E.C. Kraus Home Wine and Beer Making Supplies

We are in the midst of the holiday season, and the days to purchase gifts for your friends and loved ones are going by quickly.  But there's still time!  Place your order with us by noon, December 19th, and you'll have it in time to place under the Christmas tree.Perhaps you know someone who is an avid home winemaker, or maybe you know someone who keeps talking about making their own wine at home...

Hello Winemakers:I am getting ready to start my first batch of wine from concentrate. I am a little confused about the sanitizing process for large pieces of equipment. The directions say to dissolve so much sanitizing stuff to one gallon of water. Does this mean a gallon will do the job? With a 6 gallon tuft tank or a 6 gallon glass carboy, for example, do you pour the gallon in the container and...

Here are five wine making tips for using a grape press. These are basic bits of information that describes the central role grape presses play when making wine at home.1 . You Can Press More Than Just Grapes With A Wine Press: While grape presses are sold with the intent of being used for making grape wine, they work perfectly fine for pressing other fruits. Everything from tiny elderberries on up...

Hello, You say grapes must be crushed before pressing, what do you use to crush them with? Thank you, Tony ----- Hello Tony, Crushing the wine grapes is a very straight forward process. All you are looking to do is burst the skin on each grape. This is necessary to efficiently release the juice from the pulp before pressing or fermenting the grape pulp. If crushing is not done first, you...

I discovered this grape crusher on line two years ago and fabricated my own version. I can crush 5 gallons of grapes in 2-3 minutes using my drill. Check out the last image which is a video of Steve's unit. I left off the de-stemming tray and just set the crusher right on a 6 gallon plastic bucket.http://www.stevehughes.org/Site/The_Winery/Pages/Crusher_Destemmer.htmlI encourage all with a few...

Hello, My friend and I make wine from grapes. A year ago we bought your fruit crusher FP130 and now we are wondering do we instead need the crusher/destemmer? We want to keep grape hulls and juice together for fermentation, does the crusher/destemmer allow the hulls to pass through and not the stems or is it the catch stand that collects everything but the juice? Thank-you, Clayton----- Hello...

Distanced from the days of fruit crushing with our feet, our wine group processes 3000 lbs of grapes with our new destemming crusher. Supporting our crusher are large food grade fermentation tubs, variable volume stainless steel tanks and gravity fed bottle fillers. The whole operation is housed in a prefab garage which has been dedicated as our wine room. www.sharkriverwines.com Name: Anthony V....

Any of the wine making books you read, will tell you that grapes need to be crushed and pressed. The same holds true for the directions that typically come with wine making recipes. But what does crushing and pressing actually mean? Many beginning wine makers think they both to mean the same thing, that the terms are interchangeable, when in fact both mean something very different. To understand...

Hello  E. C. Kraus: I’ve read a lot of the articles on your site concerning wine making. The one titled “Wine Making With Grapes” mentions that there is a different method of processing red grapes than there is for white grapes, but I’m not sure I completely understand the process for red grapes. What does it mean when it says that they are to be “crushed and fermented with the skin and pulp for...

Hello-   I've never made wine; but, I'm slowly acquiring the wine making materials. I would like to make fruit wines mostly plum and perhaps strawberry and peach.   From what I've been reading it seems that either one starts with juice and does the whole fermentation process that way or that one ferments the chopped up raw fruit contained in a bag for a week or so and then continues the...

There are many misconceptions and misguided assumptions about making wine at home. Most all of them are perpetuated by individuals who never even tasted or made homemade wine. Others are simply born out of the mystique surrounding the commercial wine industry.How can something so sophisticated be made in one's kitchen?Here are the ones that we run into the most. The ones that flat-out drive us...

The Wine Institute, a California based organization representing over 1,000 wineries throughout the state of California, stated in it's recent report that the U.S. has now surpassed France in the amount of wine it consumes. In 2010, we Americans consumed some 330 million cases of wine, topping France's 320 million cases for the same year. This makes the U.S. the largest consumer of wine in the...

One subject that gets asked about a lot by beginners is how to make white wines. They usually ask about it in a way that leads me to believe that they think it is a completely different process than making red wines, one that just skirts the fringes of main-steam wine making. The fact of the matter is, there are more similarities than differences between making the two. You use the same wine...

ECKraus, If a recipe calls for 4 or 5 pounds of pears for instance, will the amount of juice (run through a power juicer) be enough to make this recipe? Are there recipes available for someone wanting to use a power juicer? Thank you for any information.  Gary __________ Dear Gary,A power juicer can play a role in wine making, but a very limited one. The main issue is that the color and body of...

One of a wine's primary flavor elements is acidity. Wines that are high in acid will taste sharp or sour, while wines low in acid will taste lifeless or flabby. Without a doubt, having the proper amount of acid is crucial to the flavor of your wine. In many fruit wine recipes, the amount of acid or Acid Blend that should be added to the must is listed right along with the other wine making...

[Editor's Note: For those of you not familiar, an ice wine is a wine made from the juice of frozen grapes. Most of the water in the grapes is frozen but the sugar is not. When a winery runs them through the grape crusher and grape presses, the result is a very, very sweet grape juice that will make a wine with high alcohol and a lot of flavor.] ----------Hi,I have some lake niagara grapes that I...

Hello EC Kraus,I was wondering what the difference was between muscadine and scuppernong grapes? I hear people talk about both as if they were the same thing. Are they? Or are they different? Thanks Justin S.,---------- Hello Justin, Muscadine/Scuppernong grapes are indigenous to the Southeast region of the U.S. They grow both wild and domestically in backyards and on farms from Arkansas to The...

Hi, I have a question I hope you can help me with. It's about the grape destemmer on your website. I would like to know if the crusher rollers on this destemmer are adjustable. I have very small grapes and need to be able to crush and destem them. They are foch grapes and this is their forth year. This is my first year for a full crop. Thanks for your help. Rusty C. ---------- Dear While the...

This time of the year we receive a lot of various questions about making wine from the different fruits that are coming into season. One particular question we get quite often has to do with making homemade grape wine:What type of homemade wine equipment will I need for making wine from grapes? Well... it depends. I know what your thinking, why can't this guy give us a straight answer? I want to,...

Right now we are offering the Marchisio Grape Destemmer/Crusher at a great value. It's a manual destemmer/crusher that can process up to 2,000 pounds of grapes an hour with just normal hand-cranking. I say this is a great value because this price includes more than just the crusher/destemmer. It includes free shipping to your door anywhere in the 48 adjoining states. That's nothing to sneeze at....