Home BrewingBasic equipment guide for making cheap homemade wine
There are many many different types of wine-making kits available on the market, but how much of this stuff do you actually need?
Obviously if you are going to start mashing your own fruit there will be extra (and more complicated!) chemicals and ingredients you will need, but for THE MOST BASIC WINE, this is what i would recommend.
A demijohn (To ferment the wine)
An airlock with rubber bung (To stop contamination whilst brewing)
Campden tablets (To kill the yeast at the end)
Yeast (To turn the sugar into alcohol)
Yeast nutrient (To feed the yeast and help it ferment quickly)
Steriliser (To make sure all your equipment is totally bacteria-free)
2 metres thin syphon tube ò€“ with plastic tap (To bottle the finished product)
A plastic funnel (To put the juice into the demijohn)
A measuring jug (to dissolve the sugar before adding to demijohn)
A solid rubber bung (for the end)
This list is kept to the bare minimum, and is all you would need if making wine from basic fruit juice ingredients.
The only other piece i would add to this (for a beginner) is a hydrometer, which is what you use to measure the amount of sugar in the mix before it starts fermenting.
The amount of sugar measured by the hydrometer is what will determine the final percentage of alcohol in your finished product.
With that lot (which would probably only set you back around Ò£20) you could follow my recipe to make my Cheap Homemade Strawberry Wine.
For all my future recipes i will assume that you have at least this basic equipment.
There are many other ingredients you could buy if you decided to go into wine-making as a serious hobby, but the main thing i would add after this is some more demijohns!
A gallon of my cheap wine is likely to be drinkable after a month, but it always tastes better if you can leave it for two months or longer. If you leave it in the demijohn to clear naturally before bottling (recommended) then you will want to start your next gallon before that one is ready.
Personally i have six demijohns. I suppose i would make two gallons of winea month, and always leave a spare empty demijohn or two to syphon the wine away from the lees before leaving it to settle and mature.
And donò€™t forget you will also need an extra airlock and bung for each demijohn, and also a few solid rubber bungs for when they are maturing.
So take a trek down to your local home brew supplier and get this basic selection of equipment back to your house, and then try one of my recipes.
You wonò€™t regret it!