You’re awesome. I’m living in a dry country and you are making it possible to get my drink on without having to swallow the swill that many people are making here.
I make it every spring and it never makes it through the summer. We enjoy it sitting on the porch during the hot weather. I do things quite a bit differently than you do. A little much to put in the comment section. So just a couple highlights. I have discovered over the years using Lalvin 71B yeast gives me a much better product. It takes out a lot of that "rind flavor" you can get using a processed concentrate. I also omit 1 pint of lemon juice and substitute 1 pint of lime juice. It seems to make it just a little more complex. I back sweeten with 4 cups of sugar or around 822 grams per 6 gallon batch. Lastly, if for the first 24 hours you whip the mixture every so often and incorporate a lot of air (Better in a 6 gallon bucket), you will exhaust the sulfites and sorbate that's in the concentrate from the manufacture. That's probably why you had trouble getting your yeast to kick off. Let that all evaporate for the first 24 hours before adding yeast. Just a couple tips for you. Cheers!
I made this wine this past December. I also made a tea wine. Both came out really good. So.... I blended parts of each to make an Arnold Palmer. After blending, I added raspberries to the tea wine. Needless to say, my sisters went nuts over all three.
I made a lemon wine with dried cranberries. Wash the berries thoroughly. They have a lot of sulfur. I put potassium carbonate in before I pitched. It kicked off in 36 hours The lal 1118 liked a ph up . It seemed happy. I took it off the berries 4 days into the ferm. Gave a little yeast nut.Kept about 80 degrees. Beautiful blush now to wait for clear.Probably rack more than usual berry solids are time consuming. I`ll write at tasting time. I love your channel. You are my go to Thanks
Using Lutra & Voss kveik yeasts made a huge improvement with this recipe. Much brighter, cleaner, crisper flavor. I had to stagger the addition of lemon juice to help to kveik yeast get started in the acidic environment. Started with 1.5 bottles and added the remaining 1.5 bottles after 3 days
My second batch is in secondary atm. I loved the first standard recipe batch but thought it was a bit too thin for my taste. A bit too much like a light chardonnay. So this batch has 500ml of red grape concentrate (for mouth feel), some brown sugar (for depth) and 3 lemons rind in secondary (for extra lemony zing). So far it tastes amazing and is exactly what I was hoping for. P.S all the wine terms I've used are just what I feel and I have no idea how to describe wine properly.
Hey, if you follow the traditional Skeeter Pee recipe, and use a yeast cake from another batch or a starter and stagger the lemon juice additions, you won't have an issue with the pH and it starting. Food for thought.
Rick, thanks a lot for your wine videos man. I've learned a lot from you. I enjoy very much making wine as much as meads. Thanks again for sharing. Just visited your website for some info on sulfite. Big hug from Brazil.😀
Your videos are pure magic. Music is wonderful too. It's a delectable combination. I'll pass on the lemon wine for the time being, it looks delicious but I'll stick to experiments with more conventional stuff as well as apple cider, but just watching your video is a feast. Thank you.
Yes, I agree with you. Without adding the zest of any fruit, you won't get 100% of it's flavour. All flavours reside in the skins. The pulp contains little bit of flavour and the rest are sugars.
I want to make wine in philippines when i go home for good. Because we have alot of tropical fruits there and must of it is always go on trash only. Thanks to your videos dude. Love it
Hey, great video! I just found your channel and subscribed, just wondering when you degas at the late stage like that prior to bottling, does exposing it to the air a bad thing? I want to try this like right now!! Thanks !!
I used ReaLemon 100% Lemon Juice from Concentrate, but didn't notice the small print at the time which stated "with added ingredients". The juice has both Sodium Benzoate and Sodium Metabisulfite (preservatives). Will that prevent fermentation? With all other steps as per the video, and a of ph 3.2 to start, fermentation did not appear to be start. Now at 3 days, I am seeing very slow moving white clusters (globules) throughout the wine as it begins to clear. Is this yeast or something else?
I really REALLY like tart/sour flavours and seeing this interested me in making a nice tart wine. I feel people make everything sweet and I don't enjoy it personally, and I make my own lemonade which is usually sugarless. I don't know or understand wine terms but I am the kind of kid who ate so much Citrus I had acid burns in my mouth. I don't eat much other than fruits n such now the acid burns aren't worth it😂
Really like this guy. So calm to listen to and explain everything so easy. Not like many other "homewinemaking youtubers" thats like HEEYYYYY WATCHUUUUUPPPPPPP FOLLOWERS NOW WERE GONNA MAKE SKEEEETTTERPEE CHECK IT OUT. Apprecieate your videos and all the details you learn us! :)
I request you to put one video on the chemistry side of this. The chemicals, reactions and the by products. I know the sense of smell for a chemical like H2S or CH3COOH is going to be important to identify. But I haven't seen wine making people know as much chemistry as you do about it.
Thank you for your awesome video. Just a question about the lemon juice, I see there is solphite in my lemon juice. Does that cause problems for starting the fermentation? I was worried that the solphite in the juice might not let my yeast to do it’s job.
I’m a beginner home brewer. I made this in a gallon batch following your steps. The aroma turned out great with 13% alcohol but it was awfully bitter. What could have caused the bitterness and could it be corrected? I’d appreciate some advice.. cheers
You will likely want to back sweeten the wine to balance out the tartness of the acids from the lemon. If you dig back through my videos, I have a video on how to back sweeten and also have an article on my website Smart Winemaking.
Most concentrated lemon juice does come with sorbate to inhibit spoilage but you are diluting the juice (using about 1 pint to make a gallon or 6 pints of the juice to make 6 gallons and if you are using a yeast starter or (as in the original recipe, the slurry from a previous batch of wine) then the amount of sorbate in the must is small enough to be overcome by a large enough colony of viable yeast.
