Load a recipe or enter your own fruit to work out the must: how much water, sugar and acid for the strength and acidity you want. Must Builder and Strength are free; Pro adds Acid, Sweeten, Scale and 41 more recipes. Browse all 47 fruit and country wine recipes.
Educational content. These tools do arithmetic on fruit, water, sugar and acid; results are estimates. Table values for fruit vary widely between sources, so measure your own juice (Β°Brix and titratable acidity) when you can. For adults of legal drinking age. Disclaimer
A recipe shows its ingredients and method and fills in the Must Builder. Picking a fruit fills in its sugar, acidity and target from our sources.
Fruit weight, and if you measured the juice, its Β°Brix and titratable acidity. Your numbers replace the table values, which vary a lot between sources.
Leave the batch volume empty and the acidity sets it: the calculator dilutes until the must reaches the target acidity. Or enter a volume and it tells you how much acid to add.
You get the must volume, the water to add before the sugar, the sugar, the acid and the gravity to expect.
"Save" keeps the recipe and every tab you calculated in one entry (free plan: up to 3). "Download PDF" gives you a printable sheet.
TA: titratable acidity, grams per liter as tartaric acid. Β°Brix: grams of dissolved solids in 100 g of juice. OG: original gravity, what the hydrometer reads before fermentation. The water is given as the total volume to make up before the sugar goes in, because dissolved sugar takes up room.
Fruit in; must volume, water, sugar, acid and gravity out.
The formulas and worked examples: Home Fruit & Country Winemaking Science, chapter 3 β
The gravity before fermentation (OG) and the final gravity (FG) once the wine is dry or stopped.
If part of the sugar went in after your first reading, enter how much and the must volume: the hydrometer never saw it, so the calculator adds it to the OG.
You get the strength by volume.
Two hydrometer readings in, alcohol by volume out.
Reading the hydrometer week by week: Home Fruit & Country Winemaking Guide, chapter 4 β
Titrate the must (or the young wine) and enter its volume and acidity as tartaric.
You get the grams of the acid you choose. Citric, malic and tartaric give different acidity per gram.
The book prefers dilution to chemical deacidification. You get the water and the sugar that keep the strength where it was.
Bring the must to the acidity you want.
Acid equivalents and why dilution comes first: Home Fruit & Country Winemaking Science, chapter 3 β
Grams of citric, malic or tartaric acid to reach a target, or the water and sugar to dilute a must that is too sharp. This is a Fruit Wine Pro feature.
Unlock with Pro β $6/moSweeten only a wine that has been stabilized, or it will start fermenting again in the bottle.
Grams of sugar per liter of finished wine. Taste a small measured sample first.
You get the sugar to dissolve and how much the volume grows.
Sugar for a given sweetness, with the extra volume counted.
Stabilizing and sweetening: Home Fruit & Country Winemaking Guide, chapter 5 β
The sugar for an off-dry or sweet finish, with the volume it adds. This is a Fruit Wine Pro feature.
Unlock with Pro β $6/moPick a recipe on the Must Builder tab; every recipe here is written for 5 liters.
Every weight and volume is multiplied by the same factor. Campden tablets, enzyme, nutrient and yeast stay "per package" for the new volume.
The same wine, in a bigger or smaller batch.
Must arithmetic for any volume: Home Fruit & Country Winemaking Science, chapter 3 β
Any recipe for any batch size, with every amount recalculated. This is a Fruit Wine Pro feature.
Unlock with Pro β $6/moThe science behind every number here: raw materials, getting the juice out, balancing the must, yeast and nitrogen, fermentation, aroma and methanol, clearing, aging, faults and safety, built on published sources. The Guide takes your first batch from fruit to bottle.