Beer/Wine Home Brewery?

[sjaguar13]

My brother and I were looking into starting our own beer. The problem is we don't have a whole lot of time for it right now, so we though maybe we should try wine. That way, we could make a few bottles and store them. If we can't do it very well, or we don't like doing it, we scrap the whole idea, otherwise we go for the beer. We were looking into starting our own bar, and wanted our beer on tap, but that has been put on hold.

Anyway, has anyone ever made wine? If I get a kit from eBay, is it pretty easy to do, or should I be studying some books or something to get ready? We are looking to fairly high-end wine. We don't want any "get drunk in 24 hours" yeast.

 

[mudbug]

sjaguar, you need to talk to ronjohn, our resident brewmaster extraordinaire, about making beer. Check out some of his posts on the subject.

 

[ronjohn55]

Howdy sjaguar13!

If you're concerned about time, I would probably stick with beer, since it will ferment out faster than wine. Unless you're speaking about the time to actually mix/cook everything up. In that case, it really is hard to beat the wine kits. I buy the ones that are about $90-$100 US, and that usually yields 2+ cases of wine. It's not THE greatest wine ever, but the stuff from the kits will easily approach the quality of wines that you would pay anywhere from $15-$30 for, so it is still a bargin in the long run.

For making beer - I would recomend a couple of things. First, I would start off doing an extract batch (you just need to mix water, malt extracts, and hops, then cook) as opposed to jumping in to a beer straight from the barley. There are some limitations to what can be done with extract brewing, but you can also brew 1st class beers from extracts.

Once it's mixed up, depending on your recipe, it will ferment out for about 2 weeks, then should be ready to bottle or keg. A hydrometer will tell you for sure. Which leads to my other recommendation:

See if you can find a local homebrewing shop, and go talk to the people there. I love ordering stuff online as much as anyone, but getting the chance to talk to another brewer face to face about getting started is invaluable. They'll likely have a starter kit of some sort that will have all the equipment you should need, and can offer advice on what styles of beer to start with based on your likes and dislikes.

And by all means feel free to ask away here, as well!

John