Do you make your own beer or wine?
 

Just ordered the equipment + wine kit...Going to give this a try...
60 bottles of wine for $50-70 is enticing, hopefully it tastes decent!

Any tips?

:drinkup

I tried beer for about a year or so. It was rare that I could get a batch that didn't suck. The only tip I can give is be more sanitary than an operating room. Seriously, sterilize everything and when in doubt, sterilize twice.

yep, I do co-own a small brewery.

Whats the name? You guys have a site?

Any good beer kits you can order online and do at home? Always wanted to try that myself.

url for that equipment pls :)

You need the equipment, and then the kits.

I bought the equipment from costco..

and then I bought this kit for the wine...

That kit was on sale a couple weeks ago for $49, but I missed it. :)

From what my buddy tells me who does it all the time, you can use the same equipment for beer..

For beer kits, it looks like amazon has these best seller kits to try ( no link code url ), there is a Canadian one I will give a go..

Made beer at school but not since.

Zoxxa, we do not have a site.
the brewery is in the Netherlands and is part of the Huizer Brouwers Gilde.

I make my own wine, I did actually bought a new kit a couple of hours ago.

~$20 for the kit and 2 kilos of suger = 25 liter of wine.

I used to have 4 kilos of suger but the wine taste A LOT better with less alcohol. I can actually say it does taste good. 4 kilos is better if you just want to get drunk quickly of course but it tastes like shit. :winkwink:

Always wanted to try it,I'd probably make slop and it would go to waste

My cousin made great wine but almost to strong I feel like beer is harder

I used to do it a lot in the mid 90s...

Elderflower wine was my fav - Enjoy your new hobby :thumbsup

I've made both wine and beer in the past. Never used a kit for wine, I always just bought or collected batches of fruit and used an old method to make it.

Boiled the fruit in a clean white pillow case for an hour, mashing it and then letting it cool.

Remove pillow case (and thus all the pulp), pour the warm liquid into the wort, add sugar (if needed)

Sprinkle champagne yeast on top, cover and let it ferment for a month to 6 weeks.

Clean (with finings), bottle it.


Always had great results. My brothers and other friends all used kits, my wine always kicked theirs asses.

That's something I've been itching to do for a long time now. Been 10 years since I have made anything. Like a previous poster mentioned, sterilize the fuck out of your equipment and anything the product comes in contact with, including the bottles, caps, corks, anything.

Just starting out I will try some kits at first, but I would definitely like to move into more "raw" techniques. :)

I own an acre of property south of the popular vineyard areas around Niagara in southern Ontario. I'd like to see how far I can take this and maybe grow my own grapevines as well. I am surrounded by farms and the soil seems to grow anything you put in it. This is all new to me, but sounds like a good hobby for sure. :)

Made my own beer for years. Love it!

No, but I cook my own meth
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I've never tried my hand at wine and have heard it can be pretty complicated... but I brew my own hard apple cider and honey mead every year.

Makes for a great apple harvest party every year! :-)

Never ever tasted a good "DIY" wine... No matter the kit, equipment, etc.... Always tasted like cheap 10$ bottle....

IF you do it for the fun of it, go ahead :thumbsup. But otherwise, cost + work != quality of it.. Seriously :2 cents:

I was making it in my bathroom for some time..

Till this day my friends i gave my product too said it was the best wine they have ever had.

The beer did not turn out too good.. Had a weird molty sappy sweet flavor. Been years and i can still remember that smell.

I use the materials i used to make wine now to make an Indian Almond Leaf extract for my aquarium hobby and business.

i make my own beer but starting with wine kit will be hard, buy a $10 beer kit and go throw the motions to get used to the equipment.

When I was in prison some would make hootch in their cell toilets. I preferred plastic trash bags but didn't do a very good job, was to busy making sure I could survive a sharpened-spoon attack.

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I just got a home brewing kit as a gift, most everything you need in it, minus a strainer and bottles and caps. Seems worth a try anyway..

I make beer quite often.

If you just want something to get started go to http://www.makebeer.net but if you like it you'll eventually be buying better equipment and better ingredients. I'd start off with the dark ale kit.

