Yep. You can make wine at home in a pickle bucket. Here’s how:
Go to your local fast food restaurant and ask for the manager. Tell him or her that you would like 2 empty pickle buckets.
These buckets are food grade buckets and will not outgas any weird chemicals into your wine. Although they are food grade, they do have a big problem: they were filled with vinegar. Vinegar is a natural enemy of wine.
So – you’ll have to sterilize and clean the pickle buckets, let them air dry, and then sterilize and clean them again. I use oxyclean and it seems to work pretty good.
Once you have cleaned and dried them twice, you are ready to go.
Use one of the buckets as your primary fermenter. The second bucket you will use as your secondary fermenter. You’ll need to make one modification to the second bucket – you’ll need to drill a small hole in the top to accommodate an airlock.
The hole should be a little bigger than the airlock diameter. Go to your local hardware store and ask for a small “grommet”. This is a small rubber gasket that will provide a good seal between the bucket and the airlock insuring that air cannot get to the wine while it is sitting in the secondary fermenter.
You’re done! All you have to do is put your juice into the first bucket and put in the yeast and then let it sit for a week. Then siphon the wine from bucket 1 to bucket 2. Put the lid on, put in the airlock and then wait a month.
At the end of the month you are ready to bottle!
