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...

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...

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 Kraus, I made 5 gallons of grape juice by using a steam juicer. In this process the stems were still attached to the grapes. Do I need to do anything special from the normal wine making process? I was told the stems contain pectin and may require additives. Thank you, Henry---------- Hello Henry,   I believe what your friend was referring to is the tannin that is in the stems of the grapes....

As 2010 draws to a close, and a new year comes into view, I thought it would be nice to take another look at the blog entries that have proved to be most helpful to home winemakers this years. These are the blog entries that everyone here has gotten the most response from, or has been able to utilize the most when helping a customer. As I result here is the list of the top 10 most helpful posts of...

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....

One of the questions we get asked from time to time is can the manual grape destemmer/crusher we offer be motorized? The short answer to this question is of course you can. All you need to do is to rig a pulley onto the crank shaft and attach an electric motor with a belt. Straight forward. We've actually had a couple of customers do this.While you can motorize the grape destemmer/crusher with a...

Hello Kraus People: My husband is interested in making wine. We have vines and vines of grapes every year that either go for making jelly or the birds. We have tried all around us in Live Oak, Florida to find kits and my niece in California found you. We would need a starter kit with directions. Plenty of directions. If you could tell us what we need to order we will be glad to do so. Thank you...

Great news! A good deal has just gotten better. We've just lowered the price of our Marchisio Grape Crusher / Grape Destemmer by $76.04. This makes the new price $475.60.  And that includes FREE shipping to anywhere in the 48 states. This unit is both a grape crusher and grape destemmer. It crushes the grape clusters through two roller mills and then drops them into a trough where it removes the...

Here's a question from one our customers about a grape destemmer that is listed on our website:We want to keep grape hulls and juice together for fermentation, does this grape destemmer allow the hulls to pass through and not the stems? This is a great questions! Particularly when you are making red wine, you want to keep the grape juice and the pulp together during the first few days of...

Making wine from grapes can require a bit of work. This is not only because you are dealing with fresh fruit as opposed to an easy-to-use concentrated juice, but it's also because you need a lot of grapes to make a batch of wine. In general, you'll need around 80 pounds of grapes to make a 5 gallon batch. With most other berries such as blackberries, strawberries, etc., you'll only need about 15...

One of the things that has really made home wine making so popular over the last few years is the availability of more and better wine making products. The average home wine maker today has a whole host of products that make life a lot easier and the resulting wine much better. It wasn't all that long ago that I remember having to build or concoct certain items myself because nobody sold them or...

When making wine from grapes there's one piece of homemade wine equipment that you may want to consider, the grape destemmer. A grape destemmer can greatly speed things up by processing the grapes automatically instead you doing them by hand. The grape destemmer crushes the grapes and removes the stems. All you have to do is throw the grape clusters into the hopper. The grape destemmer does all...