MAKING WINE

There are a number of ways to carry out a fermentation to produce alcohol.

The follow- ing instruction describes how to ferment grapes for this purpose.
Many alchemists con- sider grape alcohol to be of the highest medicinal
value.

Equipment required:

1x 25-30 litre food grade plastic brew bucket. Should

have a sealable lid. 1x thermometer that will measure up
to at least 50oC
1x packet of brewers yeast (to suit a 25-30 litre brew)
1x packet of brewers yeast nutrient (often comes
packaged with the yeast) 1x air lock (fits on a brew
bucket lid)
Sodium or potassium meta-bisulphate (wine sterilizer, which brew
shops sell)
Enough grapes to fill the bucket ¾ full once they have had their
stalks removed and are pulped.

Method:
The first thing to understand about grapes is that table grapes are not
the same as wine grapes. Wine grapes are soft fleshed and very juicy,
whereas table grapes have firm flesh and less juice. When choosing grapes
to use the softer the flesh the better. Soft, juicy flesh means more juice and
that means more wine (liquid).
Red grapes are treated differently to white grapes when wine is being
made. With white grapes the skins and pips are discarded immediately after
the grapes are crushed, before the yeast is added. This can be messy if you
are not well equipt. So my suggestion is that you use red grapes.
If you can only get firm flesh red table grapes then I suggest you pulp
the grapes in a kitchen blender, so you get as much juice as possible. Start
by washing your brew bucket in steaming hot water to sterilize it, or use
sterilizing powder or tablets that you can obtain from a brew shop. Then
remove the grapes from their stalks and put them through the blender. Then
from the blender in to the brew bucket. You want to fill the bucket ¾, no
more. Because as the ferment begins the solids in the must (the pulped
grapes) will rise up. If your bucket is too full the bucket will overflow.
Be as careful as you can to ensure no fruit flies get in to the grapes or
in to the must in the brew bucket. Fruit flies carry a bacteria on their mouths
that turns alcohol into acetic acid (vinegar). So keep everything covered.
 As soon as you have all your grapes in the bucket seal the lid so that no
bugs or dust get in. The must needs to be warmed up to at least 25oC
(check your yeast packet instruction to see what its ‘best’ operating
temperature is). If your must is below the lowest operating temperature of
your yeast (often about 12oC), it will be too cold and the yeast will stay
dormant. If the must temperature is too high (usually over 30oC) the yeast
become stressed and start producing poisonous or spoilage chemicals into
your wine. So check your must temperature and if it needs to be warmed up
you might have to sit the bucket in a warm place. If it needs cooling down
you might have to shower the
outside of the bucket with cold water. The must can be stirred with a clean
stick until an even acceptable temperature is reached.
Next take a small bowl, at least 1 litre, preferably plastic or glass, and
add luke- warm water. Then sprinkle the yeast on to the surface of the water
and leave it for about 5 minutes. Then gently stir the yeast, and leave for
another 5 minutes. Then stir again and leave again for 5 minutes. Continue
this until all the yeast is dissolved. Now add your nutrient to the must and
stir it in thoroughly. [Note, yeast nutrient helps ensure your yeast don’t die
prematurely during ferment, causing a ‘stuck ferment’, which can be tricky
to restart. Nutrient can often be bought in small packets at brew shops.] Now
add your dissolved yeast by carefully pouring it on to the surface, and do not
stir it in. Seal the bucket and put the air lock in place with a little water in it.
From this point do not open the lid unless bubbling does not start within 48
hours. Once bubbling starts the air space (ullage) in the top of the bucket
will fill with CO2 that is produced by the fer- mentation. This CO2 acts as a
‘gas blanket’ and stops bacteria and fruit flies from getting in to the wine
and spoiling it. Once the CO2 stops rising at the end of the ferment care
must be taken to keep the bucket sealed, or spoilage will likely occur.
While the ferment is happening you must be very careful to keep the
bucket at a good temperature. So you must check the temperature regularly,
and move the bucket to a warm or cooler place if required. Under normal
conditions the ferment should take longer than 5 days. The average time is
7 days. It is not unusual for CO2 to still be rising after 14 days. Once a day
(or twice) during ferment the lid must be lifted and the ‘cap’ (grape solids)
should be plunged down and stirred carefully for a few minutes.
Once the bubbling stops this means that the yeast cells are no longer
multiplying and converting grape sugar in to alcohol and CO2, and that the
bulk of the yeast is now dead. [Dead yeast is referred to by wine makers as
‘lees’.]
You should be careful to smell your wine immediately every time you lift
the lid to plunge the cap. If the wine smells of acetone (like nail polish
remover), or of rotting, or any other strongly bitter or sharp odour, your wine
may be spoiling. Check your tem- perature and be sure its not too warm.
Add some more nutrient (a few teaspoons full), and see if that helps.
Once ferment is over, the next step is to scoop your fermented must
out of the bucket with a jug, and pour it into a cloth (such as a cheese cloth
or linen), and press out all the juice into a second clean bucket, which you
should also keep covered and sealed as much as possible during this
