How To Clear Cloudy Alcohol

Winemaking is a long, demanding process that requires months or even years of patience. After spending all that time on your wine, it is always disappointing to see it refuse to clear. Or worse, form a haze after it had been clear enough to bottle.

The most common causes of cloudiness in a homemade wine are incomplete fermentation, excess protein, lingering sediment from the initial fermentation, or bacterial infection. Fruit wines may also form a pectin haze.

6 Reasons Your Wine is Cloudy

1. Fermentation Was Not Finished

Your wine might be cloudy because it is still fermenting. Wine is usually done fermenting when it reaches a gravity of .990 or lower, but temperature changes or movement may reactivate the remaining yeast. You may also restart fermentation if you add a conditioning sugar without a stabilizer. You cannot judge the fermentation by the airlock alone.

When a wine ferments, the dead yeast will fall to the bottom and create sediment. This grit will get stirred up when you pour the wine and create a haze.

How to Fix It: Move the wine back to the carboy and allow it to ferment completely. Be certain the fermentation has stopped by testing the gravity over three days. If you see no changes, your wine has finished fermenting.

2. It Has a Pectin Haze

Pectin is a natural compound in fruit that is frequently used to make jam because of its sweet, gel consistency. Pectin is normally broken down during the fermentation phase, but some fruits have a higher pectin level than others. These include pears, apples, plums, citrus fruits, and peaches. When making wine with any of the fruits above, a pectic enzyme is required or the wine may stay cloudy.

How to Fix It: Add a pectic enzyme. Learn how to test a pectin haze and clear a fruit wine below. You can get 1 oz of pectic enzyme for roughly $5, which will be plenty for a single batch of wine.

3. The Sediment Got Bottled With the Wine

If you bottled your wine from the primary fermenter, you may have bottled a haze with it. Always rack the wine into a secondary fermenter before you bottle it in order to separate the wine from the sediment created by fermentation. You may need to repeat this process and transfer the wine several times, depending on how long you age it.

Wine that looks clear to the eye may still have yeast floating in it, and that yeast will drop to the bottom of the bottle in a few days.

Prevent after-bottle cloudiness by only bottling the wine once it has had enough time to rest after fermentation, and never bottle the wine from a fermenter with sediment inside.

How to Fix It: Put the wine back into the fermenter and clear it with food-grade bentonite. The yeast particles will be dragged down to the bottle, and the wine can be moved to a sediment-free fermenter to rest.

4. It Is Precipitation From the Wine Itself

Precipitation is caused by substances in your wine formed by overfermentation. In red wine, precipitation usually takes the form of tannins, which resemble dust. In white wines, common precipitation is tartaric acid, which will form crystals. Either form will make your wine cloudy.

Chilling a wine may create the tartaric crystals while heating it will create tannins. Cold stabilize the wine to preventing tartaric precipitation, and try to keep the wine at 55°F (10°C) for whites and 70°F (21°C) for reds.

How to Fix It: Put the wine back in the fermenter if you have already bottled it. Treat it with bentonite or sparkolloid to collect the extra particles.

5. It Is Infected

A wine will a bacterial infection will smell bad. It may have a sour scent or smell like pure acetone, but you will notice the smell before the other indicators.

This is because bacterial infections cause the wine to turn to vinegar. Infections can be results of bacteria on unsanitized equipment, exposure to the air, or contamination from a foreign yeast. If you added sulfites to the wine before and after fermentation, it is unlikely that the haze is due to bacteria.

How to Fix It: Dump it. You won't want to drink an infected wine—it will taste like it smells.

6. Your Water Contained Iron

Ferric casse is a haze caused by iron. If you used water with a high-iron content to create your wine, it is possible that the iron interacted with the air to create white or blue particles. Ferric casse happens in low-acid wines, or wines that were stored in cool temperatures. This can be prevented by using purified water and minimizing your wine's interaction with the air.

