Looks like I wasted a small fortune on winemaking gear!

[user 32114]

an old horseman once told me the difference between a horseman and a horse-trader (spit) it was if you say it fast enough it will sound good,,,, me i go my own way, and respect all others choices,,,
To Each Their Own,,,
Dawg

 

[BernardSmith]

Could be a kveik yeast. Not actually used one myself but it seems that they thrive in any temperature AND you can harvest them with ease and dry them.
Have no idea what kind of fruit this kit is set up to make but even if malic fermentation typically takes a few weeks or months to complete, it can take off immediately (depending on the bacterium) and even if it has not ended by the time you come to bottle it will have added some lactic and removed some malic AND may result in a petillant wine. For many people that may viewed as an added attraction.
The lack of SO2 may be deliberate if they have added malic eating bacteria AND they likely already added the K-meta to the juice.If their time table is even close then they may argue that there is no need to add more at bottling.
I guess my position is that not everyone who wants to try making wine is wanting to make a $100 a bottle wine. They just may want to see whether they CAN make a wine and if they can whether that wine tastes OK. And for some folk , perhaps many, an OK home made wine may be just what the doctor ordered.

 

[heatherd]

"we blended together six previously inaccessible winemaking ingredients to make each magical brewsy bag."

There are some gems on the Brewsy website. They do list the 6 magic ingredients:

"Amazing" yeast
Organic Micronutrients (sounds like Go-Ferm + Fermaid O)
Bentonite
Pectic Enzyme
KBicarb (this is an odd one)
Malolactic culture

So I don't object to the ingredients, just the breathless, exaggerated, over-hyped nature of the marketing. Just me, but these seem like pretty normal wine making ingredients. Looks like about $3 worth or less. Notably absent is any sulfite. So you should make this and drink it quick. What's odd to me about this is the Malolactic culture. That fermentation takes awhile and so including it wine you're supposed to drink in 5 days is odd, especially if you don't know if you juice even contains any Malic acid.

I think its directly targeted toward young folks, based on looking at the website. Very reassuring and welcoming. Those ingredients are not inaccessible though.

 

[RickD]

. ..And for some folk , perhaps many, an OK home made wine may be just what the doctor ordered...

Very well said.

"Hard times demand strong spirits" (Steven Ray Tickle)

 

[winemanden]

Trouble is, loads of people, especially the younger generation, have got the attitude "I want it and I want it now". Can't really blame Companies if they cater to their needs. When all's said and done, they're in the business of making money not wine.

 

[Bohunter]

Many of the comments in this post might be a little discouraging to a beginning Brewster. Seems everyone here started out at the top of the heap instead of the bottom! How’d you all do that??

 

[BernardSmith]

Hi Bohunter - and welcome. Don't know that I would agree. I think many of us on this forum (and I will certainly speak for myself) would argue that no one should ever spend a great deal more money on wine making equipment than they pay for the ingredients and that you can start with a 2 gallon food grade bucket and a 1 gallon carboy, some tubing, a bung, an airlock, and an hydrometer and you would probably get change from $40. You might want some bottles and some caps or corks to close the bottles and a tool to cork or cap the bottles. If you find that you enjoy making that first gallon (about 5 bottles) and want to make more then you have the equipment. If you not only want to make more batches but want to make larger batches - say 5 or 6 gallons then you can purchase larger buckets and larger carboys but if you focus on making one gallon batches for a period until you have mastered the processes then you can simply purchase a few 2 gallon buckets and a few single gallon carboys and you can make a different batch of wine every week. Your supermarket has frozen berries and frozen fruit picked at peak of freshness and ripeness and in season there are farmers markets and orchards and farms that let you harvest the fruit you buy.

