I decided to test the yeasts. It was a very simple test. I placed the bags of yeast in the oven and let them stay there for a week at 40 – 45 C. After that I checked whether the yeast were still alive.

I was not disappointed. The yeast was not affected at all. It worked perfectly and my mind found peace again.

A few days ago I noticed that I had 2 very old packages of wine yeast. The expiration date is November 2013. Three years ago…. I estimate that the yeast must be 5 or 6 years old. Normally I would throw it away but I was curious. Would the yeast have survived?

So I prepared a very simple starter. It is only apple juice in a clean bottle with the cap placed on top of it. (Not sealed of course) I was actually not surprised that after a few hours the fermentation clearly was underway. Again, I could not see any difference between this old yeast and a new package. I have another package that expired November 2013. Maybe I will test this again in 2020.

The juice is fermenting nicely and I am going to let it finish the job. See if it becomes a nice cider.

So if you have problems with a fermentation I would not blame the yeast. More likely the circumstances in which the yeast are put are too hostile. For example beers with a lot of alcohol may have trouble fermenting after bottling. If this is the case you can try to add champagne yeast which is very alcohol tolerant, give it a better chance with a starter, or in very serious cases you can try to restart the fermentation like this.

Cheers

Hans

However, one of them stuck and I wanted to try it for a long time: Parsley wine. Especially when I found out that parsley is apparently very healthy.

So I looked for a recipe and I found that there are 2 kinds. The first is very simple: Buy a bottle of white wine and add some parsley. If you want your wine to be healthier and tastier I think that this is a good option. If you are a wine maker you would choose for the second option: Create your own parsley wine!

There are plenty of recipes on the internet but I found that I did not have enough parsley in my garden so I made my own version. Here is my very simple recipe for 5 liters:

Ingredients:

• 310 gm Parsley
• 2 bananas
• 30 gm citric acid
• 1 kg sugar
• Wine yeast
• Yeast nutrition 1 tsp

Method:

• Mash the banana and put all the ingredients in a fermentation bucket
• Add boiling water up to 5 liters
• Stir to dissolve the sugar and let it cool down
• Add yeast
• After 3 days, rack into another bucket or demijohn.

The recipe was completely new to me but I had some ideas about it. It should be a light, fresh wine that perhaps could be drunk rather quick.

Some remarks:

It is rather safe to assume that there is not too much sugar in parsly. (Let’s say none.) 1 kg sugar in 5L gives you approximately 11 % alcohol. In the bananas is some sugar but that probably would not even produce 1% alcohol. Since some alcohol would evaporate in the demijohn I did not include the bananas in the calculation.

I assumed that there also would not be much acid (close to none) in parsly so I added 6 gm/L citric acid. Citric acid is stronger than tartaric acid so the acidity would be around 7.

The bananas serve 2 goals:

• Yeast need food and probably they will not be able to get this from parsley.
• A wine made only from herbs or flowers will not have much body. Bananas are great for body. No idea why, but bananas in wine is never a bad idea.

The result

After 6 months I tried a bottle and I was not sure about it. It looked great but it was a bit harsh and the aroma was a bit green, flowery. It was not ready and could be better in the future. At least that was what I hoped.

And luckily I was right. After 1 year it has become very nice. Of course it is not like a regular wine from the supermarket but it is not too weird. It is a very pale wine that has become very clear. It looks good. The combination of parsley and citric acid makes it very fresh. Maybe some people will find it too acidic.

The parsley creates an aroma of flowers and has a great impact on the taste. Recipes that I found on the web mention a lot more parsley but I think that you can also make this wine with only 250 gm for 5 liters.

In conclusion I would say that this was a very nice first attempt and I will definitely try it again. However I would change some details. I would use less parsley. I think that 250 gm would be enough for 5 liters wine. It tastes nice but it is not very subtle. I would also use a little less citric acid. Citric acid is the right choice but the combination with parsley gives the impression of a more acidic wine. Next time I will try 24 gm.

