Recent content by analog_kidd

Could you not have a stateside friend purchase your supplies and mail them to you? I would think that would be a lot cheaper.

You should look for the Dragonette recipe. It's an offshoot of the Dragon's Blood, without the lemon, made with just the berries. I think you could easily adapt it to your berries.

I just mixed up my Blackberry concentrate from Homewinery.com. The online instructions say to add the acid after fermenting. All the recipes I usually have seen add this at the beginning. Does it really matter? The online instructions also say fermentation takes 4 to 8 weeks. What is everyone...

We have Food Lion stores in the area, and they give me three gallon buckets that frosting came in. They are the perfect size for a small batch.

Sometimes it takes a few days to get started. It's not uncommon for mine to take until the third day after pitching yeast to show real activity. I bet yours starts going tomorrow.

Well, my Skeeter Pee with K1-V1116 yeast finally fermented dry. It took about two full weeks to go from 1.085 to .995, which is a little bit longer than normal (although my last one with EC-1118 took almost a month, but that was an anomoly). The one thing I noticed about this yeast is that it...

On the recommendation from dralarms, I also bought a half gallon of this blackberry concentrate. I can't wait to get it started. I think my fermenting bucket will be free by this weekend. Do you all just add the ingredients that came with the concentrate (acid and pectic enzyme), or do you add...

I noticed that when I move a container of wine that needs degassing, when I put it down it knocks free some carbonation. I was wondering if anyone ever tried to vibrate carbonation out of wine? My idea would be a platform of some sort that you place a carboy on and it would vibrate, kind of...

It's been a full week and a day since pitching the yeast. I started at 1.08 and it is at 1.03 today. I've had SP batches go quicker, but I'm not complaining. It's steadily progressing. As a matter of fact, yesterday I added the 2nd bottle of lemon juice and the extra nutrient and energizer, and...

When I first got started, I heard a person call metabisulfate meh-tabby-sulfate, and so that's how I thought it was pronounced. A nice person at my LHBS corrected me one day. Duh.

Question about the Dragon's Blood recipe in the .PDF file: You list "1 Bottles (48 oz each)" of the lemon juice. My notes from way back when I made my first batch said 2 bottles. The way it is written in the .PDF makes it sound plural. I was wondering if it was a typo?

Well, I pitched the K1-V1116 on Sunday, and here it is two days later and my SP is off to the races. We'll see how it progresses. I noticed there is no froth building up, but plenty of CO2 bubbles popping from the surface.

I mixed up a batch of Skeeter Pee this afternoon, and when I went to the fridge to get my EC-1118 yeast, I realized I was out! :ft Looks like all I have left is a packet of K1-V1116 that is about 9 months old, and a sad packet of Montrachet, that is probably a year and a half old. Both have...

I forgot to mention another great idea my wife had for the wedding. We kind of went with the wine theme, flowers under wine glasses for centerpieces. But, the really cool thing she did was take corks and cut a sliver off the edge to give it a flat spot to keep it from rolling, then opposite from...

My son got married a few weeks ago. I knew a year ago I wanted to make some wine for the wedding. I wanted it to be quality wine, so I splurged on a decent kit of Pinot Noir. It turned out very nice. We had special labels printed up with a picture of them ans a nice note on the back. As the...