Home made wine advice

Question

I am trying to make home made wine, i know how its done but i want to know how to control the alcohol percentage, for example how could i make the percentage higher or lower?

Answer 1

THAT SOUNDS  HARD

Answer 2

Generally speaking, the amount of alcohol you get out of wine is proportional to the amount of sugar available to ferment.  The more sugar, the more alcohol...to a point.  Yeast can only survive up to a certain percentage (between 14 and 20 depending on what strain of yeast you choose) before the alcohol kills off the yeast.

You need to know whether you have enough or too much sugar or you risk the fermentation never starting in the first place.  A brewing hydrometer is what you need to measure this...it will also tell you what your potential alcohol content is when you start.

Answer 3

It's really quite easy to discuss controlling alcohol content.   There are two variable elements that effect alcohol level:

1. Sugar Concentration: measured with the use of a hydrometer.  The higher the sugar content of your fermentable juice, the higher your alcohol content.  If you are juicing raw grapes, you can increase the sugar concentration, by heating your juice and allowing steam (water) to blow off.  You can reduce sugar concentration by diluting with water.

2. Yeast: there are a variety of wine yeasts out there.  They all have different attenuation levels - attenuation is the measurement of the yeast's ability to convert sugars to alcohol.  A high attenuating yeast means that it can thrive in high sugar volumes and produce drier wines (more sugars are turned into alcohol.)  A low attenuating yeast means that less of the sugar is converted ... in general, this means's sweeter wine.

Once a wine is fermented, there are a few tricks to increasing or decreasing alcohol content.  To decrease alcohol, you can water it down.  Not an optimal wine-producing procedure, but it will certainly reduce the alcohol.  You could also mix a high alcohol wine with a lower alcohol to minimize alcohol levels.

To increase alcohol levels, you could add more juice (concentrated would be best) to a fermented wine and let the yeast keep rocking.  You could add higher attenuating yeast to a wine (champagne yeast, for instance, tends to produce high alcohol wines) to increase alcohol level.  Or you can distill.  The easiest way to distill is to throw your fermented wine into a freezer and then remove the ice crystals.

Hopefully, that gives you an overview.  Good luck!

Answer 4

There are several techniques to do that... like freezing and skimming the ice crystals off, BUT *IMPORTANT* buy a book and learn the proper way, you could seriously kill yourself if you do it wrong... also if you make the alcoholic content too high, you could technically get in trouble for distilling w/o a license... although if you made it that way I don't see how its distilling  (although the freezing technique is distilling)

Another tip!-  use the best ingredients, no matter how much you polish a t**d, it will still look like sh@t afterwards!

Answer 5

Why does :} smily get 2 pts for answering this question?????????

I have enjoyed wine for 35 yrs and would not even think of an answer for any question on making wine. I don't know how..

But thanks for the 2 pts.

Answer 6

A hydrometer helps especially if you are trying to make it lower but usually just follow the recipe and cut back on the sugar will lower the alcohol.   Following the recipe will give you average wine alcohol content of 10-12proof.  After that point the wine yeasts cannot handle the alcohol content of the mixture and just die off and the wine "finishes" fermenting.   You then rack it, bottle it and store it to age(to get the greenness out of it).  Pretty straight forward, pretty simple.