Let’s make wine! Now that we’ve covered wine kits and what equipment required to make wine it’s time to hydrate the grape juice and pitch the yeast. In this video I’ll show you everything it takes to get your wine kit happily fermenting.
This part of the process is probably the most labor intensive step until it comes to bottling. The most time-consuming part was cleaning all the equipment and reading the directions over and over again.
One word of caution, watch your water temperature. My must was a little too warm. When I hydrated the grape juice concentrate I should have measured the temperature of the water I was adding. Because I didn’t I wound up with a must around 90 degrees (F)!
That’s really not all that bad except that for the yeast to get going the must needs to be between 72 and 75 degrees (Fahrenheit). It took nearly six hours for the must to cool off after re-hydration.
Lesson: monitor the temperature of the water you’re adding to the must as well as the ambient room temperature.
My Shiraz began fermenting within 24 hours of pitching the yeast and it smelled like heaven! For about two days… After a couple of days it began to smell like old beer and grape juice; kind of rowdy.
Up next, racking off the lees and into the carboy!
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