I’m a bit annoyed at the chamblaise, there’s all sorts of *stuff* stuck to the side of the carboy, and it’s getting carried over when I rack the wine. It sat long enough, I’ll look into problems with clearing and try to figure out what to do about it. No bottling today!
Tag archive: home winemaking
Happily the wine was very clear at the last racking, so I was confident that it was fine to bottle after 2 more weeks. I had added extra Kmeta (potassium metabisulphite) for long-term aging when it was racked previously. There was a little layer of goop in the bottom, so I opted to rack the […]
The Chamblaise is at SG 0.996 today, ready to rack out of the primary fermentation bucket and into a carboy for secondary fermentation. The wine won’t get topped up yet, I’ll leave some space on top so that I can stir in the stabilizing and clearing agents in about 2 weeks.
The wine sits an additional 8 days for the clarifying agents to do their thing and bind to all of the junk floating around in the wine, mainly yeast carcasses at this point (yummy!). They clump the junk together forming heavy particles that will fall to the bottom of the carboy faster then without the […]
Luckily I had not been told yet to read and follow the directions exactly, and so I waited more than the 10 days indicated in the instructions to do the next step: stabilizing and clearing. I didn’t want to cut the time short, and I really only had time to deal with the wine on […]
While I was waiting for the wine to do what it needed to do, I realized I needed to make some labels. I figured I would be making more wine in the future, and so I wanted to have a cellar name and a theme for my wines. I initially considered an animal mascot theme, […]
I needed to order bottles, corks, and shrink caps for my upcoming wine. While I was browsing, I thought, hey, the fermentation bucket is empty now. That seems wrong. I should fill it! So, I picked out another wine kit — Chamblaise. It is a basic (i.e., cheaper) kit, and the description says it does […]
The yeast took off, and after 2 days the shower smelled like wine! It’s cool and creepy all at once. The instructions said to wait 5-7 days to check the specific gravity, so I checked it the next weekend after starting it out of convenience. The SG was just right, so I put the bucket […]
It is difficult to decide where to start, because I like all varietals of wine. I prefer red wine, so I decided I should definitely get a red wine kit. I was getting a starter pack that included all of the equipment to make wine as well as a wine kit, and there were limited […]
My husband and I live in San Diego, which has become quite a mecca for small craft beer breweries. I got my hubby one of those “brewing bags” to make beer at home a few years back, and I have to say, through no fault of his own, that beer was just gross. However, I […]