Hi. I'm Kyle Lerfald. I'm here at Northern Brewer, Minneapolis,
and today we're going to be taking a look at a wine kit and how you do that.
A lot of homebrewers are kind of mystified by the big boxes of wine kits that are out there,
and I think there's a little fear factor in making wine.
One of the things that we run across is people think it's far more difficult or more finicky than making beer.
It's not actually true.
What I have here is a good basic kit for a beginner.
What you can expect to find in the kit, here is the juice.
This is what you need. It's a concentrated juice so we'll be adding a little bit of water to this later.
When you unpack a kit, there's going to be a bag with the instructions in it.
Some fining agent. Potassium sorbate and potassium metabisulfite.
Bentonite, this is brewer's clay. What this is, is a fining agent.
And of course the yeast.
And then we have some oak chips here to add to the flavor.
Instead of in a brewing situation where you have a secondary fermentation, you would add the oak chips there.
That does happen in wine-kit making; however, with some kits, you add the oak right away with the juice.
Naturally, you're going to need a fermentor that can handle six gallons.
I know most homebrewers do five gallons. You're getting one more gallon here.
And then you get to play with one of these. These are great.
This is a degasser stirrer and you just put it on the end of a power drill
-- playing with power tools, a lot of fun -- and we'll show you how that's used later.
Another variety of stirrer degasser, this is the stainless steel model.
You can see that the paddles flap out rather than having three distinct tines on there.
So without further adieu, let's get started.
The first thing that we're going to get going here is the fining agent.
You actually put a fining agent in first.
You get about a half-gallon of hot water and then you'll stir the bentonite into the hot water to dissolve it into a slurry.
Really neat engineering on these boxes.
You'll notice that when we opened it, you can see that there are little cardboard cutouts here that you just pop out.
Because they've thought of everything with this kit.
The cardboard cutout is actually going to help you hold this big bag of juice, to hold that in place.
Then you've got the cap here. The cap has to come off.
Which they do make tools for this. I don't recommend using a pliers or anything.
There is a plastic tool that you can get that will pull this top off.
Oh man, I wish you could smell how this -- this wine juice -- just gorgeous.
By the way, it's always good to have the instructions out and take notes on the instructions that you've done everything.
Very straight forward process but definitely one that you want to keep track of everything going on.
This is one of those things also, don't do this over the carpet in your house.
Do it your basement or somewhere -- or your kitchen. If there's a spill, it's easier to clean up that way.
Because let's face it, red juice on any form of carpeting or furniture is not a happy thing.
So we take the wine box so.
{Sound of wine pouring in bucket}
How's that for pretty, huh?
All right. So just like in brewing with a liquid malt extract,
in the juice bag here, we like to get as much out of this as possible,
so we're going to add a gallon, that's about 3.8-liters, of water to the bag to shake it up
and get it into the fermentor so that we have absolutely everything we can possibly have in our fermentor.
And then we want to add just a little more water,
and I like to use the bag again to bring it up to this interior ring, which marks as six gallons for your -- for your yield.
All right. So we have our six gallons here. However, we've got heavy, dense, grape juice
on the bottom and we've got water on the top. So what we need to do now is mix this very thoroughly
to make sure that everything is a consistent gravity from the top to the bottom.
So we take our stirrer, which you'll be using again later to degas -- but that's a different story entirely.
And start out gently and give that just a really good thorough stir.
Don't go maximum power on your drill with one of these unless you want wine flying absolutely everywhere.
Just gently stir and just be thorough and make sure that it's really thoroughly mixed.
By the way, you're most of the way through the process of getting the wine started.
Pretty amazing, huh?
Look at that. Just beautiful.
You don't need to aerate wine the way that you aerate beer. It's just not necessary.
The wine yeast will take care of itself very thoroughly.
Here's the next part. You are going to want to take a measurement.
Take your test jar and a wine thief -- hey, now we know why it's called a wine thief --
and go down here and take your measurement.
You're going to get your original gravity off of this.
What original gravity is,
for those that just kind of just have been seeing the letters O-G but not really understood what that is,
that's the amount of sugar that's in solution, and that gives you an idea of how much alcohol you're going to have when you're done.
Now I've sanitized the wine thief because anything that touches your wine from here on out should be sanitized.
The reason I'm doing this in a test jar versus in the bucket is it's harder to read in the bucket than it is in the test jar.
And it looks like what we have here is a great original gravity of 1.0 -- or we're right on button. We're right on button, 1.080.
Write that down.
Now that we've hit our gravity, now it's time, according to the instructions, to add the oak.
We're adding 60 grams of oak chips to our wine right now and then we'll be pitching our yeast.
But we're just going to sprinkle the oak chips directly into the wine.
Those will eventually -- well, not water log precisely, perhaps wine log and sink to the bottom,
but we're going to give them a stir as well and make sure that those are well incorporated into the wine itself.
And there we are.
So the next thing to do, very straight forward, is you grab your yeast, it's dry yeast, and then you just sprinkle that right into the wine.
You don't have to stir this in. It will take care of itself.
And so you put this where you will be doing your fermenting from here on out,
somewhere with a nice, steady, warm temperature within a 70-degree range.
Some people use a closet; some people have an area in their basement that's good for that.
So this will take about five to seven days.
Then you're going to want to take another gravity reading with the test jar and the hydrometer again
and you're going to want to see it drop down to -- from the 1.080 down to something closer to 1
so that we know that all the sugars are fermenting out of the -- of the wine must.
That's it. That's the whole process for getting wine started and fermenting.
In an upcoming video, we'll go on with degassing and we'll also go on about how to bottle wine as well.
There you go. Easy as pie.