I loved how you explained every step, with pros and cons. Subscribed !! I'm gonna try your recipe with some different types of native citruses that i find in India.
Also, you will have to pasteurize the honey, there are natural bacteria in raw honey that although healthy for your GI tract, could have unintended negative consequences for your wine! 🤮
The pH of my lemon wine is 3.7, a little higher than the 3.3 you have. Should I leave it be? Should I add acid? And if so, should I add tartaric acid or an acid blend?
You can leave it be if it doesn't taste like it needs acid. 3.7 is within the range of a wine. You are more likely to oxidize at 3.7 vs 3.3 though, so keep that in mind. You will need a heavier dose of sulfite and will not want to age beyond about 5 years.
CO2 will stay dissolved in the wine especially after corking a little pressure can build up without popping and it is somewhat sealed. Stirring will allow that CO2 to bubble out like shaking a soda. If you don’t mind a little sparkling effect you don’t have to degass but in some wines it is probably not desirable. As for stirring and O2 it may be that the exposure to O2 from stirring is a relatively limited exposure. You more want to avoid leaving the bubbler off or letting it dry out creating a prolonged exposure. The benefit of degassing may be worth the small O2 exposure. Also if you degass in the carboy as he shows in some other videos the degassing probably creates a slight CO2 atmosphere in the carboy further limiting O2 exposure.
I'm planning on starting my first lemon wine this Sunday using your recipe. What do you think about adding nutrients, energizer and tannin to the starter right before dumping it into the carboy?
Just remembered I didn't add tannin to my wine based on your comment about the peptic enzymes binding with it. My original gravity was 1.072 and my pH was 3.2 (using only 2.5 bottles of lemon juice). I'll add the tannin and some additional nutrients today but, so far, primary fermentation is going great!
It is not going to make much of a difference, but potassium metabisulfite is the standard. Potassium metabisulfite will leave a bit residual potassium and sodium metabisulfite will leave a bit of residual sodium. Both can theoretically make the wine taste salty but it would have to be in such high amounts that is unlikely to occur. When working with wine from grapes, potassium will bind with tartaric acid and fall out as potassium bitartrate. Sodium is more likely to stay in solution and carry through to the bottle.
Great video, definitely have to try this. But what I always ask myself is, how can you tell that an acidic dry wine will mallow out with age and not need any sugar? For example I made an actually quite good wine using wild yellow plums which were really acidic. I used only about 2 pounds per gallon of full fruit but in the end I still had to backsweeten (pH was ~3.2). If I want to make a dry wine (to drink after lets say 1 year) what is a good indicator that the wine will turn out nicely balanced? I guess pH is not since different acids taste and appear different. Can a dry wine that seems too acidic after a few month in secondary even improve in this regard?
Normally for white wines and fruit wines I make them to drink young so you can take advantage of the fruity aromas. The lemon wine is a little one dimensional when young but refreshing. If it were so acidic that it were actually sour I would add a little sugar. At 3.28 where I finished, or was not sour but was a little thin. Mouth feel will generally increase over time until the wine eventually oxidizes. Fruity aromas will generally decrease, which can reveal more complex aromas in some wines but in other wines, there is nothing hidden under the fruity aromas. With the lemon wine is so cheap and the lemon smell is so stable that it makes sense to make a little extra to age. The lemon sticks around but eventually becomes more of a light citrus like a young Riesling can have. The mouth feel climbs up more like a traditional white wine. If you do intend to age the wine, I would recommend making sure you have a source of tannin whether from the fruit or in powdered form. It can act as a nice binding agent for lots of desirable things that would otherwise fall out of the wine. It is also a key building block for mouth feel.
How much Calcium Carbonate did you end up using to rate the PH level to an acceptable level to get fermentation started and what level did you achieve?
I really enjoy your videos. A more general question about country wines: many recipes suggest using what looks to me to be a very small quantity of fruit and a very large volume of water. And that might make some sense if the fruit was particularly acidic (I am thinking cranberries, or as in this video, lemon juice, for example) but why would you not try to use as much fruit as possible and as little water as possible. What is the rationale , for example, for using three pounds of strawberries or raspberries to make a gallon of wine, and not say, 10 -16 lbs of fruit? Thanks
i dont like dry wines with high % alcohol. Is it possible to brew a weaker wine. I like my wine around 5 to 7% nothing over 8. i am extremally sensitive to the taste of alcohol this is why i only drink dessert wines or lighter beers.
I've made this recipe using lemons from my backyard tree. I used about 40 lemons and the peels of about half of those. I zested and left the peels in just during the 8hrs of pectic enzyme time and pulled them out for the rest of the ferment. The biggest challenge I've had is getting TOO much rind/ lemon pith (the white part just under the outer skin) into the wine. This left the wine with a pectic haze (even after using the enzymes) and a slight bitter flavor. I'm on my second batch now. This time I used a cheese grater on the peels and ran the must through cheese cloth twice to remove as much pulp/pith as possible. Hoping this turns out better!
@@phaylon you might consider covering the lemon peels in sugar and allowing the sugar to pull the oils out of the peel for about 15 minutes then use the lemon oil infused sugar without the solids.
If you are talking Celsius, then yes. With some yeast strains it is possible. It is about the lower limit though. In most cases the yeast will become very stressed at 10°C and create hydrogen sulfide (rotten egg smell).
The poor fermentation you had at the beginning is why the original recipe suggests to only put half the lemon juice in at the beginning, and then after fermentation is 2/3 complete go back with more nutrient and the rest of the lemon juice.
