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Degassing is always done after fermentation and before adding the fining agents, at least for the kits I have done.

Here's a follow up. My Chilean Malbec is 11.5 months old now so I cracked a bottle the other day. At 6 months I could barely drink a glass, it was so harsh. But now at just shy of 1 year I actually enjoyed a bottle of it. It's still a pretty heavy wine so I think I'll still give it some time...

Pretty cool. Another alternative is to use an anti-foam agent like Fermcap-S. I've been using this stuff and it is amazingly effective. You can use it for boiling wort to make beer, use it for fermentation, or I've even used it to control foam when vacuum degassing my wines. Best of all...

Tasted the Piazza last night; it was started in January 2011 so it's not that old. It wasn't good when I bottled it but it's come a long way, it's pretty good now! Really enjoyed it.

I have cleaned probably over 400 wine bottles so I have a bit of experience with it. First, I soak the bottles overnight (or longer if I'm lazy) with oxyclean. Actually it's no-name stuff that's scent free. Then your best friend is a utility knife. Scrape of all of the labels with the...

It's true; if it's cloudy it's not effective. Get some distilled water to mix it with; your water is too hard. Listen to the podcast on brew strong where they interview the guy from Five Star Chemicals for all you'd ever like to know about StarSan. Or just google 'cloudy StarSan' for more...

You'll know it's bad if it goes cloudy. But if you use distilled water, as recommended, it will keep for a long time. I mix it in 2L pop bottles with RO water and 3.2ml of starsan from a syringe (recommended ratio). Keeps for a long, long time. Learned recently if you soak corona bottles...

I wouldn't use sand...oxyclean does wonders. It will even take all of the burnt coffee off of the inside of a coffee pot if you leave it to soak for a couple hours. It's like magic. I use the unscented stuff.

Sometimes it can cause the wine not to clear properly, but I've bottled crystal clear wine that was still gassy (to my dismay). On another note I went to a wine tasting festival recently, tried a whole lot of different wines. I noticed at least 3 of the white wines I tasted had some CO2 in...

I wouldn't hesitate to buy a kit that old at a discount, but it seems like you got a good deal in the end so good job!

7.99 for 1.5L of wine? I wish.. In Canada the taxes are so high the cheapest wine is 750ml for that price. What I do is just make a cheap kit and use that to top off my kits. Plus, I only top off once, after degassing/clarifying to keep topping off to a minimum. I top off reds with red...

I disagree. I degassed a piesporter at 15" instead of my usual 20" for an experiment and unfortunately it is still slightly gassy. So I will always degass at 20". As far as the carboy being half empty or full...it doesn't matter. If it did, then you'd be able to degas using a plastic...

Tim Vandergrift has some input on the effects of filtering on aroma and color: Here is the original article.

Well, I would think not. I assume you are looking for a sterile filtration which means to remove all of the yeast cells. The pads I have found online say they are .4 to .6 micron. By definition sterile filtration is at .45 micron, so these pads will let some yeast cells through. Most...

Glad we got that sorted out, otherwise I would have had to sell my vacuum pump and buy a compressor to degas my next batch of wine :). When in doubt, ask the internet!

My 2 yr old likes a sip of beer ('mmm beer') but he really does not like a sip of wine!

Wouldn't it be the opposite? I mean, lots of use a vacuum pump to reduce the ambient pressure around the wine to allow the gas to naturally come out of solution. At 3000ft the air pressure is actually LESS than what it is at sea level, making it easier for you to degas. If you were to take...

Not too soon is my best advice. I have a Cellar Craft 'Old Vine Zinfandel' in secondary now. When the SG got down to about 1.010 I squeezed out the grape skin bag and racked it to a carboy. Came back a few hours later and it had blown a bunch of wine through the airlock and misted it through...

It's easy to be patient when you already have a bunch of wine you've made in years past. But when I was just starting out about 8 months ago I made as much wine as I could as quick as I could to get it in the bottle to age properly. Now that I have a bunch I can afford to be more patient.

I wondered about this too but it turns out not to be true. The article 'Follow-up on Vacuum Degassing' on the winemaker magazine has some info about this very topic. From the article: I commented to Tim Vandergrift (the author of the article) on another forum that I thought it...