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Mesho14

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Hey guys,

so i started wine making this month!
What I do is buy fresh grapes with seeds in them. Crush them, blend, then pour the grape juice in an instant pot. I add fruits which cut in large pieces for pairing and to make sure they don’t melt. THEN i add for every 2kg of grapes which roughly 1L of final product; a cup of sugar and 5g of brewers yeast.

set the instant pot on the the Yogurt setting with low heat adjustment and let it rest for 48hrs.
afterwards, I move the mixture into a container where i first cut the large fruit into smaller prices to fit the container and transform the wine. Let it sit in a dry dark room for a week. Lastly i pour it out from the container over a coffee filter to get rid of the skin, then wallah, my wine is ready; the first bottle was really good, I didn’t like the color but i assume thats because of the grape i choose which I think was a table grape. There is also color differentiations in the bottle.

in college I studied to use cheese cloth to get rid of the skin, is it reallyway better than the coffee filter?

could you please give me suggestionson how to improve my fermentation? I would also love some knowledge over brewers yeast sugar ratio for alcohol.

My second issue, my friend told me i can use what’s left from the yeast and fruit from the first patch and use it in the second patch, how is that done exactly?

Cheers guys
 
Are you in a place in the world where you can acquire a hydrometer? (This measures the density of the liquid.) This tool is the one that you need to tell you about how much alcohol you will make in your batch, and it will also let you monitor the progress of the fermentation.
 
IP is coming out of a country where this hobby would be "heavily frowned upon".
 
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Well you get the idea; yes I’m in the process in acquiring a hydrometer. However, how will i use it? I put the yeast sugar mixture before closing the pot. I’ve read about the process of characterization throughout fermintation. I suppose adding sugar and yeast in portions throughout the 48hrs.

does fermintation has to be at least 48hrsin instant pot? Or can it be less or more?
What about letting sit in the container? My method is at least 1 week in a dark place. Can it be less?

I’m doing a patch 4kg of grapes in a bit, what do you guys suggest my yeast sugar measurement should be?The hydrometer is being shipped to at the tome being.
 
Hi Mesho14 and welcome.
An Instant Pot? But you are not brewing beer. You are making wine and when you make wine there is really no need to cook the fruit. all you need to do is press the grapes to break their skins and expose the fruit inside to the yeast. If you CAN you might try to expel the juice from the grapes and one easy way to do that is simply to freeze the grapes and then allow them to thaw and get back to room temperature. The freezing will create ice crystals inside the grapes and that ice will damage the cells that hold the juice so that when the fruit thaws far more juice will be expelled.
Another thing you might do is add some pectic enzyme to the fruit. NOT pectin. You are not making jam but the enzymes that break down the fruit and - again - produce more juice from the fruit.

You CAN use an "instant pot" as your primary fermenter but that will mean that you won't be able to use that cooking instrument for a few weeks. A better option , if you can find this is to buy a 5 L or gallon bottle of water (or other fruit juice) and use that as your fermenter (after drinking the juice or water... or if it's juice , fermenting that juice to wine.

Table grapes will make a wine but they are not grown for wine so their flavor, sugar content, their acidity and their tannin content are not the same as wine grapes. To get the same amount of alcohol from table grapes you may need to add about 1 - 1.5 kg of sugar per gallon of juice.

And yes, after you make this batch of wine in your instant pot, you will want to transfer the wine into another container where it can age for a few months. If you use a siphon to transfer the wine you will leave behind all the sediment and on that sediment will be all the yeast and you can simply pour any next batch of juice onto those lees and treat it as yeast or you can wash the lees to remove much of the fruit waste and so have a "purer" - purer but not "pure" solution of yeast. There are many videos on Youtube that teach you how to harvest or wash yeast for reuse. BUT
It is very likely that your grapes will be covered in yeast and so any next batch of grapes that you obtain for wine making will have enough yeast on and in them to ferment them. Wild (indigenous) yeast are not as vigorous as lab cultured yeast and some colonies of indigenous yeast may produce flavors that you don't like ... but if grapes are relatively inexpensive the cost of making a few gallons of wine that is not great may be well offset when you find yeast that make a wine that you find wonderful - but try simply treating the sediment as the yeast for the next batch.
 
Well you get the idea; yes I’m in the process in acquiring a hydrometer. However, how will i use it? I put the yeast sugar mixture before closing the pot.

You can decide how much alcohol content you want ahead of time, by adding sugar until you get to a certain density (specific gravity, SG) before fermentation. Then after fermentation, you can figure out the percentage of alcohol (ABV, alcohol by volume) with a simple formula. ABV = (starting SG - finishing SG)*131 is a good approximation. You don't NEED to monitor the SG during the fermentation, but the SG is the best indicator of the progress of the fermentation.
 
in reference to the coffee filter note, paper filters are fairly weak. My mother would use a 1950s 10 kg flour sack, I use a nylon straining bag. My mom’s version was hang the pulp and drain/ squeeze all the liquid out by hand, my version is to use a bar clamp and compress the bag of pulp in a tube, guess I am a bit lazy vs mom.image.jpg
 

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