How to Make Wine With Your Beer Brewing Equipment

Good morning. Do you feel like you brew award winning beer? Put your ego to the test and enter the 2024 National Homebrew Competition, the largest homebrewing competition in the world.

Registration for the first round starts February 27th - may the odds be ever in your favor.

-Brandon Copeland

How to Make Wine With Your Beer Brewing Equipment

As homebrewers and just generally “beer people”, we constantly have to defend the art that goes into beer, and how the craft rivals winemaking. In other words, we often have to suffer wine snobs who turn their noses up at beer.

However, as much as I appreciate a Russian Imperial Stout, I also love an Argentinian Malbec from Mendoza. Variety is the spice of life, and it’s okay to love wine and love beer. It’s all fermented goodness, why split hairs over it?

With the brewing equipment you already have, you could easily make wine at home using a wine kit. If you’re interested in making something different that will be incredibly easy compared to brewing beer and will impress your friends and family, this is what you’ll need:

• Primary fermenter w/ airlock

• Secondary fermenter w/ airlock

• Filtered water

• Siphon for transfers

• Sanitizer (StarSan or similar)

• Hydrometer

• Wine bottles & corks

• Wine bottle corker

• Wine Kit

The only extra items you’ll need are obviously the wine bottles and corks, and a corker. There are hand corkers that are very inexpensive but require a lot of elbow grease, along with more sophisticated solutions, depending on your budget.

With most wine kits, you are generally just assembling all the ingredients either in the primary fermenter or the secondary fermenter. There’s not an active process like brewing - the kit will include grape juice concentrate along with yeast and a lot of other additives.

There are all different wine kits out there - you can find pretty much any style you’d like to make. You’ll be the life of the party at your next family gathering - homemade wine, homemade beer - next thing you know you’ll be buying a still…

Beer Trivia Question

🍺 What country consumes the most beer per year?

Read to the end to find out if you're right!

Deal of the Week

Get a Free Keg With Kegerator Purchase

If you’re in the market for a new kegerator, if you buy a KOMOS kegerator on MoreBeer, you’ll receive a new 5 gallon ball lock keg for free. This is a pretty solid deal especially since you’d likely need more kegs anyway since some of these kegerators have space for 4 taps.

Brewgr Recipe of the Week

Kentucky Kool-Aid

This Kentucky Common beer recipe sounds like the perfect companion to a nice bourbon. If you’re interested in learning about this style and had never heard of it before (guilty as charged), here’s the Wikipedia article.

Similar to a cream ale, this style became massively popular near Louisville, Kentucky in the early 1900’s and dropped off the map come prohibition.

Credit: BeerMessiah

Poll Results: What Do You Use to Chill Your Wort?

The immersion chiller won out in this poll, which is not surprising - immersion chillers are inexpensive and can drastically reduce the time it takes to cool your wort without needing a pump. However, counterflow is still the second most popular option due to how effective it is, even with the difficult task of cleaning them thoroughly.

And the Answer Is...

🍺 China, by a landslide. It’s estimated that over 113 billion 12 oz cans/bottles of beer are consumed in China annually, about double the United States at 67 billion.

However, since China has over 4 times the population of the United States, Americans are pounding double the amount of beers per capita. Hoorah?