process. If you have the capability, you should put dry ice in this second
bucket before you start adding the pressed wine. Dry ice is CO2, and CO2 is
heavier than air, so it will sink to the bottom of the bucket. When the wine is
added the CO2 will protect the wine from air and bacteria (this is called gas
blanketing). [Vinegar, acetic acid, is produced mainly when ethanol is
oxidised. So keeping bacteria and oxygen away from wine is important.] This
pressing out can be tricky, but a little imagination will help you devise a
method that is best for you. If you want to work later on making an
alchemical wine remedy, you should dry the solids (the mark) in the sun (or
a warm oven) and keep them stored in a sealed container. Once all the solids
(mark) have been separated from the liquid (wine) you should seal the
wine in a container
(such as the original brew bucket, once its been cleaned) with an air lock on
top. This is because there will probably still be some yeast activity, so gas
might still be escaping. [At this point it is best to store the wine in a
container that has no ullage. So top the wine right up to the top of the
container.]
On average you should now have about 1-15 litres of wine (or possibly
even more) at around 10-12% alcohol. If the ferment was very good you
might have as much as 14% alcohol (the maximum amount that normal
yeast can produce). To this wine you should add about ¼ of a teaspoon of
sodium or potassium meta-bisulphate that has first been dissolved in ½ cup
of water, and stir it in to the wine carefully. This will kill any bacteria in the
wine and to a certain degree stop it from ‘going off’, while you are working
with it (this is normal practice with commercial wines). Now place the closed
wine container in a cool place to settle out any remaining solids.
If you intend trying to drink this wine you should wait at least 24 hours for
the residual solids to settle out. Then if the wine has stopped fermenting
(gassing) scoop out as much as you want to drink, in a clean jug. You can
pour this in to a bottle till the bottle is al- most full to the top, and put a cork
in or a screw cap on. If nothing has gone wrong with the ferment, this wine
should keep in this bottle for at least a month (there will be some sediment).
The remainder of the wine should be poured in to bottles full to the top, for
storage. When you are ready, you can then distil the wine in your distillation
train. The alcohol will come over first. The red coloured residue that remains
should be sealed in a fresh clean glass container (full to the top and sealed
air tight), if you want to make an alchemical remedy from your wine.
The ‘mark’ (dry solids) are the alchemical ‘Salt’ of the wine. The alcohol
is the al- chemical ‘Mercury’ of the wine. The red coloured liquid is the
alchemical ‘Sulphur’ of the wine. All are still in an impure state.
Note: an important trick to successful wine making is to not allow air to
get in to the wine once it has finished ferment. Air oxidises wine. Oxidation
of wine discolours it, makes it taste ‘flat’ and can turn the alcohol in the wine
into acetic acid (vinegar). Remember, while the wine is fermenting it
releases carbon dioxide, this stops air and bugs getting into the wine, so it is
relatively safe to open the bucket and look at the wine during ferment. So
commercial wine makers always put CO2, nitrogen, or other inert gases over
their wine when they have to open the container that it is in.
Temperature control during ferment is also very important, so buy
brewer’s yeast that gives temperature information on the packet. In 90% of
cases where wine is ruined, it happens during fermentation, because of bad
temperatures, or insufficient yeast nutri- ents.
These instructions can be used to make wine for any fruit that is juicy
and high in sugar. Remember, alcohol is produced by yeast digesting fruit
sugars. So the sweeter your fruit is the more alcohol you will obtain, up to
around 14% by volume. The juicier the fruit the more liquid you will have in
your must, and this means the environment is better for the yeast to live in
(they need to move around).
If you are worried your fruit might not be sweet enough, you can add
cane sugar. Just how much you add really is a matter of guesswork, if you
have no means of mea-
suring oBrix, or oBaume’ in Europe (amount of dissolved sugars) in your
must. If your ferment starts to slow down quickly before 7 days of bubbling,
and you were previously concerned that there wasn’t enough sugar in your
fruit, as long as the ferment is still bubbling you could add more sugar by
hand. Take some of the wine out of the bucket with a jug, and dissolve the
sugar in that wine, then add it back to the bucket
If for some reason you want to try white wine. The process above is
exactly the same except for two things. First, you press the skins (solids) out
right at the start, before ferment. Then the solid-free juice is fermented by
itself. Secondly, it is best to use spe- cial white wine yeast which allows you
to ferment at temperatures around 12oC. This allows the ferment to carry on
longer, and stops the wine from loosing too much of its aromatic and flavour
properties. White wines are generally more fragile, and so harder to make,
especially in small quantities.
(Addendum: to make wine from fructose instead of fruit, you simply add
fructose to water, then carry on as per the instructions above. The quantity
of fructose to water is something I haven’t had to calculate for some time, so
do a Google search to find the best brew measures. I think its about 2kg
fructose to 25 litres of water.)

