Wine Yeast – 15% Alcohol 5L

Under professional additives, we have tons of fining agents like Bentonite, Isinglass, Irish Moss, and Gelatin that you can use to make your home brew clear. For instructions and dosage refer to this link

Methanol a.k.a. wood alcohol is generated from fermenting wood, pectin, skins of fruits, and distillation. There is a simple WHO-approved test to check for dangerous levels of methanol. The various strains of brewer’s yeast aka Saccharomyces cerevisiae that we stock will produce ethanol by fermenting glucose (grape sugar), maltose (grain sugar) and fructose (fruit sugar). Methanol is a toxic byproduct of fermentation, but its levels are so low that unless you distill your homebrew, you should be safe. If you still want to test for methanol levels, please refer to this document.

Bread yeast is selected to leaven (raise wheat-based dough), produce a lot of CO2 in a life span of 4-6 hours, and die off. Wine yeast is created in a lab and selected for its ability to produce high alcohol in adverse conditions (like no oxygen, low pH/acidic environment, and high sugar concentration). Yes, you can ferment ethanol with bread yeast, but to make quality wine you would need a special wine yeast.

Wine yeast will produce high ethanol (ferment dry without residual sugar or sweetness), does not produce off-flavors, and bring out the best color and aromas from your grapes and fruits. For more details, please refer to this tutorial 

Winemaking is like any fermentation or curd making. If you add too much jaman (curd starter culture), then your milk will turn into curd faster, but there will be no other perceivable change in your final product. However, if you don’t add enough starter culture, then the milk will spoil. Similarly, wines require a dosage of yeast. If the active yeast cell count is too low, you will be prone to spoilage. However, adding too much yeast will only lead to faster fermentation and no other change. The yeast will finish their job fast, settle at the bottom, and will be raked off.

Adding too much yeast nutrients or DAP is serious. It is a chemical and usage of more than 1gm per liter is banned in the USA.

Yeast is a living creature that is shipped in a dormant condition. So like any organism, they have a shelf life from 3 days to 24 months. It is always important to buy yeast from a reputable store and ensure that it is kept in a cool dry place (away from sunlight and not in the freezer). Using bad yeast means that all the effort you put into making the homebrew will go to waste. There are Four kinds of yeasts used in home brews.

1. Dry Yeast (like the ones sold at arishtam) They have an 18-24 month shelf life.
2. Commercial Liquid Yeast: which has a shelf life of 1 week. If you are buying imported yeast, it might be difficult
3. Self-propagated cultures: You could take some yeast sediment (trub) from your previous batch, wash the yeast, and maintain the culture. As long as you can keep it in the refrigerator and feed it every 3rd day, you can keep it for years.
4. Slants: Seasoned pro home brewers can maintain their slant bank in agar medium for 3 years by freezing them. Home oven-dried yeast is usually able to survive 1 month of storage.

Yeast is the single-celled microorganisms that are responsible for fermenting sugar (maltose, glucose, fructose, sucrose, etc.) to ethanol. In the absence of oxygen, these yeasts do the transformation which converts your grain/fruit into a beverage. Yeast nutrients, on the other hand, are food for the yeast. On their own nutrients achieve nothing more than making a comfortable home for the yeast to function at its best capacity. Yeast energizer, on the other hand, is an SOS remedy needed to recover from stuck fermentation or incomplete fermentation or excessively low-temperature fermentation which can make yeast sluggish.

Although Yeast Energizers are types of nutrient blends, they also contain components such as vitamin B, diammonium phosphate, tricalcium phosphate, magnesium sulfate, and yeast hulls. Yeast energizers are particularly useful to restart a Stuck Fermentation, as it allows yeast populations to increase in a batch of beer or wine which likely has been depleted of these components due to an earlier yeast population growth. The additional components included in Yeast Energizers are most effective when for high gravity fermentation (high sugar high alcohol), low-temperature lagering, excessively low pH, high ash content (molasses) and other extreme fermentation styles.

