I’ve been doing home brewing for about a year. I’ve focused on mead (honey-based wine). I like the flavor profile of mead and with our apiary, it’s a logical extension of interest. However, I have dabbled in a few other non-mead brewing projects.

My attempts and hard apple cider have been frustrating. They come out overly dry and flat in flavor, I have yet to come up with the right blend of apple types. I also made a pretty good white wine from our own grapes last year – no clue what variety these are – but it tasted a bit like a Riesling.

One aspect of brewing is time, particularly with mead. Being patient is key. While some projects come out good when young, most will need a good amount of time to age and bottle condition. When I say young by the way – it’s still a solid 2 months in most cases from start to bottle.

A good example of a brew needing age: we made a peach-rose mead last year that was very harsh when we bottled it and mostly undrinkable. We almost tossed it. However, why not let it sit and see what happens. We opened a bottle the other day and it’s improving as it conditions and is actually quite nice 9 months later. I expect that it will only get better with time.

Patience isn’t exactly our strong suit. I have probably 40 bottles of mead in various age states that just need more time. I wanted to try something different that gives a much quicker finished product, so did some research on sweet red wines. I found a recipe that is quick, cheap, and is best drank young (early as 3-4 weeks).

I used store-bought concord grape juice. It’s important to make sure that it’s 100% juice with no additives. Ascorbic and citric acid is ok – those are just there to preserve the color and are naturally occurring. Just make sure it doesn’t have any sorbate of sulfite.

For this one, I used bread yeast *gasp,* yes it can be done and there are a ton of recipes that call for it. The point of the bread yeast is to create a yeast colony that has a low alcohol tolerance. We want residual sugar for this and brewers yeast would consume most of the sugar we add making this a dry wine. Remember the key here is “sweet” red wine.

A note on the yeast – I’ve read that most people using bread yeast for wine have better more consistent results from Fleischmann’s. This is the first time I’ve used it so I have no real opinion and it’s what I had anyway.

Ingredients:

1-gallon concord grape juice (I used welches).
1 cup strong black tea
1 1/2 pound of white sugar
1 tsp active dry yeast – Fleischmann’s

Target Original Gravity is 1.115

Steps:

• In a sanitized 1 gallon carboy – add 1 1/2 pound of white sugar.
• Add in 1 cup of strong black tea (this isn’t for flavor- it helps give the finished wine a little tannic pucker – aka mouth feel).
• Add 1 1/2 pound of white sugar
• Add in 1/2 gallon of grape juice.
• Lid up the carboy and shake until the sugars are well dissolved.

• Add in 1 tsp yeast.
• Top up with more grape juice – NOTE: I’ve read some pretty amazing horror stories about grape juice ferment – give it some headspace, especially if you do use brewer’s yeast – these can be very active ferments and will erupt. You will not use the full gallon

• Check your specific gravity – the idea is to hit around 1.115 – I was between 1.112 and 1.114 which is ok.

• Place an airlock and store in a dark room temp location (Note I put this in a tub so if for some reason it gets a little aggressive, It’s a bit more contained.

• Allow to ferment for 1-2 weeks

I’ll come back with Part Two – Racking and conditioning in a couple of weeks!