Home Wine Making Equipment
So I’ve been making a lot of wine at home – I use kits to make the wine, but after a few subsequent mishaps have learned what I need to know about the basic equipment needs to get started in home wine making.
If this is your first time making wine you probably don’t have ANY of the equipment you need, but that’s okay, I didn’t either and all told it wasn’t very hard to gather the right stuff. You do need plastic buckets though – big, five gallon buckets, because when you are racking the wine they will come in handy.
When you are mixing ingredients it is also helpful to have at least a few plastic buckets so you can move fluids from one container to another without much difficulty.
You will also need corks. Now there are a lot of different types of corks available and I go into more detail about it on my blog www.winestainedfeet.com but suffice to say you will to shop around and find some that fit inside your price range (I recommend synthetic).
The other absolutely critical item are airlocks. As far as home wine making equipment goes, there is nothing more important than finding good airlocks.
What do they do?
They allow carbon dioxide to flow out of your wine fermenting barrel without letting the oxygen leak out – if the oxygen is gone the wine will turn sour and the fermentation process will be completely wasted.
Attaching airlocks keeps the fermenting process exactly the way that it should be, by getting all of the carbon dioxide out without running the risk of causing detriment to the entire batch. Like I said, shop out and buy a few of these, because they will last a long time and provide a tremendous benefit to the finished product.
The final step is getting a good carboy that you are happy with. The carboy is what you use to actually ferment the wine (we often call these barrels but the professional term is carboy). I recommend buying two of these so that when you are transitioning wine it doesn’t have to wait in buckets for the single carboy to be rinsed and cleaned. They are not expensive so investing in two of them is worth its weight in gold – it will save you lots of time.
Once you have a carboy, airlocks, and good corks you’ve got all of the basic wine making equipment that you need to get started in home wine making.
Happy fermenting!
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