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Wine Making Equipment for Homemade Wine
If you are thinking about making wine at home, you should know that you will require quite a few pieces of equipment for wine making. You can buy most of it from special wine making stores or order online.
Important Wine Making Supplies
You will need a food-grade bucket and lid for primary fermentation and bottling, as well as a spigot to drain the wine into the carboy. If you do not have a spigot, you can siphon the wine instead.
Another requirement is a six gallon glass carboy, which you will use for the secondary fermentation and aging, as well as a bung, which is a drilled rubber stopper, to provide an airtight seal that holds the airlock. An airlock lets the carbon dioxide escape from the plastic bucket while keeping out the oxygen. This is vital for wine making.
For home wine making, you will also need a hydrometer to measure potential alcohol, sugar, and gravity. Some vinyl tubing is useful for transferring your homemade wine from vessel to vessel. You can also use an auto-siphon, bottle filler, spigot, or racking cane. A paddle or plastic spoon will be handy for stirring your wine and you will need a sanitizing chemical to sanitize your wine making equipment, as well as a cleansing chemical to clean it.
Bottles and Corks
Never reuse corks because they leak if you do. You will need new corks to keep the oxygen out and the wine in. You will also need about thirty empty wine bottles. You can reuse these. You might be good at removing corks from bottles, but what about getting them in? For this, you will need a device called a corker (unless you are planning to use screw-cap bottles).
A device for removing a wine sample from your carboy for taste testing is called a "wine thief" and this means you can taste your wine, to see how it is developing, without having to tip it out of the carboy.
Optional Wine Making Supplies
Once you have invested in the above wine making supplies, you might like to add some optional extras to your collection, just to simplify the wine making process and make it more fun. One handy piece of kit is a drill-mounted stirrer. This power drill attachment makes stirring your wine quicker and easier. A carboy brush is like a baby bottle brush and you will be able to scrub it better with one of these.
A bottle washer attaching to your kitchen faucet so you can rinse your bottles is handy, as is a bottle rinser which will spray your sanitizer and cleaner into the bottles. A bottle drainer holds your bottles so you can drain them and a floor corker stands on the floor so corking your bottles is much easier.
Capsules can be made from plastic or foil and they are used to cover the carboy bottle top to keep dirt and dust out from where the bottle and cork meet. A carboy handle attaches to the carboy neck so you can carry it around more easily and avoid accidentally dropping your precious homemade wine.
