Quote:
Originally Posted by 4X4
Really? My 1st batch was a Valpolecella and so is my 3rd. I filtered my 1st, but I won't filter my 3rd, just to see if I can detect the difference.
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Maybe it's just me, but I found the taste better with unfiltered wine. My father-in-law always filters his, and it just doesn't taste as natural to me. If you're not going to filter though you pretty much have to keep racking and letting it settle to get away from all the sediment. If you'd rather not go throght the extra work, filtering is proably the better method.
As for the cider, it's pretty much an identical process to beer, and beer bottles are what I used for bottling. The first batch I made was from a kit, but it seems to me I just used cans of concentrated apple juice after that, and followed the instructions from the kit I'd bought. It's been a while since I made it though, so I might be forgetting something. I'm sure Google would yield some good advice. As I recall the amount of sugar used for cider was a bit tricky. Too little and the cider wasn't sweet enough, and too much sugar made the alcohol content too high. Not that a high alcohol content is bad, but it can throw the taste off, kind of like with beer.
On the topic of increasing the alcohol content of beer, I experimented with boosting the percentage in my beer. I made one batch that was about 8 or 9 per cent alcohol, which is pretty much the max you can get, but it tasted kind of like a boiler maker. Yuck.
Something I forgot to mention before is to keep a diary about each batch you make. I found that quite useful so I could refer back to it and see what worked and what went wrong with various batches.