Dude what if i just added sugar to lemon juice from lemons doing 1 gallon got it to say 5% and added in my lalvin ec1118 along with yeast nutrient then allowed it to ferment out till no mo bubbles and rack to another vessel and sweetened to taste then bottled and capped? What you think?
Pure lemon juice is going to be pretty acidic at a pH of about 2.0. You are going to want to get it up to about 3.0 to get the fermentation started. If you are going to stick with Winemaking, definitely get a pH meter. It is probably the most important single instrument for a winemaker. Anyways. You can see where your juice stands and add water or potassium bicarbonate to adjust accordingly. If you use the bicarbonate method it will be more lemony but that might not be ideal... Too much lemon might over power the wine.
Hi, I followed your recipe exactly as it is ! My wine didn't even reach 3% ABVP, where did i go wrong ? The temp. is optimal as well. The yeast is still fermenting, i can hear the bubbling.
If it is still fermenting, let it keep going and churn it up once a day. Your hydrometer will read below 0% ABV when it is is complete but that is not the actual ABV. If it stalls it is likely too low of pH which can be solved with potassium bicarbonate or too cold of fermentation temp.
@@TheHomeWinemakingChannel Oh my god, thank you for responding, i wasn't expecting you to respond. The acidity isn't anything below 6 as i used fresh ripe Meyer Lemons which are barely that puckery as Eureka Lemons are, Temp can be an issue, but it's still 16°C at night and 26°C at day which is optimum. Shall I add a Yeast energizer or add more yeast as my ferment is pretty sweet already?
Thank you for the explanations. Appreciate the list of chemicals you provide. I am concerned about picking up random chemicals off the web so your experience is very helpful. One question I have for you regarding this vid is why not stir vigorously at the start to put more oxygen into the must?
QUESTION: I made the exact wine with the pectinase, clearing up nicely, maybe 4 weeks ago. But, I have a huge starfruit tree on my property here in FL, and I also made your above recipe but with fresh starfruit juice sub for lemon juice. But, I froze some juice for the back sweetening, in leu of simple syrup. However, the juice is cloudy. How would you clarify that juice so it wont cloud up my crystal clear wine? Some kind of super ultra juice filter? Or just use the simple syrup 🙁
Did you add the pectic enzyme to the juice that you set aside? If you give it a good dose of pectic enzyme and store in the fridge it should drop out much of the haze. It is tricky because the enzymes work much better at warmer temps but you don't want to store a juice warm. You can try to fine it with bentonite. I would try to get it a little more clear before adding to the wine but don't get too worried about it... It should clear up in wine form a little easier since the specific gravity is so much lower... If it doesn't, call it a hard cider.
The Home Winemaking Channel juice is in the freezer. Ill put it in the fridge and add the enzyme, then in a week run it through a filter, then let it settle a few more days, then rack off the top more clear juice. The next question is, Should I rack off the wine, add juice with Sorbate in a carboy and let it settle another week, or just go straight to bottle? Maybe I’ll see how it looks. 🧐
i like your video, i search a lot and didnt find a video with concentrate or without heating the sugar . Did you try or would you try in an other video replacing the white sugar with honey ?
The alcohol provides a bit of sweetness, and the acids will become more gentle over time. A dry lemon after a couple years can have a similar perception of acidity to a dry riesling. So certainly crisp and lively buy not overly tart. If you are not into dry whites though you can definitely back sweeten it to your liking.
Returning to your video, and I see that you commented around 17 minutes, 10 seconds that you had some difficulty with fermentation that you ascribed to the acidity, but I wonder if the problem may be more associated with the preservatives that are usually part of commercially available lemon juice. Typically, sorbates are added to the juice and sorbates are what we use to prevent yeast from reproducing. Your method is to step feed the lemon juice to the wine but if you step feed using smaller amounts of the juice with larger colonies of the yeast I would think that you are more easily able to neutralize the impact of the sorbates. I suspect that that is the reason why the original recipe for a wine that is called Skeeter Pee called for a yeast slurry from a recently made wine - and so , a very large colony of viable yeast, much larger than would be found in any single pack of yeast you are pitching into this must.
Could I add so much sugar in the beginning that the alcohol concentration becomes so high that it kills the yeast before it uses up all this sugar, so the wine stays sweet?
If I wanted to bottle the wine, but wanted to start drinking it within 3-6 months, what would I need to do differently, compared to your instructions in the video?
Nothing really. If you want to drink it young, just sweeten to taste, then bottle it. If it doesnt clear up naturally within the first couple months you can use a fining agent to speed up the process
You can try with lime. I have made it in the past with two lemon juices and a lime juice. It is similar in taste to limoncello but only about 10% alcohol, vs around 30% for limoncello.
@@TheHomeWinemakingChannel Thanks! I'm apparently allergic to lemon :-( so using lime in its place for everything. Is it the yeast making the difference? I usually make wine with D-47 or 71B, both of which give me a much higher ABV. My cherry wine (made from juice) is usually around 18% ABV and my grapefruit around 16%. I also did pineapple but that came out tasting like a chardonnay, which I do not particularly like; I think that ABV was around 15%.
@@TheHomeWinemakingChannel hi there so I was making a white wine from fresh grapes and it turned brown during my primary fermentation stage i know this is from oxidation but can it recover from that?? Have you had this happen
It would be rare for a wine to oxidize to the point of browning if the fermentation is active. Yeast is very efficient at scavenging oxygen. Did the fermentation struggle to start? Did you press the grapes before fermenting? A white wine will turn brown/orange thanks to the seeds if it allowed to ferment on the skins. Occasionally a white wine maker will intentionally brown the juice immediately before fermentation, then allow the fermentation which is reductive to un-brown the wine. By doing this, most oxygen reactive compounds have already reacted, requiring less effort to prevent oxidation later on. In the finger lakes this is done with Riesling on rare occasions.
