Reflection Yields a Plan

Writing this blog has been therapeutic for me the last couple of days. It started with my husband asking a simple enough question of what would it take more me to make larger batches of wine and cider. This lead to a good analysis, but also revealed some hesitation due to liquor licensing laws and money fears. This has lead me to today’s plan.

I had a thought that I would buy one carboy a month.

My husband loves the idea, which he does benefit from, though he suggested thinking about alternatives buy using plastic Better Bottles instead of glass carboys. For instance, 5 gallon glass carboys can be obtained for about $35, while a 5 gallon plastic Better Bottle would cost about $25.

But my husband and I are both a bit twitchy about plastic. It does give off flavors after awhile, where glass does not. However, I currently use a plastic bucket as a primary fermenter if I am working with solid material such as fruit or vegetables. Therefore, I think I would be okay to have a few of these plastic Better Bottles around for the batch to be in for a week or two, but long term aging would have me rack the batch into glass.

I’m feeling pretty good about this plan and feel like I’m moving forward.

Bigger Batches

My husband asked me last week, “What equipment would it take to get you making bigger batches of wine and cider?”

He brews up 5 gallons of beer at a time. Due to the amount of boiling water, it doesn’t make much sense to do smaller batches since you end up going though the same amount of work. In the end, he ends up with nearly sixty 12 oz bottles, and it only cost about $50.

He watches me make batches of wine for $12 for a gallon, maybe even more money if I used honey instead of sugar. And my final yield is 5 wine bottles or a dozen 12 oz bottles. Granted, I have to let them age for awhile, but they sort of become like gold, where I’m more willing to pay $15 for a fruit wine in a 750 mL bottle than drink mine. I think he wants to start drinking my wine with an evening meal much like he does his beer.

He is also at a point to take his brewing to the next level. See, beer relies on sugar in grains to ferment. Now, there is a cheater method of buying these grain sugars already extracted out as malt, but any really serious home brewer and any brewery is going to do a process to get those grain sugars out themselves. My husband is looking to do this, which may require more equipment, but I think he is also wanting me to step up to the next level with him.

What would it take for me? Well, for starters, I currently have seven 1 gallon jugs, which allow me to experiment for a small price. I would need lots of carboys, and my batches would become much more expensive and harder to obtain all the materials I would need. Right now, my husband has all the carboys tied up. The one gallon glass jugs cost $5 each, and the carboys run about $30 and more (cost provided from link shown also requires shipping and handling).

The other thing that I should probably upgrade is from my $20 hand corker to an $70-150 floor corker. Right now, with my small batches where I’m doing 5 bottles at a time, the hand corker isn’t so bad, but I hear that for larger batches, the floor corker is what you need.

I’ll get there someday, but for now, to help with money, I’ll just stick to doing 1 gallon batches.

Primary Fermenter

In my attempt to make a peach wine, I used pitchers to put my fruit in mesh bags into with liquid to start fermenting, and I used cotton balls to act sort of as an airlock. After that whole ordeal, I went to my local supply store and asked for a small primary fermenter. Most primary fermenters are buckets with lids on them which can be sold in three or six gallon sizes. Part of the reason I did not pick one up before was because the lid looked wrong to me. There was no place to put an airlock! I mentioned this to the sale’s clerk, and he said they have a special drill to put a hole in the lid that an airlock will fit into. I just finished up a strawberry wine in the primary fermenter last week, and it looked and smelled good, and I now have a bell pepper/peach wine started in it. After about a week in that kind of container, it is best to remove the fruit, which is why a mesh sack in a bucket works, and move the liquid into a glass bottle or carboy for small batches. These allow you to see into the liquid, noting the color, clarity, and presence of lees.