Wine yeast, indispensable in the preparation of wine or mead, you can make yourself at home. Alcoholic beverages made with such yeast have a pleasant taste and aroma.
Pick your recipe
To make wine yeast at home, you will need ripened small-fruited grapes (raspberries, honeysuckle, white currants, strawberries or gooseberries are also suitable), sugar and water.
How to cook
To prepare the starter, ripe berries must be collected ten days before making the wine. In order not to wash off the yeast from the surface, the berries do not need to be washed. Two glasses of mashed ripe berries will require a glass of water and half a glass of sugar. Water must be poured into a glass bottle. Put berries and sugar in a container, mix well. After that, close the bottle with a cotton plug and leave at room temperature for 3-4 days. During this time, the juice will ferment. It remains only to strain it through a sieve, separating it from the pulp.
Beer and bread yeast should not be used for making wine. If there is no way to make wine yeast, you can propagate living organisms on flour, barley, bran.
Raisins and Figs Wine Yeast
It so happens that the wine must be made in conditions when the season of berries has already passed or has not yet begun. Then the wine starter can be made from raisins or figs. Raisins should be of high quality, blue-violet, with tails. A good raisin, if you toss it, when you fall on the table makes the sound of falling pebbles. Yeast does not work out of the bad raisins, everything becomes moldy.
In order to make wine yeast, a handful of raisins or figs should be omitted in 400 ml of slightly warmed sugar syrup. Then, in the same way as in the previous recipe, close the bottle with a cork that lets air through (you can use a large piece of cloth or a piece of cotton wool wrapped with gauze or cloth), and leave the future wine starter in a warm place for 3-4 days. The contents must be shaken throughout the day so that the raisins do not mold. As soon as the fermentation process begins, decant the liquid and use it for making wine. In addition, in some cases, figs and raisins are also omitted by winemakers as a whole.