@@TheHomeWinemakingChannel thanks for the reply ya so we crushed and then pressed them then I added my potassium metabisulfate to it 1 tablet per gallon and it looked like it started to clear up I then added the yeast it took off but then turned brown
Do you know what the pH is of the wine/juice? If the pH is a little high it would be a lot more likely to brown like that. I try to adjust my whites to about 3.1-3.2 before the start of fermentation .
You are introducing a lot of oxygen degassing this way. Degassing in a carboy using vacuum is a far "cleaner" way of doing it. Water driven vacuum ejectors are a great cheap way of pulling strong vacuum without ever exposing the wine to the elements.
Where can i find this at? I just found this video and that was my comment that i was concerned with. It would probably help me with my wine as well. Thank you
If you want to stay true to real country wine then you don't want to add any of those additive or chemicals just juice water sugar and yeast and real country it will be bread yeast
Do you have it above 70 degrees? I have my jugs of concord grape fermenting on the furnace vents. They're producing a lot. This video is way too much work to make wine.
For a real country wine, tannins, mouth feel and vinosity would come from black tea raisins and or banana. I also now avoid the use of all sulphites and sorbates in my food, we are make homemade wine and doesn't need to be transport stable, if properly left to completely finish fermenting, time to clear and age before bottling and good sanitation you don't need man made chemicals taht are harming your gut flora and you
Sulfite (SO2) and Sorbate (Sorbic Acid) are both naturally occurring. Sulfite will be in the wine whether you add it or not. Yeast naturally produces SO2 as a biproduct and can additionally produce SO2 as hydrogen sulfide (another biproduct) reacts with oxygen. Some strains found in the wild can produce up to 100ppm in a normal fermentation. The reality, whether you add it or rely on natural sources is that it readily oxidizes and also binds with things like acetaldehyde so it is mostly gone if you don't add more. If you make wine with enough tannin or acid, the need for sulfite is very low. If sulfite levels are too low, and the wine is aged beyond about a year you will begin to see measurable amounts of oxidative biproducts like acetaldehyde, ethyl acetate, and/or isoamyle acetate. From a toxicity perspective, I would rank them worse than sulfur dioxide and more likely to produce a headache. Acetaldehyde is one of those polarizing components where some people enjoy the nutty taste but to many it is a big flaw in the wine. For a country wine, of course you have a lot of freedom to do things that otherwise might not universally acceptable. I would certainly make a sulfite free wine if I had a low enough pH and don't use Sorbate unless there is residual sugar. The reality with most wines. especially with grapes is that they are at huge risk of volatile acidity without maintaining a minimum level of sulfur dioxide.
You’re awesome. I’m living in a dry country and you are making it possible to get my drink on without having to swallow the swill that many people are making here.
Or maybe don't become an alcoholic reliant on booze to exist?
I make it every spring and it never makes it through the summer. We enjoy it sitting on the porch during the hot weather. I do things quite a bit differently than you do. A little much to put in the comment section. So just a couple highlights. I have discovered over the years using Lalvin 71B yeast gives me a much better product. It takes out a lot of that "rind flavor" you can get using a processed concentrate. I also omit 1 pint of lemon juice and substitute 1 pint of lime juice. It seems to make it just a little more complex. I back sweeten with 4 cups of sugar or around 822 grams per 6 gallon batch. Lastly, if for the first 24 hours you whip the mixture every so often and incorporate a lot of air (Better in a 6 gallon bucket), you will exhaust the sulfites and sorbate that's in the concentrate from the manufacture. That's probably why you had trouble getting your yeast to kick off. Let that all evaporate for the first 24 hours before adding yeast. Just a couple tips for you. Cheers!
I made this wine this past December. I also made a tea wine. Both came out really good. So.... I blended parts of each to make an Arnold Palmer. After blending, I added raspberries to the tea wine. Needless to say, my sisters went nuts over all three.
I'd love to see your recipes for that, especially the tea! Sounds delicious 😋
That is similar to kombucha. No airlock you`d have kombucha.
what about your wife?
Holy Smokes!!! Sounds good. Do you have a recipe?
@@Chatisthisrealquestionmark you've officially won the most awkward and uncomforting question on youtube comments section today! great job 😕
I made a lemon wine with dried cranberries. Wash the berries thoroughly. They have a lot of sulfur. I put potassium carbonate in before I pitched. It kicked off in 36 hours The lal 1118 liked a ph up . It seemed happy. I took it off the berries 4 days into the ferm. Gave a little yeast nut.Kept about 80 degrees. Beautiful blush now to wait for clear.Probably rack more than usual berry solids are time consuming. I`ll write at tasting time. I love your channel. You are my go to Thanks
Using Lutra & Voss kveik yeasts made a huge improvement with this recipe. Much brighter, cleaner, crisper flavor.
I had to stagger the addition of lemon juice to help to kveik yeast get started in the acidic environment. Started with 1.5 bottles and added the remaining 1.5 bottles after 3 days
My second batch is in secondary atm. I loved the first standard recipe batch but thought it was a bit too thin for my taste. A bit too much like a light chardonnay. So this batch has 500ml of red grape concentrate (for mouth feel), some brown sugar (for depth) and 3 lemons rind in secondary (for extra lemony zing). So far it tastes amazing and is exactly what I was hoping for. P.S all the wine terms I've used are just what I feel and I have no idea how to describe wine properly.
So, how did this turn out?
Hey, if you follow the traditional Skeeter Pee recipe, and use a yeast cake from another batch or a starter and stagger the lemon juice additions, you won't have an issue with the pH and it starting. Food for thought.
best information i've seen yet, love how you explain the science behind what you do, I have lots of citrus trees, making this recipe first!