I make a lot of it.

the beer is good, but you really need a keg devise to get the proper flavor with CO2. a kegerator is best and most affordable on ebay or the like. The sugar method the kits tell you about works but proper CO2 in a keg dispenser system makes beer better then you can buy at the vendor for cheaper than coke a cola.

for wine, for $50-$60 range the only GOOD stuff is the wine coolers. niagra mist and island mist are both really good. I love the blackberry. it finishes in about 2 months and is fabulous. If you want real wine, be prepared to spend $100-$180 a kit for the good stuff, and it takes longer to make.. 4-6 months. But the wine you get from a $100+ kit is equivalent to the $15-$20 750ml bottles in the wine stores... pretty decent stuff. I won't buy a $60 wine kit, I think they taste like shit. and god rest your soul of you're buying the $30 kits from wallmart - that's for students and ugly chicks already drunk to keep them going and happy - not fit for human consumption. mind you if all you want to do is get drunk and don't care about taste or hangovers, the wallmart shit works good.


the main thing you need for wine is a filter machine. they're about $100 and about $3 per kit for the filters. it makes it similar to store bought quality. the kits say you don't need it - or can use coffee filters. they're full of shit. you NEED the pressurized filter machine to do it right. Specialty wine making stores usually have very educated people in them that can help you get going.

tempature in fermenting is a BIG issue. I do mine in my furnace room. You really need a stable tempaure to get good ferminatation. -

also buy a whine whip. they attach to a drill and are about $20-$30. they REALLY help to make better wine then stirring. You will DEF make MUCH better wine with them.

A corker is a good thing to buy - I like the big one, it's about $50. real easy to use.

GET a spout that fits on your tap for cleaning wine bottles. ASK you wine store about this, they work MAGIC in bottle cleaning and save you HUGE time. They're about $10.

if you recycle wine bottles, get into the habit of rinsing them quickly after you finish them. wine dries in them and is a pain to deal with if you don't rinse right away.

Have fun!

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currently making mead 23L - it takes almost a year but the samples I've tried are AMAZING as it should be done next month.....

imagine a smooth honey taste that isn't sweet.......

the equipment is fine, the wine kit, well... it might be drinkable but if you want to get into this, PLEASE go to a wine making store. Yes you can make wine with koolaid and sugar, but you really won't want to drink it unless you have a still and live where no one will find out, then make sugar wine and distill it to vodka and don't get caught. You'll find MUCH MUCH better kits at a wine making store. you might be able to get some equipment cheaper at costco... but once you try a GOOD kit, you can't go back.


I get great beer results from the cheap Australian beer kits though.

i buy the coopers brand beer all the time, it's $18 at the wine making stores and $15 at superstore. can't believe how much they want at amazon!!!! what a rip off

wine equipment works good to make it, and it turns out great (you have to add one KG of sugar though). It's amazing with a kegerator, but OK with pop bottles and sugar to make the co2. Everyone's who's tried it here raved about it.

No :pimp

My friend does, as he's figured out the tricks and read the recipes he's getting better. Set him up with a blog but updating it isn't a priority for him, still might be something useful about brewing beer for you: http://www.brewingmybeer.com/

I brew a lot of beer and it's pretty good, it's a great hobby.

Also coopers was just bought by Mr. Beer

Use northernbrewer.com for your online stuff.

Thanks SleazyDream for all the info... :)

It's all a pretty simple process once you get used to all your equipment, the biggest things are sterilizing your equipment like people mentioned, proper environment / storage and knowing how to use your hydrometer, it's all pretty basic though.

In the past 6 months I've made roughly a 300L of wine and probably 100L of beer. Beer can be a little more complicated if you're making it from scratch, but starting out, just use the malt kits...the beer isn't bad with a little tweaking and the same with wine, you can get some excellent tasting wine kits.

another hint about beer, when you bottle it if you're using the sugar CO2 method, you need bottles with an amazing seal. Used one and two liter plastic pop bottles work well, the bottles i bought from the wine store didn't. they looked better, but they never sealed right and lost CO2. the plastic coke and pepsi bottles, with the ORIGINAL cap, seal better than anything else I've tried. The caps the wine store sells look great too, but they suck. You need the original cap with the original plastic insert in them, and tighten the living fuck out of them, then the sugar method will work. You just end up pouring the beer from the plastic bottle to a glass... which is probably preferable as the sugar method leaves a lot of sludge in the bottom of the bottle you don't want to see when you're drinking.

a 2 liter bottle is about the equivalent of a six pack of beer but much easier to transport ;)

I'm a home brewer and have made lots of beer. From pre-hopped extract kits to partial/mini-mash recipes. It's quite easy. I've never had a bad or infected batch. Use oxyclean free(only oxyclean free, no other oxycleans) to clean and star san to sanitize and you will be good to go.