DISTILLING WINE
It is important when you read instruction I give here, on things like this,
to not just read the information and then try and follow it like a recipe. You’ve
actually got to think about what I’ve said and why I’ve said it.
What was my motive for saying don’t use a thermometer? The motive
was so that you learn to use all of your senses and your mind instead of
relying on tools that rob you of immersing yourself in the experience.
How do you know when your ethanol is as pure (dry) as you can get it
by dis- tillation? Because if you perform the distillation (in the way I
describe) by easing the heat up from the start, until you hit the sweet spot
where your liquid starts to simmer
… the temperature at the simmer point will always be the boiling point of the
liquid in the flask which has the lowest boiling point. So if you have water
and ethanol mixed and are trying to distil the ethanol off separately, if you
ease the heat up till you see sim- mering, the temp of the liquid will always
be the boiling point of the ethanol. You don’t need a thermometer to tell you
that, because that is a natural fact about mixed liquids and boiling points.
Once you have all the ethanol distilled over, if you’ve been totally
careful to ease- up, and you stopped raising the temp as soon as you see
simmering, once that ethanol is gone the simmering will stop. This is
because water needs a higher temp in order to boil, so the remaining water
won’t simmer … you’d have to ease the temp up again to hit 100oC, where
the water will then start to simmer again.
Now … if you take your 1x distilled ethanol (which will still contain
about 20-30 percent-ish water), and redistill it, using the method I describe,
easing up the heat till you hit simmering temp, that temp will be the boiling
point of ethanol. Then, again, once all the ethanol comes over you’ll have
some water left behind and the simmering
will slow then stop, because you’re not hot enough to boil that remaining
water.
After a bunch of such ‘rectifications’ you’ll notice when you get to the
end of the ethanol distilling there is nothing left over (or very little) and the
heat remained constant at ethanol boiling point throughout. At that stage
you know your ethanol is now about 95 percent dry.
You can test this by pouring a wee bit of that distillate on to a metal
tablespoon. Then light it with a match or lighter. What will happen? All the
ethanol present will burn off … and any water in the mix won’t burn, it will
remain in the spoon. This gives you an idea what percentage of water is still
in the mix. If the spoon is dry after the burn your ethanol is 95-98 percent
dry.
So … this is all common sense. And that is important because this is
how the old alchemists operated, mostly from common sense. When you
work actually think about what is going on in the flask and the equipment
and seek to understand the forces in- volved in the reaction. This is how the
old alchemists discovered everything they knew about alchemy … by
watching, sensing, thinking and drawing conclusions. This is what lab is
designed for … to educate you about its processes through observation and
think- ing. When you use ‘tools’ those tools rob you of the results of
observing and thinking, because they are doing your work for you.