Rick, thanks a lot for your wine videos man. I've learned a lot from you. I enjoy very much making wine as much as meads. Thanks again for sharing. Just visited your website for some info on sulfite. Big hug from Brazil.😀
I added citric acid to a brew today and it went volcano on me, thanks for the tip of using some brew to mix it outside the fermenter =D
Your videos are pure magic. Music is wonderful too. It's a delectable combination. I'll pass on the lemon wine for the time being, it looks delicious but I'll stick to experiments with more conventional stuff as well as apple cider, but just watching your video is a feast. Thank you.
You can also put some lemon zest in it to add a bit of flavour and Colour
Yes, I agree with you. Without adding the zest of any fruit, you won't get 100% of it's flavour. All flavours reside in the skins. The pulp contains little bit of flavour and the rest are sugars.
I want to make wine in philippines when i go home for good. Because we have alot of tropical fruits there and must of it is always go on trash only. Thanks to your videos dude. Love it
Hey I see a Les Paul in the background! Looks like a custom! Love it brother. Can’t wait to try this lemon wine out
Just started this wine a few days ago. It's still in full fermentation.
I really enjoyed the detailed tutorial thanks for this video.
Hey, great video! I just found your channel and subscribed, just wondering when you degas at the late stage like that prior to bottling, does exposing it to the air a bad thing? I want to try this like right now!! Thanks !!
Instead of using lemon juice - how many lemons (by weight) would you recommend adding for this wine? Thanks
Is e the back of the homebrew plastic spoon to stir the sugar and water to help dissolve.
I used ReaLemon 100% Lemon Juice from Concentrate, but didn't notice the small print at the time which stated "with added ingredients". The juice has both Sodium Benzoate and Sodium Metabisulfite (preservatives). Will that prevent fermentation? With all other steps as per the video, and a of ph 3.2 to start, fermentation did not appear to be start. Now at 3 days, I am seeing very slow moving white clusters (globules) throughout the wine as it begins to clear. Is this yeast or something else?
Thank you for sharing. I'm very interested in trying this. You made it look very simple 👏 👌 😊
I really REALLY like tart/sour flavours and seeing this interested me in making a nice tart wine. I feel people make everything sweet and I don't enjoy it personally, and I make my own lemonade which is usually sugarless. I don't know or understand wine terms but I am the kind of kid who ate so much Citrus I had acid burns in my mouth. I don't eat much other than fruits n such now the acid burns aren't worth it😂
Really like this guy. So calm to listen to and explain everything so easy. Not like many other "homewinemaking youtubers" thats like HEEYYYYY WATCHUUUUUPPPPPPP FOLLOWERS NOW WERE GONNA MAKE SKEEEETTTERPEE CHECK IT OUT. Apprecieate your videos and all the details you learn us! :)
I request you to put one video on the chemistry side of this. The chemicals, reactions and the by products. I know the sense of smell for a chemical like H2S or CH3COOH is going to be important to identify. But I haven't seen wine making people know as much chemistry as you do about it.
Can you use fresh squeezed lemon juice?
Thank you for your awesome video. Just a question about the lemon juice, I see there is solphite in my lemon juice. Does that cause problems for starting the fermentation? I was worried that the solphite in the juice might not let my yeast to do it’s job.
I’m a beginner home brewer. I made this in a gallon batch following your steps. The aroma turned out great with 13% alcohol but it was awfully bitter. What could have caused the bitterness and could it be corrected? I’d appreciate some advice.. cheers
You will likely want to back sweeten the wine to balance out the tartness of the acids from the lemon. If you dig back through my videos, I have a video on how to back sweeten and also have an article on my website Smart Winemaking.
Did your lemon concentrate have added preservatives or was it completely 100%
Most concentrated lemon juice does come with sorbate to inhibit spoilage but you are diluting the juice (using about 1 pint to make a gallon or 6 pints of the juice to make 6 gallons and if you are using a yeast starter or (as in the original recipe, the slurry from a previous batch of wine) then the amount of sorbate in the must is small enough to be overcome by a large enough colony of viable yeast.
@@kb2vca
Thank you 👍🏻
I loved how you explained every step, with pros and cons.
Subscribed !!
I'm gonna try your recipe with some different types of native citruses that i find in India.
Thank you for your video. What are additional steps to make it from real lemons?
Would it be possible to substitute the sugar in this recipe for some honey? Wondering if it would be like a lemon mead? Thanks for the inspiration!
You could do that. Honey is usually a good bit more acidic than table sugar, so you will probably want to add a little less lemon juice.
@@TheHomeWinemakingChannel Okay awesome! Thanks a bunch, I cant wait to try it
Also, you will have to pasteurize the honey, there are natural bacteria in raw honey that although healthy for your GI tract, could have unintended negative consequences for your wine! 🤮
@@beescheeseandwineplease889 that's definitely not true. I make Mead regularly and never do.
The pH of my lemon wine is 3.7, a little higher than the 3.3 you have. Should I leave it be? Should I add acid? And if so, should I add tartaric acid or an acid blend?
You can leave it be if it doesn't taste like it needs acid. 3.7 is within the range of a wine. You are more likely to oxidize at 3.7 vs 3.3 though, so keep that in mind. You will need a heavier dose of sulfite and will not want to age beyond about 5 years.
If you Degas's is that not adding more oxygen which you say should be avoided. Would wine not Degas's itself over time?
CO2 will stay dissolved in the wine especially after corking a little pressure can build up without popping and it is somewhat sealed. Stirring will allow that CO2 to bubble out like shaking a soda. If you don’t mind a little sparkling effect you don’t have to degass but in some wines it is probably not desirable. As for stirring and O2 it may be that the exposure to O2 from stirring is a relatively limited exposure. You more want to avoid leaving the bubbler off or letting it dry out creating a prolonged exposure. The benefit of degassing may be worth the small O2 exposure. Also if you degass in the carboy as he shows in some other videos the degassing probably creates a slight CO2 atmosphere in the carboy further limiting O2 exposure.