Cheers

Hans

Since I have no grapes or other fresh fruit I started experimenting with juices that I bought from the supermarket. I was very happy with the resulting white wines but making red wines continued to be problematic.

I used many different red juices but in general they all have the same problems:

• During the fermentation the color becomes lighter. In many cases it becomes a dark rose but definitely not red.
• The acidity of the juices is too high. This does not suit red wine.
• The resulting wines have no body.

So usually what you end up with is something that is more or less a rose with too much alcohol and a taste that resembles lemonade. Not bad as a rose most of the times but nothing like red wine.

Then I started experimenting with additional ingredients. I used for example oak chips, bananas, vanilla, dried elderberries, and tannin. Again the results were not good because I used too much. Vanilla is a great addition but it is very overpowering and red vanilla wine is not nice.

One juice became the exception: Black currant juice. I made red wine from it several times and it is pretty good. It can compete with the better supermarket wines.

So here is my recipe for 10 liter:

Ingredients:

• 10,5 liter black currant juice (This contains total 1260 g sugar according to the label)
• 1 banana
• 3 g red tannin
• 4 g oak chips
• 4 g dried elderberries
• 1200 g cane sugar (Total 246 g/l which makes approximately 13% alcohol)
• Yeast

Method:

• Boil the sugar, oak chips, tannin, elderberries and mashed banana for a minute in some black currant juice.
• Rehydrate the yeast in a little water.
• Put the black currant juice in a fermentation bucket and add the boiled mixture. This way it cools down fast.
• Add the yeast.

As you can see I did not measure anything. The amount of sugar in the juice is written on the package and I trust this. The acidity is probably a bit high so I will not add any. I am confident enough so I will not make a measurement.

The amounts of additions are very small. This is mainly because they all give a lot of flavor and the oak chips and elderberries also have tannin. You want them in your wine but not too much.

The banana is there to give the wine body.

I have made this wine before but I always try to experiment a little with additions. This is also the reason that I use cane sugar. I have not tried this before and we will see if this is an improvement or not.

Cheers

Hans

As I said before; I share my mistakes so you don’t have to make them again.

Putting beer (Or champagne) in bottles.

The last step in making beer is putting it in bottles. It is my least favourite step because it looks a lot like working.

You can do this as follows:

• Dissolve bottling sugar in water and add the right amount of the solution to each bottle and add the beer.
• Add the right amount of sugar to each bottle and add the beer.
• Add all the bottling sugar to another demijohn or bucket and rack the beer to that bucket. Then put it the beer in bottles.

The last option is my favourite because you don’t need to be very precise. Instead of measuring 2,64 gm per 0,33L bottle you can measure 120 gm per 15L. I also believe that is less work. I am not 100% sure of the last part because it requires one last racking extra.

So what I do is the following:

• I clean a demijohn and add the bottling sugar. Usually about 8 g/L for beer (or 20 to 25 g/L for champagne.)
• Rack the beer into this demijohn. Don’t worry too much about splashing and oxygen because you need oxygen to give life to your yeast again. Also don’t worry about racking some yeast. Your beer needs it. Try to get as much beer in this demijohn as possible. There is no need to to work extremely clean because new yeast will form in the bottles anyway.
• Shake the demijohn until you are sure that all the sugar is dissolved in the beer. (For champagne this takes a bit longer because there is a lot more sugar to dissolve.)
• Siphon the beer from the demijohn in the beer bottles. Get this tool if you don’t have it. It is worth its’ weight in gold!

So here comes the DOOOHH!! part. I made 2 huge mistakes in these simple steps.

• I forgot to add the bottling sugar completely. I just racked the beer in another empty demijohn and into the beer bottles. After 1 month I found that there was no CO2 at all in the finished beer.
• I added the bottling sugar to the demijohn but did not dissolve it properly in the beer. The result was that some bottles had very little CO2 in them but other bottles had very much and they created so much CO2 that you could barely taste the beer.

