Ill share my apple wine recipe. Everyone who tastes it loves it- its a very dry wine and easy to make. First buy and use 100% pure apple juice only!. I use a 5 gallon carboy (glass jug made for wine making). For each gallon of apple juice add 1 cup of granulated suger. Sugar ups the alcohol content and give more for the yeast to feed off of. Make sure the suger is well mixed- no particles of sugar on the bottom, before adding to the carboy. Next add one packet of formulated yeast. Montrachet Yeast makes a dry wine that is good for apples, you can buy the packets at wine making supply places -some beer and wine shops sell them as well.There pretty inexpensive, and there is other types of yeast as well. Alot of time the yeast is refrigerated at the stores. You need to follow directions on the yeast packet to activate it. Usally its just adding it to warm water and mix it. Add the yeast mixture to the apple juice in the carboy. Make sure the carboy is at constant room temp 70-75 degrees, as the warm temp is needed to make the yeast work- they multiply and digest the sugars into alcohol! Place a piece of paper towel over the opening of the carboy, and put a rubber band around the neck to keep the opening of the jug covered. Let the mixture sit like this for a few days to a week ,until you see bubbles and gassing going on as the yeast starts doing its thing. Now is the the time to place a fermintaion lock over the carboy (again available at wine making shops and better beer wine and spirits shops). Its a kind of cork/bung cover that you fill with water that allows the gases to escape, and air to not enter the carboy! Its also an indicator of what the yeast is doing. It will bubble very fast until the yeast is done, then it bubbles no more. You can only yield 18% alcohol then the yeast kills itself. Usally a hydrometer can be used to measure alcohol level if you want to get real technical. Once fermintations stops you need to start racking the wine. The bottom of the carboy will be full of muck (dead yeast) the muck will cloud the wine if you leave it. Racking is done with a siphon and moving the wine from one carboy to another without sucking up the muck and letting it settle. You do this many times- usally a week interval, until the wine is clear and no more muck is on the bottom -then bottle it! Use wine bottles with new corks (youll need a bottle corker tool and some corks) and store your wine bottles sideways so that the cork is always wet and dosnt dry and cause oxidation of the wine. Apple wine usally tastes best when stored for about a year or more.