Hi Keith,

> I have some questions regarding how to make Alcohol 100% absolute.

Firstly, you can't produce 100 percent absolute alcohol. That is

chemically impossible. All you can do is reduce the water to around 2
percent, residual.

Next, you can't trust a hydrometer to measure that residual water

accurately. All laboratory measuring equipment, such as hydrometers,
have a +/- factor of error of accuracy. The degree of error is larger
on cheaper equipment, and smaller on expensive equipment. The average
type of hydrometer you can buy for measuring beverage alcohol by
volume has roughly a 5 percent +/- error factor. So when your water
level drops below 95 percent it is literally impossible by common
means to know how much water is actually there ... mechanically.

(note: if you look at any hydrometer you own, that +/- error factor
will often be printed on it somewhere.)

Also, barometric pressure and liquid temp play a huge role in the
accuracy of reading a hydrometer.

> Let' say I'm able to get my wine rectified to 95% and I add 200 grams of pot
> carb to a litre of this alcohol.
> Do I proceed then to distil the alcohol or is it possible to syphon it off
> the pot carb?

It used to be fashionable to distill the alcohol off the tartar water.

But I have only ever done that once, and decided it was a lot of
mucking about for nothing.

I simply macerate the alcohol over tartar for about a week (shaking it
only once at the start). If at the end of the week there is a
precipitate of tartar remaining, then you're good to go. If there is
no tartar precipitate add more salt, shake again, leave for a week
again.

> If syphoning is a possibility it seems there could be a danger of some

> grains of pot carb getting sucked up into the alcohol.

Yes. But any lye or salt you accidentally suck up will precipitate in
your jar of pure alcohol. Then you can simply pipe it off the bottom
of the jar. It won't dissolve in the alcohol.

> Also, wouldn't there then be a danger of humidty being captured in the time
> it would take to syphon as the alcohol is exposed to the air?

Every time you expose dry alcohol to the air it will draw in some
atmospheric moisture. The only practical way to avoid that is to work
quickly, and to work in a warm atmosphere.

> Also it would seem the whole initial distillation setup would have air
> containing humidity in it, especially in the flasks...is this an issue or am
> I over thinking it? If it is an issue, how do you get around it?

Always warm any glassware you are placing dry chemicals in to (such as
pure alcohol.) This helps to expand the internal atmosphere and drive
out any moisture.

> I thought his write up was very good but in this technique he uses a vacuum.
> Is this the standard approach?

No. Its really just a matter of preference. Vacuum distillation is

used because it speeds up the distillation process, and because it
lowers boiling point temperature. Which means substances can be
distilled with less energy (at dramatically lower temp's). With
delicate chemicals that can be advantageous.

At the end of the day the only practical way of assuring the Ens
extraction goes as planned is to over saturate your water-tartar lye,
and to maintain that over saturation at each stage of the process. In
that way, when you add your alcohol at the end, keep the volume of
alcohol as low as practical. Because this will allow the over
saturated lye to quickly counteract the effect of any residual water
in the alcohol. And it needs to be a quick reaction because your
alcohol isn't going to sit there long. The greater volume of alcohol
you pour onto your lye the more residual water you are also adding to
the equation.
Also, I often make the point ... it is important after collecting your
Ens in its alcohol, that you need to reduce the volume of alcohol as
much as you can, by distillation, and concentrate the Ens. This has
the effect of saturating your remaining alcohol with the Ens material,
thus squeezing-out any residual lye ... which will form small 'beads'
of brown liquid. Those beads can then be piped out of your Ens, with
the help of a large reading magnifying glass (or ease and accuracy).

ruba'