Learning all the time.

Cheers

Hans

And see what happens next! When the fermentation finally started I was still a little worried because it remained a little slow. For that reason I decided to put it in the 15 liter demijohn and fill it up. Champagne yeast usually does not create a lot of foam so I did not expect problems.

Only a few hours later the weather changed dramatically. From a relaxed sunny day it turned into a hurricane. Fermentation became quite violent and I was afraid that the air lock would be filled with foam and eventually overflow and spill on the table.

A simple solution is to accept the fact that it overflows and place the demijohn in the shower so you can clean it easily. Perhaps your family will not think that this is a brilliant solution.

And they are right. A nicer solution is the Tsunami airlock. It obviously is not a high tech solution but it works good enough. And it is very easy to make.

• Make two holes in the cap of a bottle.
• Glue a tube in one of the holes. (The tube should fit in the hole for the air lock in the cap or bung.)
• The end of the tube should be close to the bottom of the bottle.
• Add water to the bottle so that the tube is in the water. (For security you can add some citric acid and sulphite to the water.)
• Connect the tube to the demijohn.

Obviously it does not stop the foaming but the foam is collected in the bottle.

Please note that in extreme cases the bottle will be filled, so you still need to check it.

Cheers

Hans

I also made apple wine from fresh apples that I got from a friend. Since it is a bit hard to get the juice out of the apples without a tool like this I didn’t make it often.

This year I was happy to make it. With my improved juicer it was fun to get the juice. Since it was not enough I also bought 4 kg apples from the supermarket.

I made a measurement of the sugar and added some to reach about 11% alcohol. I knew that the apples from my friend are very acidic and therefore I decided not to make a measurement at all. I don’t like to use chemicals to get some acid out of the wine. If it would prove to be too sour I could add some sugar just before drinking or I could blend it with a wine that is not sour. We will decide later.

So I put the apple juice and the sugar in a bucket, rehydrated the yeast and also added it. To my big surprise the fermentation sort of started, but stopped very quickly. This has never happened to me before!

There it is again; The question that I asked myself many times “What happened?”

I have no doubt about the yeast, and the apples from my friend. I have used them before and I know that yeast absolutely love apples. The only new thing were the supermarket apples. It did not take a long time before I realized that these apples are treated with some kind of poison to protect them from bugs.

So that is it! The yeast was poisoned! I could not believe that there was still enough poison in these apples to stop the fermentation. As a child we were always told “Snack healthy, eat an apple.” (Poorly translated from Dutch) I seriously have my doubts about how healthy apples really are.

Since I had 15 liters of juice I did not want to give up immediately. I decided to make a very big yeast starter to see if I could get the fermentation going. So I bought a big bottle of apple juice and made a starter. Now I had a big, big army of yeast on my side. So I added 1,5 liter very active starter to the bucket. It started to ferment but I was not happy with it. Fermentation became slow and eventually stopped again. I could not believe it. How much poison is in these apples?

So I decided to follow the advice given in some books. The procedure is as follows:

• Make a starter with apple juice or whatever you usually use.
• When the starter is very active add the same amount of the “not fermenting juice” to it.
• When the starter is very active again, add again the same amount of juice. (Double as in the previous step.)
• Repeat this until all the juice is fermenting.

Since I never tried it before I was not so sure it would work. The juice already killed an enormous amount of yeast before so why should it not kill again?

But I still wanted to try. Otherwise I had to throw away a lot of work. So I bought another bottle of apple juice and made another starter. This time I used champagne yeast. I know that it is recommended for restarting fermentations also in beers.

I followed the procedure but in the beginning I added less “poisoned juice” just to let the yeast get used to it. (Again I pretend that yeast act like humans.) The fermentation was still slow and I did not believe it would work. I thought that the yeast would be killed again when I would add more and more of the poisoned juice.

