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I need to get a new bottle capper for beer bottles. I'd like to be able to do twist caps and I'd like to keep it under about $60. Any suggestions? I know there are some vendors on here that should be able to help.

I know this is winemakingtalk. But with all the wine snobbery there has GOT to be some amazing knowledge of great commercial wines here as well. Maybe this is the wrong place for this thread, maybe one already exists. If I'm out of line then hey I'm out of line. But I am really excited about my...

I'm currently working with water kefir grains and kombucha. I need some ideas on how to sterilize glass carboys and 1-2 gallon glass barrels (mostly ball-type jars) with a minimum amount of chemicals and without cracking problems from boiling water. In order to keep the grains and SCOBY healthy...

Anybody on here have any experience getting a ginger bug ferment kicked off? This ginger is like STUBBORN! I keep yelling at it to ferment and its like "NO!" I've got about half a cappuccino mug of ginger mash sitting in 1:1 organic brown sugar/water and I've added a 1 inch bulb of minced...

Okay you Winophiles, lets see who can guess what's in this bottle of delicious goodness! I have left the commercial label on to make it more challenging. And because there's a cool picture of a giant ship eating sea creature on it! And who doesn't like giant ship eating sea creatures?

Found out from experience today: if you use a plastic carboy or racking container, when you get to the last bottle or two it's really light. (Duh) The weight of a racking tube and bottle attachment is enough to pull the whole thing off the counter and spill the rest of your wine all over the...

In a large winery, the regular quality control manager died and the director started looking for a new one to hire. A drunkard with a ragged, dirty homeless look came to apply for the position. The director of the factory wondered how to send him away. The director figured they'd test him...

We're having fun with the older kids by freezing pickles with a dry ice/vodka slurry and letting them break them on the concrete. Some of them wanted to eat pieces of the pickle. Thoughts on this anyone? I am the responsible adult assigned to this party tonight and I don't want to have any...

So I was using the "beer bomb" method to force carb 2 liters tonight. I carbed: Amber light Limearita Cranberry Lemonade Malt Sweet Cranamber Light And then realized I had some dry ice and an extra 2 liter bottle left over. So I went ahead and bottled some cranberry skeeter pee that had been...

The wife made some delicious lemonade for a party. We didn't drink it all, so the gallon that had been kept in the refrigerator got thrown in a Carlo Rossi 1 Gallon "Carboy." When it hit 72 degrees I took a hydrometer reading of 1.060, pitched some Cotes des Blanc yeast (just what I had lying...

You get a boil notice from the water district and immediately reach for malt pots and a carboy. Only potable water in the whole house now thanks to a moron trying to put in a sewage system at the other end of the road.

The purpose of the chart is to be able to take a small sample of a batch, and sweeten it or flavor it the way you want without risking the entire batch. And to then know exactly how much flavoring or sweetener to add to the whole batch to make it taste exactly the same as the sample. The...

This is the first wine I've ever done. Started with coastal white concentrate and added bentonite and red star premier couvee Racked off lees after 2 weeks. It fell clear the next day. Sample was bitter with a yeast taste. Degassed 2 weeks later. Sample was still bitter and very strong yeast...

Never a good day when you try to make wine and get vinegar instead. But don't throw it out! (Not all of it anyway...) When I was in college the big thing in my group of friends was barbecue. That's pretty much all we did, and in those days my claim to fame was a homemade BBQ sauce that my...

Ready to free up this carboy, but no money for more glass bottles. How bad of an idea would it be for me to sanitize 2 litre coca cola bottles and store my wine in them? At least until I can empty a few glass Rossi bottles...

Working on a vintners harvest coastal white. Was supposed to bottle on Friday but had to put my plans on hold because of hurricane Isaac. If my power goes out at home and the temperature rises, will it have a negative effect on the 5 gallons of coastal white in my better bottle? Also if I...

Okay so I'm attempting to mix our family's apple cider recipe with an apple wine recipe and speed up the fermenting process to have it aging in the bottles by Christmas. I've done some serious reading and I think I have this mapped out pretty well but I'd like to hear from anybody who has done...