I only make it when I have disposable income, and make craft beer quality for the price of the cheapest beer you could buy from a discount store. My sam adams boston lager clone is quite good and is based off a coopers real ale kit, with some specialty grains, quality yeast, some dry malt extract and added hops.

Midwest Supplies and Austin Homebrew are both good online stores, and centrally located in the US if you don't have a local brew store.

For bottles I bought a couple of cases of 1 liter flip tops, plus some 22 oz bombers, plus a couple of cases of sam adams bottles and a capper. All work well :)

I havent done wine yet because I dont have the equipment or time or money right now. Liquor is also possible, or sake, or cheese, or soy sauce.. you can brew a lot of things at home.

Hope that helps.

A lot of Americans on here don't realize in Canada we pay 2-4X as much for booze as they do. Economically it makes a LOT more sense to make your own in Canada than the USA because of all the extra tax we pay on booze here. If Yankies had to pay what we do, you'd see a LOT more of them making booze.

In Winnipeg, a small city, there's at least 10 specialty wine making stores plus you can buy kits in the supermarkets and wallmart. That says a lot as to how many people are doing it here...I suspect Ontario is similar....

I'm making both in my drawers right now.

I think the only products that I own that say "made in canada" are wine thiefs and bottling gear. Where there's a niche, an industry is born.

most of the stuff I use for making wine is made in other countries... very little is made in Canada

I made my own Rakija once, 55% alcohol :)

I'm not sure how their shipping rates are to Canada, but I've have very good luck with each of the beer kits I've ordered from midwest-supplies.com. I'm making my first actual wine "kit" right now, it's a mock port that is supposed to be good. However I've made quite a few gallons from fresh juice, either imported from Chile or California. I'm fortunate to live within 30 minutes of two of the largest juice importers on the east coast, and they both sell to the public.

Biggest recommendations, clean and sanitize and have patience. Make the first few batches by following the directions exactly before you start to experiment.

I think ferm-tech is a Canadian based company who makes some cool gadgets which LD Carlson does not.

I remember years ago, an editorial from one of the contributing editors in the Wine Spectator. It was an open letter to all of his friends, and the future people that he would ever meet, that if he was invited over to their homes at some point, please do not ask him to review their home made wine, that came from powder, water and a bit of yeast. He didn't want to waste his time or their time. He had no problem telling them it was shit.

If you want something to throw into a spritzer, or sangria, or cook with.. I suppose its fine, but so much of the quality depends on the fruit, and the method. I'm sure that Mead, Beer, and Cider would be much easier to procure, and control. So I would stick with that.

shipping rates might be why so many wine making stores exist in canada. they ship in bulk, and buy in bulk, shipping adds huge cost to a small purchase...from the rates I see posted here, the specialty wine making stores are cheaper for the same product and they have the good stuff

I used to think you used shit wine for cooking, but think about it. If it tastes like shit, and you use it for cooking, your food will taste like shit.

use good wine for cooking if you want good flavor!!!!! use shit wine if you want coc - o-McCrap

takes about 15 years to get the vines right for wine though doesn't it?

too much work for me.

You'd be surprised at top restaurants using cheap wine to cook with. For deglazing a pan you're not going to see much difference between $6 plonk, and Chateau Petrus, other than the $1900 price difference. Much like Olive oil, cooking with vs drizzling at the end, there's no need to go high end.

I once ran into a neighbor in the LCBO, who was browsing the Vintages section looking for "a good Burgundy" I asked her what it was to be paired with.. she responded, it was to go in a Beef Bourguignon. The book said the better the wine, the better the dish. So I directed her to a $12 Aussie Pinot instead. During the cooking process, much of the subtle differences that separate a great wine from a tolerable wine, are lost.