Add about 0.1 gm of Campden powder to fresh grape or apple or fruit juice to inhibit the bacteria, mold, and wild microbial activity in it. Cover the juice and let it rest overnight for the Campden to dissipate before adding any yeast and nutrients to it. This way the wild fermentation is prevented, and acetobacter, which turns alcohol into vinegar, is inhibited.

Wild yeast in fruit and grapes are often killed using Campden. However, once you have finished wine a stronger wine stabilizer is used when bottling sweet wine.

1. Use extra yeast (3gm per liter will ferment twice as fast as 1 gm per liter. With turbo yeast, you can ferment 18-20% in 3 days.
2. Maintain the temperature between 20 to 25 degree Celsius
3. Add a little quantity of sugar syrup daily rather than all at once. If your recipe calls for 210 gm of sugar per liter, add 70 gm daily for 3 days rather than 210 gm on the first day. This will prevent the dehydrating effect of sugar from slowing down the yeast metabolism.
4. Always hydrate the yeast for 15 minutes at room temperature water (less than 30 degree Celsius temperature) so that it hits your wine running.

Yes, you can make amazing wine from tetra pack juice or fresh fruit juice. Just add some sugar and turbo yeast and you are golden. Couple of things to take into account:

1. Make sure the juice is preservative-free. Preservatives retard the microbial action and lead to stressed yeast wine.
2. Don’t buy juice with added colors and artificial flavors. Mango juice is notorious for this it has 5% mango pulp and the rest 95% is added sugar, color, and synthetic essence. You would not want to drink that.
3. Check for acidity. If it is lower than 3.5 (which is the case with most artificially sweetened fruit juices), you need to increase it. Adding some Calcium Carbonate will help to achieve the right pH level.

Mangrove Jack’s craft brewer’s yeast sold at arishtam.com is in the dry form. Dry yeast is easy to store, transport, and carry. The wet yeast on the other hand needs to be chilled at all times and has a shelf life of a few weeks (as compared to almost 2 years for dry yeast). As a result for a hobby brewer and even microbrewery dry yeast is much more convenient and easy to use.

Although most manufacturers recommend that you use the yeast directly, but rehydrating the yeast is always advisable for the following reasons:

1. When hydrated, the yeast forms spores and goes into inactive state. By hydrating it in a sugar/wort plus nutrient solution, you give it adequate time and jumpstart to become fully active again.
2. Yeast often dies when expired, mishandled, exposed to humidity or high temperaures during transportation or storage. If you pinch it directly in the wort, it will take 24-48 hours before you can detect yeast inactivity. By hydrating the yeast, you are always 100% sure the yeast is active.
3. Hydrated yeast have a jumpstart over any other contaminents or microbial infection. When the wort is cooled, it sometimes picks up infection from the fermenter or air. If the dry brewer’s yeast is hydrated (good yeast count) they are able to fend off infection by the mere fact that they are more in number and faster in activity.

Process:

1. Take 5-10X of sterlized water (boil the wort or water) (50ml)
2. If you are using water then add some priming sugar or table sugar to make a 5% solution (2.5gm or 1/2 teaspoon). DME or wort can be also used instead of sugar.
3. (optional) add nutrients 1/4gm per 50ml.
4. Boil and cool it to body temperature.
5. Once the solution has cooled to 25-35 degrees celsius then add your yeast (5gm)
6. Wait for 30 minutes to foaming to start and then add it to your beer wort or wine must.

If the foaming has not happened. Then wait for another 30 minutes. If not then the yeast is probably inactive and it might be best to use a backup sachet.

Home-made wines are healthier and better alternatives to cold drinks and even packed fruit juices. This is because when consumed in moderation, wine has fewer calories and sugar than these sugar-laden drinks and beverages. Just remember to use a triple scale hydrometer to check how much sugar is eaten by your brewer’s yeast daily and how much residual sugar is left..

Here is a chart of the sugar content in various fruits.

However most of this sugar gets fermented and converted to Alcohol. So a Dry Wine made at home has <1gm sugar per 100ml drink. The chart below has information on how much alcohol does sugar (what is inside the fruit + what is added) will yield. You can also buy ready made wine Arishtam 15% from your nearest liquor store.