E.C. Kraus Home Wine and Beer Making Supplies

At the very center of wine making is the process of fermentation. Fermentation occurs because the yeast want to consume the sugars in a wine must. As a result the sugars are converted into both alcohol and CO2 gas by the fermentation. Normally as winemakers, we are concerned about the alcohol, but in this post we are going to change directions and talk a little about the gas.Almost all of the CO2...

You can't read too far on the subject of wine making without running across the warnings of excessive air exposure and how oxygen can turn a great wine into a brown, caramelized mess through oxidation. Books, websites and even this blog have expressed these cautions.The reality is without some oxygen being available, the progression of a wine's aging process can be brought to a near standstill....

When selecting corks for your homemade wine remember that appearance is not everything.  In today's market there are a lot of pretty corks, but pretty does not make the cork good.  If there is one wine making tip I can give it is to look closely at what you are purchasing.  You have to consider that your cork is the final piece of your wine preservation system and great care should be taken to see...

Synthetic corks are becoming increasingly popular as a means for sealing up wine bottles. Numbers are sketchy, but it appears that currently around 9 percent of all corked wine bottles in the world are done so with synthetic corks. There's lots of reasons for this slow increase in popularity, but the main one is pure economics. Over the last decade, wine consumption has increased roughly an...

When it comes to bottling homemade wine, we often get questions about using gallon glass jugs in place of the standard 750ml wine bottle. Some winemakers like the idea of using jugs simply because it is less work. If you have 5 or 6 gallons of wine, just put it in 5 or 6 one gallon jugs and be done with it. I can tell you that bottling homemade wine in gallon jugs is perfectly okay. The wine will...

There are 750 mls of wine in a standard wine bottle. That's 25.36 ounces. Which comes out to over 6 - four ounce glasses of wine. Sometimes, drinking a whole bottle of wine is just not do-able. So, what do you do with the remaining wine? You certainly don't want to pour it down the drain. That would be waste. But leaving it in the bottle and sealing it back up with the wine bottle cork isn't all...