brita filter

[Guest]

this question concerns making wine to drink, not for distilling.

is it true that running the finished mash through a brita filter reduces the alcohol content? it sure makes it taste better, but i'm almost positive it has less kick. i don't have a hydrometer to test this for sure, but does anyone know how this might happen?

[Guest]

i believe this should apply to any other type of carbon filtering as well

[knuklehead]

The "kick" you refer to is not necessarily high alcohol content kick. You can make very very smooth product that is at 50% and because it is so smooth it will taste more like 30%. The filter will remove impurities and some of which is alcohols so it will drop slightly in % but not as much as you assume.

[Guest]

ok, thanks for your reply. this is my second attempt at fermentation - the first was a white wine. i did not filter it through a brita filter. i tried drinking a bit of it, it tasted terrible, but gave me a small buzz. Then, i tried making sugarmash, and bought a brita filter. After it was done fermenting, i added some lemonade mix to make hard lemonade. After i filtered the mash twice, i added the lemonade powder and drank the same amount as a drank of the first wine. it tasted great, but i didn't feel it at all. maybe the sugar + water is missing some nutrients which prevent it from fermenting to as high of an abv% as the white grapefruit juice. it definitely seemed to be fermenting less vigorously, in terms of bubbles and foaming and such.

[knuklehead]

When doing an all sugar wash you need to add some sort of nutrient to the ferment for the yeast.

[Guest]

ah ok, that makes sense..... i guess i'll stick to using white grape juice, until i get the chance to buy some yeast nutrient.

[Fourway]

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