Would a few tea bags help for tanins? Aren't tannins needed for wine?
How much calcium carbonate should I add if I don't have pH meter
I'm planning on starting my first lemon wine this Sunday using your recipe. What do you think about adding nutrients, energizer and tannin to the starter right before dumping it into the carboy?
Just remembered I didn't add tannin to my wine based on your comment about the peptic enzymes binding with it. My original gravity was 1.072 and my pH was 3.2 (using only 2.5 bottles of lemon juice). I'll add the tannin and some additional nutrients today but, so far, primary fermentation is going great!
How many lemon is that equivalent to, the grocery store neer me has lemons for .64 a piece. And what specific gravity is that starting
Hi, Thanks for the nice startup video. LD Carlson has two types of sulfite, Sodium, and Potassium. Which should I buy?
It is not going to make much of a difference, but potassium metabisulfite is the standard. Potassium metabisulfite will leave a bit residual potassium and sodium metabisulfite will leave a bit of residual sodium. Both can theoretically make the wine taste salty but it would have to be in such high amounts that is unlikely to occur. When working with wine from grapes, potassium will bind with tartaric acid and fall out as potassium bitartrate. Sodium is more likely to stay in solution and carry through to the bottle.
@@TheHomeWinemakingChannel Thanks
Great video, definitely have to try this. But what I always ask myself is, how can you tell that an acidic dry wine will mallow out with age and not need any sugar? For example I made an actually quite good wine using wild yellow plums which were really acidic. I used only about 2 pounds per gallon of full fruit but in the end I still had to backsweeten (pH was ~3.2). If I want to make a dry wine (to drink after lets say 1 year) what is a good indicator that the wine will turn out nicely balanced? I guess pH is not since different acids taste and appear different. Can a dry wine that seems too acidic after a few month in secondary even improve in this regard?
Normally for white wines and fruit wines I make them to drink young so you can take advantage of the fruity aromas. The lemon wine is a little one dimensional when young but refreshing. If it were so acidic that it were actually sour I would add a little sugar. At 3.28 where I finished, or was not sour but was a little thin. Mouth feel will generally increase over time until the wine eventually oxidizes. Fruity aromas will generally decrease, which can reveal more complex aromas in some wines but in other wines, there is nothing hidden under the fruity aromas. With the lemon wine is so cheap and the lemon smell is so stable that it makes sense to make a little extra to age. The lemon sticks around but eventually becomes more of a light citrus like a young Riesling can have. The mouth feel climbs up more like a traditional white wine. If you do intend to age the wine, I would recommend making sure you have a source of tannin whether from the fruit or in powdered form. It can act as a nice binding agent for lots of desirable things that would otherwise fall out of the wine. It is also a key building block for mouth feel.
How much Calcium Carbonate did you end up using to rate the PH level to an acceptable level to get fermentation started and what level did you achieve?
I really enjoy your videos. A more general question about country wines: many recipes suggest using what looks to me to be a very small quantity of fruit and a very large volume of water. And that might make some sense if the fruit was particularly acidic (I am thinking cranberries, or as in this video, lemon juice, for example) but why would you not try to use as much fruit as possible and as little water as possible. What is the rationale , for example, for using three pounds of strawberries or raspberries to make a gallon of wine, and not say, 10 -16 lbs of fruit? Thanks
Cost, alcohol content, acidity are important factors there
What dosage of calcium carbonate did you end up using? Dealing with the same issue of low pH
i dont like dry wines with high % alcohol. Is it possible to brew a weaker wine. I like my wine around 5 to 7% nothing over 8. i am extremally sensitive to the taste of alcohol this is why i only drink dessert wines or lighter beers.
Friend, did you end with a sweeter wine or a dry wine when you used the EC?
Also have you added lemon peel/zest to get the brighter lemon flavors?
I've made this recipe using lemons from my backyard tree. I used about 40 lemons and the peels of about half of those. I zested and left the peels in just during the 8hrs of pectic enzyme time and pulled them out for the rest of the ferment. The biggest challenge I've had is getting TOO much rind/ lemon pith (the white part just under the outer skin) into the wine. This left the wine with a pectic haze (even after using the enzymes) and a slight bitter flavor. I'm on my second batch now. This time I used a cheese grater on the peels and ran the must through cheese cloth twice to remove as much pulp/pith as possible. Hoping this turns out better!
@@phaylon you might consider covering the lemon peels in sugar and allowing the sugar to pull the oils out of the peel for about 15 minutes then use the lemon oil infused sugar without the solids.
sir, does fermentation occur at 10 degrees?
If you are talking Celsius, then yes. With some yeast strains it is possible. It is about the lower limit though. In most cases the yeast will become very stressed at 10°C and create hydrogen sulfide (rotten egg smell).
I wonder how it would do if you swapped out the sugar for honey (... a Skeeter-mel ?)
Can you use maple syrup instead of sugar or maybe with sugar for higher alc content
The poor fermentation you had at the beginning is why the original recipe suggests to only put half the lemon juice in at the beginning, and then after fermentation is 2/3 complete go back with more nutrient and the rest of the lemon juice.
Dude what if i just added sugar to lemon juice from lemons doing 1 gallon got it to say 5% and added in my lalvin ec1118 along with yeast nutrient then allowed it to ferment out till no mo bubbles and rack to another vessel and sweetened to taste then bottled and capped? What you think?