That said, if your desire is to make grape wine and you want to buy kits then most kits are based on 5 or 6 gallons (25 or 30 bottles) and you will need to start with the larger size fermenters (buckets and carboys). BUT I would always argue that it does not make very much sense to spend a lot of money on equipment if you don't know how interested you will be in this hobby in six months or in a year. And to get into this hobby you can start with nothing because wine making is not about the equipment. It's about the process, the ingredients and it's about the patience needed to make wine because wine making is not engineering. It's more like child raising or gardening. You really can start with no equipment except a mason jar from your kitchen and make far better wine (if you know what you are doing) than someone who spends $500 on a stainless steel conical fermenter fitted with wireless thermometers and hydrometers.

 

[sour_grapes]

Many of the comments in this post might be a little discouraging to a beginning Brewster. Seems everyone here started out at the top of the heap instead of the bottom! How’d you all do that??

Welcome, Bohunter!

I have a different take than you do. I see the comments above as repudiating the idea that you can buy (for the low, low price of $49.99!) your way to the top of the heap. Instead, we recognize that we all had to start at the bottom, and to learn our way up. The comments reflect the idea that there are no shortcuts, that Brewsy makes a false promise.

I largely agree with Bernard: The most important thing is to have good ingredients, and develop sufficient knowledge and experience not to screw them up!

 

[Scooter68]

I started out with a $50.00 kit (No Juice just the hardware and Additives) I had to supply my own juice (Homegrown Blueberries for batch 1) I then found I need a bit more hardware and started piecing together over the years to what I have today. My kit had an excellent wine making booklet that wet my appetite to learn and I did a lot of research. That kit did not try to over-simplfy the process and simply laid it all out for you to learn.

Now - My batches are 1 or 3 gallons typically and I certainly still have much to learn after 5 1/2 years of this.

As already mentioned many of us started out slowly with small kits or limited hardware but we learned quickly what it would take to reliably make good wine.

What you are seeing is a reaction to an advertisement that will NOT do anyone much good and certainly is more likely to lead to dissappointment than success and encouragement to get deeper into the hobby. There is no Ronco-matic wine making kit that will help a person get started and that is essentially what this advertisement presents itself to be. The advertised kit might be better than taking a bottle of apple juice, opening it, putting a ballon over the top and waiting 4 weeks ........ but not much better.

 

[ASR]

I started with a full 1-gallon kit that was equipment and juice. It was on sale for $79 (online but that provider has since closed down). My first supplement to that was to buy a second gallon carboy (so inexpensive I dont even recall what it costs). That investment allowed me to make several kits (one at a time). I bought bottles/corks as needed. I have gone on to 5 gallon batches, but the same equipment from the one-gallon kit is still being used.

 

[Paulietivo]

There's only one place I can think of that brewsy 5 day wine would be amazing. That place is called Prison.

 

[BernardSmith]

The advertised kit might be better than taking a bottle of apple juice, opening it, putting a ballon over the top and waiting 4 weeks ........ but not much better.

But in fact, if you can obtain a good bottle of apple juice (one made from apples pressed by an orchard that supplies apples to (hard) cider makers, then you can make a great apple cider or a delightful apple wine from that juice and using that container. AND if you cannot locate such a supplier (we have a number not far from here), then you can make a very drinkable apple cider (drinkable, not wonderful) simply using Mott's apple juice (if you add tannin and malic acid. But you don't even need to buy a carboy to do so... and this is the way I taught my son how to make his first wine. His second was Skeeter Pee (and for pennies a bottle, that makes an incredible fun wine.

 

[winemaker81]

Many of the comments in this post might be a little discouraging to a beginning Brewster. Seems everyone here started out at the top of the heap instead of the bottom! How’d you all do that??

My first wine was rhubarb, picked from the neighbor's garden, fermented in a used beer ball with bread yeast. I didn't have a siphon hose so I carefully poured the "wine" off the sludge into a bucket, and from there into screwcap quart whiskey bottles ... I had no idea what metabisulfite was, but I did scrub everything with soap and water.


I follow the Beginner's forum, and pay a lot of attention to the newbies. Most start out small, they acquired fruit of some sort and asking either "how to do it" or "how to fix it"? Less common is the folks that jump in head first -- IIRC, a newcomer recently started with a 70 gallon batch -- that's far braver than me!

