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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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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