How to Fix It: Put the wine back in the fermenter and clear it with bentonite. The bentonite will collect the proteins or phosphates created by the iron and drag them to the bottom. You can then rack your wine off the sediment.

How Can You Tell If Wine Is Clear?

A wine is clear when it has no sediment suspended in the wine or settled at the bottom of the carboy. It is usually easy to eyeball whether a wine is clear enough to bottle. But, if you are unsure, you can use a bright flashlight to test the wine's clarity.

A cellphone light or any handheld flashlight around the home is usually bright enough for this trick. Place the light against the carboy, and slowly slide it from top to bottom. If you see any participles floating in the wine, it is not clear enough to bottle. Other indicators might include:

You don't see any floating sediment, but the light is brighter at the top of the carboy than the bottom.
You are making a white wine or a fruit wine, and the light is not penetrating through the carboy. This test won't apply to red wines, as a dark red may be perfectly clear and still not let enough light through.
The light gets fuzzy in some places.

All three are indicators that there are still particles in your wine, and you should wait longer to let it clear.

How to Clear Homemade Wine Quickly

Given enough time, most wines will clear themselves by dropping sediment to the bottom of the fermenter. It can take as much as a year for wine to clarify, however, and you may not want to wait that long.

You can clear your wine quickly with bentonite, or some other fining agent from a local homebrew store or online. Follow the manufacturer's instructions to add the bentonite to your wine. Bentonite removes negatively-charged participles and drops them to the bottom, allowing you to rack your wine off the sediment.

If the bentonite alone does not do the trick, you may also need sparkolloid. Sparkolloid is a fining agent that removed positively-charged particles. So, sparkolloid works on what bentonite doesn't and vice-versa. You may not need both, however, and plenty of home winemakers consider bentonite enough to clear their wine.

Give the fining agents enough time to work, and then rack your wine out of the fermenter.

How to Clear Fruit Wine

The most common cause of cloudiness in a fruit wine is pectin haze. The easiest way to clear the haze will be with a pectic enzyme. Fining agents and filtering will not be able to remove pectin molecules.

To test whether or not you will be able to remove the pectin haze, take a sample of your wine out of your carboy. Your sample can be somewhere between half a gallon to a gallon, but should not be more. Keep the sample in an airlocked container and add as much pectic enzyme as you would use for a full 5- or 6-gallon batch.

The extra concentration won't hurt your sample, but it will help you get faster results. Watch to see if the enzyme starts to clear the wine. If so, you will know that you have a pectin haze and that it can be cleared. The test will take 2 to 3 weeks even with a higher concentration.

Mix the enzyme into the sample thoroughly. If you see that it has started to clear in 2 weeks, dump the sample back into your carboy and let the full dose of the pectic enzyme work on your full batch. If it looked like the sample was clearing, but you don't see results in the full batch, add a second dose of pectic enzyme.

If the enzyme does not clear your sample, refer to the list above on why your wine may be cloudy.

Is It Safe to Drink Cloudy Wine?

It is almost always safe to drink a cloudy wine, unless the sediment is the result of a bacterial infection, in which case your wine will smell bad enough that you don't want to drink it anyway. Sediment in wine is not hazardous and does not usually affect the flavor. It may make the wine a bit gritty, but it won't make you sick.

If your wine is cloudy in the bottle, or there is another reason you are not able to clarify it using any of the methods above, decanting is a useful way to separate wine from the sediment. Yeast participles, precipitation or other causes of haze will usually fall to the bottom of the bottle given enough time, and the wine will clear. However, these particles can get stirred up during pouring and re-cloud the wine.

Using a decanter and careful pouring, it is usually possible to separate the wine from most of the sediment. The results may not be perfect, but are still preferable to drinking grit.

If you crafted this wine to be served at your daughter's wedding, or have some other similarly important reason that the wine must be clear and perfect, you can attempt a second clarification. Clarifying the wine again will expose it to more oxygen and shorten the shelf-life. Combat the extra oxygen exposure by using inert gasses. White wine is more susceptible to oxidation than red wine.