Coffee wine is brewed coffee, sweetened and fermented with yeast, so the alcohol is made by fermentation in the coffee rather than added to it. If you make it, do not bottle and seal it until a hydrometer shows fermentation has stopped: glass sealed around an active ferment can burst.
Why that matters: a sugary liquid with live yeast in it keeps producing carbon dioxide, so glass sealed around an active ferment is a pressure vessel, and the failure mode is a bottle that bursts on a shelf. The most dependable way to know fermentation has finished is a hydrometer reading that has stopped falling and stays put for several days.
Table of Contents
Coffee wine vs coffee-infused wine and wine-infused coffee
Coffee wine is made by fermenting sweetened coffee, often with a cold brew base, with yeast, so that the alcohol is produced in the coffee rather than mixed into it afterwards. That is the whole distinction, and it is the one that separates it from every other coffee-and-alcohol drink.
Three things get called “coffee wine” and only one of them is:
| Drink | Where the alcohol comes from | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Coffee wine | Fermentation of the sweetened coffee | A standalone fermented beverage. No grapes involved. |
| Coffee-infused wine | The grape wine it started as | Finished wine steeped with coffee beans. Grape wine with a coffee note. |
| Wine-infused coffee | Nowhere — usually none survives roasting | Green beans soaked in wine, then dried and roasted. A flavoured coffee, not an alcoholic drink. |
Irish coffee and similar drinks are a fourth category again: spirit added to brewed coffee at the point of serving.
The name is also used in research for wine made from coffee fruit pulp, a different product from the brewed-coffee ferment this page covers (for example, a 2024 comparison of coffee pulp wines in Molecules).
What does coffee wine taste like?
Nobody here has tasted a coffee wine, so this page is not going to describe one. What can be said from the process rather than from a glass: fermentation consumes sugar, so how sweet the finished drink is depends on how much sugar was added and how far the yeast got through it; a cold brew base carries less perceived acidity than a hot-brewed one; and the character of the coffee that went in still shows up in what comes out, which is why the bean choice matters as much here as it does in a cup.
If you are buying a commercial coffee wine, look for the alcohol content on the label. US rules let a wine of 14% or less leave it off if the label says “table” wine, and allow a stated figure to be off by up to 1.5 percentage points (27 CFR 4.36).
Why there is no coffee wine recipe here
We do not publish quantities, temperatures and timings we cannot source. Invented numbers are how a fermentation recipe becomes dangerous, and filling its gaps with more invented numbers would only make it look more trustworthy than it is.
If you want to ferment at home, work from a published protocol written by people who do this — for example the University of Georgia Cooperative Extension circular Winemaking at Home (C 717), which covers sanitation, yeast selection, sugar measurement, racking and bottling as one connected process rather than as five tips. The circular is written for fruit wine, not coffee, and we have not made coffee wine. The safeguards below, a hydrometer, an airlock and caps left loose at first, are the parts of it that concern the fermentation itself rather than the fruit.
How do you know fermentation is complete?
Yeast eats sugar and produces alcohol and carbon dioxide gas. As the sugar is consumed, the liquid gets less dense. A hydrometer floats in the liquid and reads that density, so the reading falls as fermentation proceeds and stops falling when the yeast has finished. UGA Extension is direct about why the instrument is not optional:
“A hydrometer is a simple and inexpensive instrument which takes the guesswork out of winemaking. It is used to measure the amount of sugar in the fruit juice prior to fermentation. It also tells when fermentation is completed. A hydrometer is essential for consistent results in home winemaking.” — UGA Extension C 717
The rule that matters: a single low reading is not a finish. A reading that has not moved across consecutive days is. One measurement cannot distinguish “finished” from “temporarily slow”, and a stalled ferment that restarts after bottling is the classic cause of burst bottles. UGA’s own timeline shows how patient this needs to be: after the first racking it instructs you to “Replace the fermentation lock and wait a month before the next racking in order for fermentation to run to completion”, and notes that “Some wines continue a very slow fermentation for several months and remain cloudy.” UGA’s fruit-wine timeline runs to months; for coffee, the hydrometer decides, not the calendar.
Two more safeguards:
- A fermentation lock (airlock) on the fermenter, not a sealed lid. UGA: “It is important for the device to be secured so carbon dioxide gas can escape from the fermentor without letting in any air.” The gas has to have somewhere to go for the entire time it is being produced. A sealed vessel gives it nowhere.
- Bottle only when it has stopped and cleared, and cap loosely at first. UGA: “When fermentation has completely stopped, the wine should be sparkling clear and ready to bottle”, and “If screw-tops or plastic tops are used, cap the bottles loosely the first day of filling to allow residual gases to escape. Next day, tighten them in place.” Note that even at the bottling stage the published protocol still assumes residual gas has to vent.
Cloudiness is a signal, not a cosmetic complaint. A liquid that is still hazy and still gassing has not finished, whatever the calendar says. A coffee ferment is too dark to judge by clarity, so rely on the hydrometer.
Is it legal to make coffee wine at home in the US?
Federal law permits home production of wine for personal use without tax, within limits. Under 27 CFR 24.75: “Any adult may, without payment of tax, produce wine for personal or family use and not for sale”, capped at “200 gallons per calendar year for a household in which two or more adults reside, or 100 gallons per calendar year if there is only one adult residing in the household.” It “may not under any circumstances be sold or offered for sale”, and the exemption “should not in any manner be construed as authorizing the production of wine in violation of applicable State or local law.” Distilling at home is a separate matter and is not permitted under this exemption. Check your state’s rules before you start. Whether a coffee ferment counts as wine under these rules is a question for the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) or your state.
If what you actually want is a coffee-and-alcohol drink you can make at home this week, a steeped liqueur is a different risk profile: it is not meant to ferment, so there is no active ferment to manage. If one does start to fizz, treat it as an active ferment and discard it; see coffee liqueur recipes. And if you want to build the cold brew that a fermented coffee drink starts from, cold brew vs nitro covers the base method.
Corrections to earlier versions of this page
- An earlier version ended its home recipe with “Once fermentation is complete… Seal the bottles and let them age for at least a few months” but gave no way to tell that fermentation was complete (no hydrometer, gravity reading, airlock or stable-reading rule, and no advice to cap bottles loosely at first), and no sugar quantity, yeast quantity or fermentation temperature. The recipe was removed.
- An earlier version said fermentation takes “a week to a few weeks”. The University of Georgia circular’s timeline runs to months.
- An earlier version stated tasting notes, an alcohol-by-volume figure and an aging time with no source. They were removed.