Fermenting most                          Poisoned apple juice

But I slowly increased the amount of juice and also shook the bucket several times to get air mixed in. Oxygen is important for yeast growth and they could use all the help I can give.

And to my surprise the fermentation became faster. More and more bubbles through the air lock.

Now all the juice is in the bucket and fermentation continues. No bad smells. Things are looking good.

I celebrate the victory of my champagne army!

Cheers

Hans

P.S.

Why the fermentation of these apples was so troublesome I don’t know. Saying that apples are poison without proper knowledge may be considered a little dramatic.

They are a bit more work because you have to get rid of the solids. And I did that the wrong way for years. I see that now. Only recently I saw the light.

The way that I used to filter is as follows. I placed a funnel on a demijohn and covered it with cheese cloth. It works but it has several drawbacks. The cheese cloth gets soaked with the wine and when it hangs over the edge of the funnel the wine leaks out over the side. To prevent a wet floor I used this set up in the shower. The biggest problem however is that all the fluid has to pass through a very small hole that gets clogged all the time. I would lift the cheese cloth and squeeze it to get as much wine as possible. Usually the wine would squirt out the cheese cloth in places that I did not expect and it would not come out easily because the cheese cloth would completely be clogged.

When I started making beer I also bought a bucket with a coarse filter. For malt it works perfectly and I am very happy with it. Only recently I realized that this way of filtering also works very well with wine.

So here is the new set up for wine. A mashing bag is hanging inside a bucket. I empty the bucket with the wine/most and solids in this bucket and let it drain inside the third bucket. It works so much better. Because of the greater surface the wine can easily pass through the filter. There is a lot less work, less mess, and less wine remains in the solids in the bag.

The funny part is that beer making has given me this idea. And I also use the filter as you would in beer making. After filtering I have to add some water to reach the intended volume. In the past I would add this directly to the demijohn. Now I pour this water over the mashing bag so the last juice and sugar can drain out of it.

Cheers.

Hans

Years ago I was given a lot of apples to change into wine. This presented me with a problem. Apples contain juice but how do you get it?

The answer seemed to be the fruit juicer we had. I started juicing the fruit rather optimistic but that changed rather quick. After only a few kilos the machine was smelling of burning electronics. It did not go very well. I became a little frustrated because a mountain of unprocessed apples was looking at me.

About 15 minutes later my little frustration had turned into a mild rage. I decided that one of us was not surviving this day. So I burnt the puny, sad, incompetent machine. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” was a phrase that came to mind. My lust for destruction was satisfied and the rest of my aggression was ventilated on the poor apples. The apples won and I never made wine from apples again.

This kind of equipment is not really meant to be used for amounts that are required by home wine makers. I decided to keep the broken juicer because in the back of my mind I thought that I could use the parts some day. And finally I did!

It took forever. It was very difficult. And now it is very dangerous! I could give you the advice not to do this at home because all the safeties that were built in this equipment were removed and it was provided with AWESOME, TERRIFYING, POWER!

What you see here is a vacuum cleaner motor mounted on a piece of wood. It is controlled by a adjustable potentiometer and a component that is meant to control speed and power of motors. Don’t ask me how it works because I have no idea. I just connected it. I left the ventilator on the axis so it could cool the motor and would also provide some load. Otherwise the motor would be completely out of control.

It also took forever to make the motor fit in the housing. The diameter of the motor is at least double and it is also taller. But after a lot of cutting it fits.

Then there was the biggest problem. Connecting the motor to the rotating bit of the juicer. It was very difficult to center the part in exactly the right position. At this stage I almost gave up even though I was so close. There is no point in going into the details because you will not have the same parts as me but after a lot of desperate hours I managed to fix it in a “reasonable way”. Reasonable means actually that it is not very accurate and that there is some vibration at certain high rpm’s.

Today is a glorious day. Ha Ha Ha! Today I managed to make juice out of 3 kg apples. It gave me +/- 2 litres of juice which I think is very acceptable. It is working. I feel a little like Dr. Frankenstein because the parts were lying dead in a box for years and I gave life to a juicer.

