Recent content by Handy Andy

Are carbon dioxide canisters any good when preventing oxidization?

Last year i decided to bag and box my red wine. Bags if poured carefully dont get air in them, which prevents the remaining wine from spoiling. Pouring the wine from a height into a glass/jug/decanter does improve most red wines, especially with shop bought cheap wine. The other key thing is...

After primary fermentation is complete, when do people dose with k meta. I am thinking in relation to malolactic fermentation.

You could get really confused an imperial gallon is bigger than a US gallon, best sticking with metric its easier. Approx 4litres to a US gallon and 4.5litres for an imperial gallon. then if you go to Indonesia a gallon of water is 20 litres. :)

I recently purchased a SO2 test kit from Amazon, it arrived from Germany, a month ago. With instructions in German and having translated it, it makes NO sense. It arrived with a test tube and some brown chemical (Jodlusung) Iodine Solution. The test tube has two scales one marked SO2 mg/l 0-...

Last year I consumed probably 30% home made wine. This year if I take it easy hopefully closer to 75% home made wine. I have about 130litres of finished home made grape wine my adega, at the moment. I am also making orange wine, which is ongoing as the oranges dont all come ripe together, and...

Poke Berry was used in the azores as a die for wine making it is flavourless. However Pokeweed apparently is different and can be poisonous or paradoxically a medicine The Paradox of Pokeweed: Poison or Peculiar Cure?

I suspect the problem was caused by me using too much K-meta on the must effectively stopping the fermentation getting started for a few days which may have resulted in the yeast being stressed. Will do, do you suspect the smell will come back ???

Seems my math was not correct, I did the above this morning before reading the replies. So how much safety margin do I have ? I work in metric units and assuming 1 US gallon = 4 litres A 0.1ppm copper addition would be approximately .15ml of the 1% solution added per 4litres A 0.1ppm copper...

OK I took half litre of wine added 1 drop of solution, still had a little egg smell. added a 2nd drop, wife could still smell egg. added 3rd drop passed by the misses. no egg smell anymore. Yeah! I have now added 300 drops to 50 litre barrel, and hey presto cant smell the egg anymore. Dosing...

I need a little help with some simple math. I have a small barrel with 50litres of wine and a lingering feint rotten egg smell, after it had been splash racked twice and left for a couple of weeks. I read that the addition of copper sulphate up to a maximum of 0.5ppm or 0.5mg/litre can be used...

Pressed the wine seems ok. ph 3.95 sg 0.998, tastes ok. More importantly the misses says its ok too. I may have got away with having a few fruit flies in the must . Thanks all for the input. I now have 100 litres of vino novo. I treated it with 1 teaspoon of k-meta, closed the lid with...

3 days in and fermentation is bubbling away, I think normally! Must tastes, ok. No flies in sight. I might have gotten lucky. I will be pressing the wine on Saturday all being well, I will report then.

Thanks Again for the advice. Sadly i dont think there are any chemical analysis facilities on this island. I guess now my only option is to finish the fermentation and try the wine, in about a weeks time.

I didnt take the ph of the must before it started fermenting. The total volume of must is approx 150 litres. Just measured the ph at 2.9 Should I add more k-meta stop and restart the fermentation? Only some of the grapes were over ripe, the ph would indicate the others could have used another...