Abyone else like Four Loko?

Man, that video! :drooling:

It's a time lapse, but you can clearly tell just how vigorous that fermentation is there.. I hope to have a setup like that some years in the future when I actually get a license and go professional. (This is exactly the reason why I don't and will not sell anything I make)

But that was an interesting article. I noticed a lot of people in the mead section of the home brewing forum I frequent just cover with a towel during the primary stage of the fermentation. Also these days it's common to stir to degas and aerate during the primary fermentation. I do this myself. It makes sense because yeast need oxygen to stay healthy and CO2 buildup is toxic to yeast as well.

Right now I'm working on my first ever attempt at making an actual grape wine. I intend to distil it into Grappa though. I asked this question in the wine making forum if aerating and degassing is as important with wine as it is with mead, and the answers that I got were that by aerating I would be exposing the wine to too much oxygen and would be risking oxidation, and that wine degases on it's own. It seems that the people who frequent that forum are still using old techniques.

I decided to make the decision on my own to aerate and degas until the yeast was halfway through fermentation. Today I went to remove the crushed grapes that I had tied up in cheese cloth and suspended in the wine and took a little taste (I like to taste everything I ferment through all stages of the process so the next time I do the same recipe/method I will be able to tell if anything changed so I will be able to fix issues if they were to occur) but, well right now it's actually tasting like a really good drinking wine already. I can't wait to bring my buddy a jar of the finished product, because he gave me a very basic recipe to follow, and I made a bunch of changes and showed him my revised recipe and he got pissed that I fucked up 'his perfected recipe' :lol:

(he knows very little about the actual fermentation process and is lazy with his distillation process as well). The changes I made was to add a lot more grape juice as well as crushed table grapes with the juice added to the must and the crushed grapes tied up in cheese cloth and suspended in the wine, and I used a proper winemaking yeast. I also added half the nutrients up front, and the other half halfway through fermentation. He just uses bread yeast with no nutrients. He does not aerate or degas, and he doesn't even use a hydrometer to take a starting and finishing gravity reading. When I distil it I'm going to do a proper stripping run and then a spirit run where I add the wine back to the liquor to 40% abv and then run it again. I also plan on making proper cuts where I will separate the run into numbered jars and take the hearts and add back parts of the heads and tails to optimise taste. I have a feeling he will be blown away by my own version of 'his' Grappa :lol:

So dustbunny, I guess you're into home brewing yourself, or at least have done it in the past? And have clearly done a lot of reading on it. Are you still into the hobby?

I'm probably going to try out the towel method soon myself, but I'll make sure to tie it around the bucket so no curious cats get tempted to take a drink of the devil juice :lol:

And yes, I do use regular airlocks. I have both the S shaped ones and the type where there is a cap over a tube inside that you fill with vodka (or whatever medium one chooses to use) and the CO2 pushes the cap up for it to escape. And I do put the top caps over them to keep fruit flies out, especially on the S bend ones where there is potential for suckback. I have read before for mead that it's okay to use an empty airlock in a vigorous fermentation so long as there aren't any fruit flies around that can get inside and turn your precious mead (or wine or beer) into vinegar.

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