Beginners Guide to Home Wine Making
Home Wine Making Equipment, The Five things you Must Have
There is a lot of information available to you online and in print about all the wine making equipment you need to get you started. In this article I have narrowed it down to what I consider to be the essentials. These are the must haves in wine making equipment to produce good results.
All these can be found at high street wine making/brewing merchants or online.
1) A bucket that is suitable for food use. Some cheap plastics will release chemicals which may contaminate the wine. I prefer a five gallon bucket with a tight lid. These can be found easily enough and are designed for the purpose. Ideally it should be marked to allow you to measure the quantities inside. Just make sure to clean it thoroughly before using it.
2) Cleaning and sterilising any of the equipment (and all) is essential. Bacterial infection or some wild yeasts can ruin a whole batch. I use a chemical sterilizer which when dissolved in water does the job very effectively. Some people prefer to use boiling water but this can be impractical with larger vessels.
3) A large funnel and some sort of straining material (I use muslin) means that you are much less likely to spill when pouring from a bucket. I use the largest I could get from our local suppliers.
4) That of course leads us into demijohns. For most of us making wine at home the gallon glass jar called a demijohn is the final fermenting vessel of choice. They are strong, easily sterilised and will last for years. Use a modern bung which is easy to sterilise and add an airlock to let the carbon dioxide out and keep the bugs out.
Clear glass will do in most cases but for some dark wines such as beetroot you will need tinted glass or the light will change the colour and the taste.
5) At some stage you will have to move the fermenting wine (called must) from one demijohn into another and so we come to my last of the five essentials A siphon.. A simple piece of plastic tubing will do the job but it is better to have something on the end to stop the sediment being sucked up from the bottom. Add a tap so you can turn the flow on or off at will and you are all set to go.
Those then are the things you really must have in wine making equipment. There are of course other things you will want to acquire but these will merely refine the task. With what I have listed above you can make wine from almost any fruit or vegetable. All you need to finish of is bottles and stoppers.
If you want to find out more including techniques and recipes too then why not have a look at the totally free Wine Making Book I have made available to download at Wine Making For Beginners.
In the book there is more equipment advice, techniques, and recipes and the site itself has a blog where you can find out more to help you make wine you will be proud to give to your friends at http://www.wine-making-for-beginners.com