Pure lemon juice is going to be pretty acidic at a pH of about 2.0. You are going to want to get it up to about 3.0 to get the fermentation started. If you are going to stick with Winemaking, definitely get a pH meter. It is probably the most important single instrument for a winemaker. Anyways. You can see where your juice stands and add water or potassium bicarbonate to adjust accordingly. If you use the bicarbonate method it will be more lemony but that might not be ideal... Too much lemon might over power the wine.
Hi, I followed your recipe exactly as it is !
My wine didn't even reach 3% ABVP, where did i go wrong ?
The temp. is optimal as well. The yeast is still fermenting, i can hear the bubbling.
If it is still fermenting, let it keep going and churn it up once a day. Your hydrometer will read below 0% ABV when it is is complete but that is not the actual ABV. If it stalls it is likely too low of pH which can be solved with potassium bicarbonate or too cold of fermentation temp.
@@TheHomeWinemakingChannel Oh my god, thank you for responding, i wasn't expecting you to respond.
The acidity isn't anything below 6 as i used fresh ripe Meyer Lemons which are barely that puckery as Eureka Lemons are,
Temp can be an issue, but it's still 16°C at night and 26°C at day which is optimum.
Shall I add a Yeast energizer or add more yeast as my ferment is pretty sweet already?
Thank you for the explanations. Appreciate the list of chemicals you provide. I am concerned about picking up random chemicals off the web so your experience is very helpful. One question I have for you regarding this vid is why not stir vigorously at the start to put more oxygen into the must?
He should have fermented in a bucket so it can be stirred. This is really a mistake a beginner would make.
How much calcium carbonate did you have to use?
Not clear; did you use lemon juice concentrate or lemon juice FROM concentrate?
100% lemon juice from concentrate. The stuff that most grocery stores carry in 1 quart bottles.
how about dissolving the sugar in the water then pouring in the jug?
great video, thanks,, i also enjoy watching u in the impractical jokers ....
QUESTION: I made the exact wine with the pectinase, clearing up nicely, maybe 4 weeks ago. But, I have a huge starfruit tree on my property here in FL, and I also made your above recipe but with fresh starfruit juice sub for lemon juice. But, I froze some juice for the back sweetening, in leu of simple syrup. However, the juice is cloudy. How would you clarify that juice so it wont cloud up my crystal clear wine? Some kind of super ultra juice filter? Or just use the simple syrup 🙁
Did you add the pectic enzyme to the juice that you set aside? If you give it a good dose of pectic enzyme and store in the fridge it should drop out much of the haze. It is tricky because the enzymes work much better at warmer temps but you don't want to store a juice warm. You can try to fine it with bentonite. I would try to get it a little more clear before adding to the wine but don't get too worried about it... It should clear up in wine form a little easier since the specific gravity is so much lower... If it doesn't, call it a hard cider.
The Home Winemaking Channel juice is in the freezer. Ill put it in the fridge and add the enzyme, then in a week run it through a filter, then let it settle a few more days, then rack off the top more clear juice. The next question is, Should I rack off the wine, add juice with Sorbate in a carboy and let it settle another week, or just go straight to bottle? Maybe I’ll see how it looks. 🧐
i like your video, i search a lot and didnt find a video with concentrate or without heating the sugar . Did you try or would you try in an other video replacing the white sugar with honey ?
Nicely produced video
Is the keg aluminum or stainless ?
The keg is 304 stainless steel.
how much yeast did you add?
If I want a sweet wine. Cant I just use more sugar and let the fermentation stop when the yeast dies from Higher Alcohol content ?
Why do you bottle dry will it slightly sweeten in aging ?
The alcohol provides a bit of sweetness, and the acids will become more gentle over time. A dry lemon after a couple years can have a similar perception of acidity to a dry riesling. So certainly crisp and lively buy not overly tart. If you are not into dry whites though you can definitely back sweeten it to your liking.
Returning to your video, and I see that you commented around 17 minutes, 10 seconds that you had some difficulty with fermentation that you ascribed to the acidity, but I wonder if the problem may be more associated with the preservatives that are usually part of commercially available lemon juice. Typically, sorbates are added to the juice and sorbates are what we use to prevent yeast from reproducing. Your method is to step feed the lemon juice to the wine but if you step feed using smaller amounts of the juice with larger colonies of the yeast I would think that you are more easily able to neutralize the impact of the sorbates. I suspect that that is the reason why the original recipe for a wine that is called Skeeter Pee called for a yeast slurry from a recently made wine - and so , a very large colony of viable yeast, much larger than would be found in any single pack of yeast you are pitching into this must.
Could I add so much sugar in the beginning that the alcohol concentration becomes so high that it kills the yeast before it uses up all this sugar, so the wine stays sweet?
The problem with that is EC-1118 can ferment up to 18% or so. But, maybe that's what you're looking for.
If I wanted to bottle the wine, but wanted to start drinking it within 3-6 months, what would I need to do differently, compared to your instructions in the video?
Nothing really. If you want to drink it young, just sweeten to taste, then bottle it. If it doesnt clear up naturally within the first couple months you can use a fining agent to speed up the process
How much calcium carbonate did you add,
well made lemon wine day 5 still at the beginning GR is 1.090 not doing anything everything is in need help ? do i add more yeast
I’d aggressively shake to degass and start your yeast in a quart of sugar juice for a couple days dump in with nutrient. It should take off
Where did you the grape vines from
Sorry for the spelling mistakes Where did you get the grape vines from
Same additions for lime? Is this lemon wine similar to limoncello?
You can try with lime. I have made it in the past with two lemon juices and a lime juice. It is similar in taste to limoncello but only about 10% alcohol, vs around 30% for limoncello.
