FAQs

When fruit and yeast love each other very much... Just kidding! Yeast reacts with the natural sugar in fruits or added sugars along with oxygen to create ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide is allowed to escape and the yeast continue making ethanol until either 1) they run out of sugar to eat 2) they die by the own alcohol they produced or 3) I tell them to stop by adding a stabilizer.  They then sink to the bottom (lees) and the finished brew is racked (decanted) off of the lees. 

Mead is simply wine made with honey as the fermentation fuel instead of sugar or brown sugar.  

While primary fermentation may only take up to 2 weeks, secondary fermentation and clarification can take up to a month. On top of that, wine and mead only get better with age, so its best not to rush perfection!

If you placed your homemade wine in the fridge and it has gotten cloudy, what you are seeing is tartaric acid crystals. Tartaric acid has a high freezing point and will precipitate out of refrigerated brews. Tartaric acid is harmless and naturally occurring in fruit wines.  If your unrefridgerated home brew goes cloudy after moving it around it is most lilkey sediment that has fallen to the bottom of the bottle. The sediment could be anything from fruit husks to dead yeast. It is impossible to fully remove all sediment from wine, so accumulation on the bottom of the bottle over time is natural. It will not affect the taste of the wine and is perfectly safe. 

If you clicked on this you are a narc! Yes it it perfectly legal. The state of Ohio allows two or more adult households to produce under 200 gallons of homemade wine, beer, or mead per year.  The alcohol is then allowed to be given away to friends and family or entered into wine/ beer making completions.  I pay taxes mind your business!

The initial investment to obtain the equipment can be as small or as large as you want it to be. You can get a wine making kit for 50-100$ on amazon that comes with everything that you need. After that its all about what you buy to make your wine or mead. You can make juice wine for about 1.50% a bottle using mid-tier ingredients. Mead is a little more expensive because buying honey by the pound gets salty, especially considering if you buy good quality wildflower honey. You also start adding costs when it comes to nutrients and stabilizers, but if you purchase them in bulk the price per gallon is almost negligable.  Overal it can be a very cheap hoby that can bring you hours of enjoyment. If you want to learn how to get started below check out the How-To page.