In fact the new motor has so much power that I can safely say: I created a monster!”

It may look rather innocent but I am sure that it can also make juice out of a tree, or play the lead role in a very cheap horror movie.

Hans

I have made this wine several times. It is not as easy as making wine from apple juice but it still is much easier than growing grapes, harvesting them, and making wine from them. For your ingredients you can go to a supermarket and buy them.

Peaches on syrup in a can!

Since I have made it before I did not make the measurements again. I am sure that the values don’t change a lot.

What is the goal? How do we get there?

I would say that we want to make a white wine of approximately 12% and acidity 6. Since I made it before and liked it I am going to make 25L.

In the past I decided to use 1 can (820mL) per liter wine. You probably would be interested how I determined that. Unfortunately I cannot answer that. It was just a guess.

I measured the acidity in the past and it was about 3,5. So per liter I have to add 2,5 gm of tartaric acid to reach 6. This means 67,5 gm for 25L. Tartaric acid would not be my choice for a white wine so I would choose citric acid instead. Citric acid is more acidic than tartaric acid so I use approximately 85% which is 55 gm.

Then there is a slight problem. How do you determine the sugar content of a peach? The hydrometer and refractometer are not really an option for obvious reasons. But here you are saved by the manufacturer. It is written on the label! 13,5 gm sugar per 100 gm peach + syrup. (That is really a lot isn’t it?) Since the content of the can is 820 gm, each can contains 110 gm of sugar. Since I use 1 can per liter wine we have to add 108 gm sugar per liter for an alcohol percentage of 12%. Which is 2700 gm for 25L.

In the past I made the wine with a standard white wine yeast. This time I want to try it with champagne yeast because this type of yeast flocculates well and so far has given me very clear wines. (Which can be a bit of a problem with peaches)

I do not believe that yeast nutrition is necessary because of the amount of fruit. (If you have it, use it to be on the safe side.)

What I believe is a good thing, are pectolytic enzymes to help break down the cells of the fruit. If you don’t have them I am sure that you still can make this wine, but perhaps it will remain hazy, (Which is only an optical issue if you want to make it an issue) and give you more work.

So here is the list of ingredients:

• 25 cans of peaches
• 2700 gm sugar
• 55 gm citric acid
• pectolytic enzymes
• champagne yeast

And here is what you do:

• Sterilize 2 buckets with sulphite and citric acid solution.
• Leave the solution in 1 of the buckets for cleaning (and blending) purposes.
• Put a teaspoon of sulphite in the other bucket (approximately 2.5 gm) for security.
• Open a can and pour the liquid (not the peaches) in the bucket with the teaspoon of sulphite so the blender can fit in the can.
• Place the can in the bucket with the sulphite solution (to sterilize the outside of the can) and use a blender to mash the peaches. Repeat this with the 25 cans. Try not to overheat the blender. Most of them are not made for these quantities.
• Boil a few liters (Not too much) water and dissolve the sugar and citric acid. Mix it with the blended peaches.
• Add a few tablespoons of the pectolytic enzymes and mix them with a clean spoon.
• Leave the bucket for a night or more so the enzymes have time to do their destructive duty.
• Hydrate the yeast as usual and pour it over the peaches.

Since there are many fruit particles in the most you need plenty of headspace in the bucket, and you need to shake the bucket a few times per day to mix the floating fruit back in the fluid.

After about 2 weeks the not so nice part starts. You have to filter out the fruit. So far I have not found an easy way to do it. (I did recently) The fruit particles are so fine that they clog up a filter (or cheese cloth) very quickly. So take your time and remind yourself that it is for a good cause. After filtering, add water to 25L.

This is one of the wines that I rack a few times because it contains so many small particles that take their time to settle. You need patience for this wine but I think it is worth it.

The result.

