Search results

There are limitations to what one can do making wine at home, with one good arm, but ingenuity helps. Next week I am to have a total shoulder replacement, which should help down the road, but for now... Steve’s all-in-one-wine-pump has been a blessing for racking and bottling, both of which...

I’ve been using mine about a month now; fantastic system, very easy to use. I’m 70, bad back, bum arm so this makes racking & bottling so much easier. I sanitize bottles with it, sometimes I just move water around. Not that I have a source of water in this 1858 basement. Very impressed with...

Yes, wonderful stuff, bentonite. Back when I played civil engineer, we constructed a lot of slurry cutoff walls and bentonite-amended soil liners. The key to getting bentonite to hydrate was high-shear colloidal mixers. Same goes for mixing or stirring in a carboy or fermenter. I use an old...

For what’s worth, keep in mind that bentonite is a clay mineral that has long been used in oil drilling to put sediment into suspension and keep the hole open. There are at least two types of this platelet mineral, and probably variations, but sodium and calcium are the main cations. If the...

For what’s worth, keep in mind that bentonite is a clay mineral that has long been used in oil drilling to put sediment into suspension and keep the hole open.

My wife and another friend were allergic to most reds, probably the tannins and maybe acidity, so we made mostly whites. I admit preference for the WE Eclipse line and I do no tweaking, preferring consistency in processing. Of course nothing stays in the bottle long, so aging is not a concern.

Yet another option, if one composts organic matter, is to add remnants from racking into the composter, thus providing more moisture to assist decomposition and feed the worms; happy worms, I might add.