@@TheHomeWinemakingChannel Thanks! I'm apparently allergic to lemon :-( so using lime in its place for everything. Is it the yeast making the difference? I usually make wine with D-47 or 71B, both of which give me a much higher ABV. My cherry wine (made from juice) is usually around 18% ABV and my grapefruit around 16%. I also did pineapple but that came out tasting like a chardonnay, which I do not particularly like; I think that ABV was around 15%.
Love your videos! Could you add more sugar to increase %ABV from 10 to 12ish or would that cause problems?
Sure you can do that. It will be a little less approachable and may need a little more time before it is ready to drink but otherwise it will be fine.
@@TheHomeWinemakingChannel hi there so I was making a white wine from fresh grapes and it turned brown during my primary fermentation stage i know this is from oxidation but can it recover from that?? Have you had this happen
It would be rare for a wine to oxidize to the point of browning if the fermentation is active. Yeast is very efficient at scavenging oxygen. Did the fermentation struggle to start? Did you press the grapes before fermenting? A white wine will turn brown/orange thanks to the seeds if it allowed to ferment on the skins. Occasionally a white wine maker will intentionally brown the juice immediately before fermentation, then allow the fermentation which is reductive to un-brown the wine. By doing this, most oxygen reactive compounds have already reacted, requiring less effort to prevent oxidation later on. In the finger lakes this is done with Riesling on rare occasions.
@@TheHomeWinemakingChannel thanks for the reply ya so we crushed and then pressed them then I added my potassium metabisulfate to it 1 tablet per gallon and it looked like it started to clear up I then added the yeast it took off but then turned brown
Do you know what the pH is of the wine/juice? If the pH is a little high it would be a lot more likely to brown like that. I try to adjust my whites to about 3.1-3.2 before the start of fermentation .
can you ad all the lemon juice at the end of the sugar fermentation ?lemon juice don t have any sugar to ferment !
Thank You ... God Bless You ... 😀😀😀
Thanks, great video!
I try to make rice wine with brown sugar but it doesnt turn right.... mostly my wine is sour like a lot of acid
You are introducing a lot of oxygen degassing this way. Degassing in a carboy using vacuum is a far "cleaner" way of doing it. Water driven vacuum ejectors are a great cheap way of pulling strong vacuum without ever exposing the wine to the elements.
Where can i find this at? I just found this video and that was my comment that i was concerned with. It would probably help me with my wine as well. Thank you
what starting gravity reading please?
Methinks I will do a second fermentation for a carbonated version.
Thank you very much
Are you using Imperial Gallon or US Gallon size carboy?
I would assume US. Here in North America, any Imperial containers would be antiques.
Indeed. He's in the States. Probably has never even heard of an Imperial gallon.
top video fella - tyvm
Newbie question 😁 Difference between Potassium Metabisulphite and Sodium Metabisulphite and their uses?
One has potassium and the other sodium. Same uses and results.
Sir How make high alcohol wine
Increase the amount of sugar you add
Where did you get your 6 gallon bottle ?
You can get them at any brew shop, or I added a link in the video description to buy online.
@@TheHomeWinemakingChannel ok ill b looking forward to it
@@TheHomeWinemakingChannel ihave some roots soaking at the moment to make a root toxic wine
Love from Bangladesh sir...
In your garden
Ever make mead?
We done
Do u have to SOAK THE CORKS before bottling? lol
Definitely helps
I made some lemon wine with real lemons,I can't get the yeast to work,this is 2 days after adding yeast
i just dont understand what i did wrong lol puzzled
Please make video on study on Methanol
If you want to stay true to real country wine then you don't want to add any of those additive or chemicals just juice water sugar and yeast and real country it will be bread yeast
Wow nice how can I start a business for this
I made a gallon and it has done nothing in 48+ hours.
Do you have it above 70 degrees? I have my jugs of concord grape fermenting on the furnace vents. They're producing a lot. This video is way too much work to make wine.
Ha.. I am sure It made a good hard lemonade.
മലയാളി ഇല്ലങ്കിൽ എന്താഘോഷം കേരളക്കാർക്ക് ഇവിടെ വരാം 👍
this is a how to make acetone tutorial.
For a real country wine, tannins, mouth feel and vinosity would come from black tea raisins and or banana. I also now avoid the use of all sulphites and sorbates in my food, we are make homemade wine and doesn't need to be transport stable, if properly left to completely finish fermenting, time to clear and age before bottling and good sanitation you don't need man made chemicals taht are harming your gut flora and you
Sulfite (SO2) and Sorbate (Sorbic Acid) are both naturally occurring. Sulfite will be in the wine whether you add it or not. Yeast naturally produces SO2 as a biproduct and can additionally produce SO2 as hydrogen sulfide (another biproduct) reacts with oxygen. Some strains found in the wild can produce up to 100ppm in a normal fermentation. The reality, whether you add it or rely on natural sources is that it readily oxidizes and also binds with things like acetaldehyde so it is mostly gone if you don't add more. If you make wine with enough tannin or acid, the need for sulfite is very low. If sulfite levels are too low, and the wine is aged beyond about a year you will begin to see measurable amounts of oxidative biproducts like acetaldehyde, ethyl acetate, and/or isoamyle acetate. From a toxicity perspective, I would rank them worse than sulfur dioxide and more likely to produce a headache. Acetaldehyde is one of those polarizing components where some people enjoy the nutty taste but to many it is a big flaw in the wine. For a country wine, of course you have a lot of freedom to do things that otherwise might not universally acceptable. I would certainly make a sulfite free wine if I had a low enough pH and don't use Sorbate unless there is residual sugar. The reality with most wines. especially with grapes is that they are at huge risk of volatile acidity without maintaining a minimum level of sulfur dioxide.
Blabla
I don't know why I got here, I am a Muslim.
Science!
Science has to be the answer. 😂
Science!
Obviously science... 😄