer rather than 3 month old water with a dozen fruit flies in it. Which I'm...

I just made it high enough ABV that it finished naturally sweet at something like 18% ABV. I was really pretty new to brewing and didn't have any sorbate, so that seemed like a reasonable way to get a sweet wine. Nowdays I'd probably back sweeten with sorbate+kmeta+sugar for a sweeter wine or...

I did mango desert wine back in the day, though my source was big cans of mango pure from the indian grocery for about a buck each. Added enough sugar to get to 18 or 20% ABV and let it go...finished sweet, strong, and dangerously easy to drink. My wife refused to believe it had alcohol in...

I probably do 4 or 5 glasses a week, mostly 2 at a time. I bottle a decent percentage of my stuff in beer bottles since I'm the only one in the house who drinks wine and the 2 glasses that a beer bottle holds is perfect for a weeknight with dinner. We eat a ton of asian food, so meals that can...

I suspect it's because some of us are using garbage $10 meters off ebay that only have one calibration point. If you calibrate at 7, then 4 will be way off, or vice versa. However if you calibrate at 4(or better yet 3.56 with tartarric) then your target PH of 3.65 is so close to your...

Very briefly, the "normal" process for reds is to crush them, add yeast(or not if you want to use wild yeast on the skins), and let it ferment(primary) until at least like 70 or 80% of the sugar is fermented(say 3 to 15 days depending on numerous factors), and then press and transfer to a carboy...

Is it sweet? Is it tart? Sweet means fermentation didn't finish, that's bad. Not tart means you got low acidity/high PH juice. I'm fairly new to this but I've seen several juice pails especially California juice that were very deficient in acid. Tasted bland and flabby, PH tests in the 4.X...

I did it as my first kit(mostly because it was cheap and would be ready quick) and I liked it quite a bit. It's light, lower tannin, higher acidity, with plenty of juicy red fruit flavors....pretty much what you'd expect from a kit that's attempting to clone a Beaujolais. Seemed pretty...

We trimmed one of the plastic ones down a bit and stuck it in our freezer on the bottom shelf where it's a pain to dig anything out of. Now it's a drawer of sorts so you can just pull it out and reach everything without having to go digging for stuff in the back. Looks a bit ghetto but it...

From the info sheet on VP41 MLF bacteria, it is prepared by freeze drying and the storage instructions say "This product can be stored for 18 months at 4°C/40°F or 36 months at -18°C/O°F in original sealed packaging." so they're tough little buggers with regard to cold.

You can always do a small batch without the equipment. Just did my first all grape batch that way and it wasn't too bad. 3 lugs of Valdepena(really california Tempranillo). Manually crushing/destemming is fairly tedious and took at least an hour per lug, but it's easy enough. I made a bucket...

I'll second the paint stirrer. Bought a little $2 one at wallmart with a plastic spiral thingy on the end and it works great. I tried the bent plastic coathanger thing with reasonable success but having a straight metal shaft is helpful as is the spiral so you can run it in reverse(pushing...

They frequently run promos of 40% off all wine kits(I've seen 30something occasionally and 41 once but 40 off MSRP is normally their best) . Southern HB is often in the same ballpark and with shipping one or the other might come out a tad better depending on your location

Wine Expert Vintners reserve Bergamais (Beaujolais), or probably any Bergamais/Gamay/Beaujolais kit for that matter. It's dry, cheapish, needs no tweaking, and is ready to drink out of the carboy at 4 weeks. Nobody will ever accuse it of being big or bold, but it's a nice smooth easy drinking...

A pH of 3.5 with cheap california grapes? Interesting. I always wondered why D Red called for white grapes, but now I'm thinking that at least part of it was for the lower PH without having to mess around PH meters and tartaric. My cali red grapes and buckets always seem to come in around 3.8...

Great read! A few more takeways 161 mg oxygen saturation capacity for an "normal" 6 gal batch of wine(and it only takes hours) 280mg of oxygen in a liter of air That means a headspace of about only about half a liter(161/280=0.575L) can saturate the wine. Ouch :/ That makes me think that...