I have a different take than you do. I see the comments above as repudiating the idea that you can buy (for the low, low price of $49.99!) your way to the top of the heap. Instead, we recognize that we all had to start at the bottom, and to learn our way up. The comments reflect the idea that there are no shortcuts, that Brewsy makes a false promise.

Paul says it best.

 

[Scooter68]

This was where I started. Lot more equipment needed to be added, but; the additives AND most of all that little booklet, is what got me off in the right direction. The booklet answered a lot of questions and spurred me to investigate more but that was my starting point.

 

[NorCal]

Many of the comments in this post might be a little discouraging to a beginning Brewster. Seems everyone here started out at the top of the heap instead of the bottom! How’d you all do that??

My start was making completely undrinkable jail-house Welches, circa 2013. It did however give me a bug and the start of reading / studying / exploring every aspect possible. I am fortunate is that I have a science background and live in an excellent wine making region.

 

[Ajmassa]

Many of the comments in this post might be a little discouraging to a beginning Brewster. Seems everyone here started out at the top of the heap instead of the bottom! How’d you all do that??

Luckily no ‘beginning Brewster’ will ever read it. Because once a Brewsy winemaker googles a question and reads info on a winemaking forum—— they are no longer a Brewsy winemaker, contradicting the entire brewsy mission statement.
To these people i would say- Welcome! By reading this you have surpassed the ‘just add this bag & get drunk in 5 days!” stage’ of your winemaking career.

 

[BernardSmith]

Ha! I guess we all tend to be "elitists" here. We make and drink wine for the pleasure it gives us and those with whom we share our wine but that pleasure is rather more than (or even other than) the "adolescent" buzz that some folk who "brew" alcohol seek. We make wine because we enjoy the taste and the aroma and the camaraderie that wine drinking creates, and we enjoy the creativity of taking fruit with a very short shelf life and turning it into something very different with a shelf life of years with the help of a tiny fungus.

 

[MHSKIBUM]

I'm about to try to make wine from fresh juice for the first time after making a dozen wine kits. My understanding is that the fresh juice naturally contains all the yeast that's needed. It speaks to the quote by Martin Luther: 'Beer is made by men, wine by God.' Left on its own, grapes and other fruit become wine. Beer has to be brewed.

 

[MHSKIBUM]

I was fortunate to have an experienced home winemaker to mentor me and lend me some equipment for my first batch. Thereafter I bought most of my equipment used via Kijiji. I bought my first five carboys, bungs, and various tubing from a person who stopped making wine. Facebook has 'Buy Nothing' groups in almost every neighbourhood. I ask for empty wine bottles (non screw top) and have received more than 4 cases of them for free.

 

[BernardSmith]

But juice ain't fresh grapes and grapes themselves may carry many different yeasts only some of which might produce a wine that you and others may enjoy. which is why most - most wine makers who ferment grapes chemically remove all the wild yeasts and add the cultured yeasts that they know will produce a wine that they will enjoy.
Juice may have the added problem that whoever expressed the juice from the fruit (grapes? apples? berries? plums? ) likely removed all the indigenous yeasts either by chemical means or by pasteurization (heat or UV) to be able to ship and sell the juice without it fermenting and turning into wine and possibly vinegar while it is still in storage. If you expressed the juice then it likely does have wild yeasts but you should know that not only are indigenous yeasts not necessarily going to make the wine that you prefer but whereas alcohol is in fact toxic to all yeasts, wild yeasts are not nearly as tolerant of alcohol poisoning as lab cultured yeast and they may conk out when forced to exist in a solution that is 5 % alcohol. Lab cultured yeasts are cultured from cells that over the centuries can thrive in solutions of 12 - 16% ABV (alcohol by volume) and most people look for wine at about 10 -12% ABV. In short, if you have juice you may want to remove all the wild yeast by adding K-meta per instructions and then waiting 24 hours before pitching (adding) some lab cultured yeast.