Unfortunately I do not have a picture of the previous versions. But I still have my notes!
“It took a long time to become clear and produced a lot of sediment. It actually did not completely clear up in the demijohn but in the bottles which contained some sediment.
Because of the long time it took to make this wine it became special. It aged well. It was a very good white wine with a slight aroma of apple. You can barely taste that it was made from peaches but when I tell my guests that it is they recognize it. It is a fruit wine that is very accessible to the “normal” wine drinker since the taste is very similar to “normal” wine.”

Try it and may the patience be with you.

Hans

“Did your fish die?”
“No, this is actually a wine glass.”

A special wine glass, for special wines. I bought it to be part of the snobbish wine people. It is crystal and very expensive for a stingy Dutch person as me. But sometimes you have to buy yourself a present right?

I don’t use it unless I have a special wine and that is what is in it today. Elderberry wine is proof that a home winemaker can make wine as good as professionals. Maybe even better because a home winemaker does not have to worry about regulations, financial risks, complaining customers etc.

Making red wine has been a great struggle for me because there are no grapes in the Netherlands. Yes, we have grapes in the supermarket but they are not suitable for making wine. I almost gave up but then I “discovered” elderberries.

A lot of them are growing where I live and in 2009 I made my first 10 liters. I tried it after 6 months because I was very curious but it was undrinkable. Extremely harsh tannins. I did not think that this could work out but after 2 years it was a great wine. It completely changed in the bottles. Fascinating. Since then I make it every year. It is a lot of work and you need a lot of patience but I think it is the best red wine in the world. It is strong, has a beautiful color, very natural, full bodied. It can compete with the best.

Not to mention that elderberries seem to be very healthy. 

Preparing the berries.

• Pick as much berries as you possibly can. Leave them in a shed or outside for a night so the spiders and other bugs can crawl out.
• De-stem the berries. I have not found an easy way to do this. I read somewhere that you should freeze them first but that does not work with these big quantities. So you have to do it the hard way.

• Place the berries in a bowl of water to clean them. The ones that are not ripe will float to the surface. Throw them away.
• Put the berries in small bags and place them in the freezer until you have enough.

Making the wine.

These are the specifications to keep in mind. Strong red wine, not acidic: 4 or 5, a bit high alcohol percentage: 13%, amount: 25 liters.

I measured the sugar contents a long time ago and there is very little sugar in these berries. Only 300 grams in 7 kg. Unfortunately the berries are so dark that it is impossible to make an acidity measurement with the test kit. Since I think there should not be too much acid in the wine I decided not to add any.

Based on the above and previous tries I use the following recipe:

Ingredients for 25L:

• 7 kg elderberries
• 2 bananas
• 6 kg sugar (=240 g/l which means 13,3% alcohol)
• red wine yeast
• Yeast nutrition

Method:

• De-freeze the elderberries in a bucket the night before.

• Boil and mash the berries with some water, the sugar and the bananas.
  There are three reasons to do this:

1. The internet claims that they contain “toxic” Sambunigrin which leaves when the berries are boiled.
2. So far I have not sterilized the berries.
3. By boiling the berries you also get more juice from them.

• Place the hot juice in the fermentor and add water to approximately 20 liters.
• Wait for the bucket to cool down.
• Dissolve yeast nutrition and add it.
• Hydrate your yeast and add it.

During the first few days you can see that the skins of the berries are pushed upwards by the CO2 gas. You need to have space in the bucket otherwise the skins will block the air lock and possibly the lid will be forced to violently leave the fermenter with colorful -mainly red- consequences for the interior of your house.
Shake the (closed) bucket vigorously a few times per day to get the skins in the fluid.

• After 7 to 10 days, take the berries out of the most, squeezing the liquid from them. This is usually a little bit messy and the berries can leave terrible stains. They really are like paint.
• Place the most in a 25 L demijohn.
• When the fermentation has calmed you can add water  to 25L.
• After a few months you can rack it and then leave it for a long time.

The wine is ready after 2 years and can be kept for a long time.

Cheers

Hans