Your insights would be invaluable! I am so grateful to the advice if the senior members.
Matteo (and Matt) - thank you so much for the transparency that Finer Wine kits are bringing to the kit wine business. I really like the two kits I've tried so far (they're both bulk aging still but I've snuck tastes), the videos, and the answers provided to emails mostly and occasionally here. I personally agree that there's no reason for you two not to chime in if you can respond to some speculation on this thread. But I also see your point of not doing too much self promotion.
I think those are both great ideas, reusing the skins and the yeast. Especially if the WE kits don't come with skins of their own (but really even if they do, the more the merrier), and if the WE kits only include EC-1118 Champagne yeast rather than the nicer RC 212.
I am loving my newish Speidel 30 liter, but beyond that and a couple plastic buckets, I have about 9 glass carboys. Never broken one yet, knock on wood. Each one now has its own milk crate. The 5 gal ones fit in the basic square milk crates you see everywhere, but I just recently scored some larger rectangular crates which hold all my 6.5 gal carboys. They make lifting the carboys so much safer, and also eliminate the risk of putting them down too hard on my concrete garage floor.
That all makes a ton of sense except that when I priced out the Coloma Frozen it seemed to cost roughly as much as Finer Wines but without the yeast, fining agents, instructions, oak, muslin sacks, etc. So though I was excited about Coloma at first it seemed to me that FWK overdelivered vs. Coloma. But maybe Coloma ships more cheaply, and you already have the yeast, and re-use the skins...
I have all that comes with the FW kits on hand except for oak. If one buys the 16 gallons at $160 that is 2 2/3 6 gallon kits so it seems to be a pretty close price point, perhaps cheaper. I’m not saying it’s better than the FW kits, it is too early to tell but I am going to make at least 2 batches of the Coloma wine so I know.
I make 2nd run wines from the pomace. There's nothing bad in the pomace that isn't already in the 1st run wine.
Wow, that pricing sounds very compelling, I must have compared the smaller size which Coloma sells which was the one I recall was nearly as costly as the original FWKits, pre-price bump and without skins. Let us know how the Coloma compares to FWK.
The Coloma price includes shipping too. If the WE “second run” works out I could see me making FW kits going forward followed by a Coloma batch immediately after further driving costs down. That’s my thinking right now, of course with wine the time lag to see how well this will work is much much longer than in brewing where I’d be boiling a batch as I racked the previous batch off the yeast cake.
From what I've read, most of the constituents of the pomace are extracted in the first 3 to 4 days. EM extracts certain softer tannins.
Thanks, I went to your website and read about your 2nd run wines. I think I will try that and feel like that will also take some pressure off from me trying to press everything out in the first runnings. Basically I will press harder on the 2nd run with whatever DIY bucket press I come up with, pressing just hard enough to hopefully fill my 30L Speidel which I'll use as a secondary for the first time ever. Then I will aim to add 5 g of water with 10# of sugar on top of all the skins/pulp/seeds/wine that is left -- basically a huge pomace to sugar water ratio. After that ferments I'll aim to squeeze that harder to fill not only a 5 g carboy with second run wine, but also some extra wine for topping up.
I stand corrected!
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