20090127
Fermenting Cheap Drinks - Day 2
We got bubbles. The yeast is rapidly breaking the sugar into alcohol. We originally tried brewers yeast (which didn't work). Then switched to a bread yeast which will taste lousy, but is easily obtainable. Finally we ordered some actual wine yeast so we can taste the difference between bread and wine yeasts when both stages of fermentation are done.
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5 comments:
Hope you don't get paroled before the juice is cooked!
Of course, the warden will tell you to take that concoction with you!!!
Welches?!
WELCHES?!!!!
Not organically, locally grown, hand-pressed, fair-trade grape juice?
Ya gotta be kiddin' me?
Shocked, I tell ya! I'm shocked....and eagerly hoping the experiment turns out well. I gotta bottle of Trader Joes spiced cider in the fridge waiting to turn into a tasty adult beverage!
Carry on!
Deep winter makes it difficult to come across fresh local grown organics. Hopefully we will have enough experience with the welches and apple juice to honor our local fruits as they pop up this summer. Then those too can be converted into tasty adult beverages.
We just racked our 3gal batch of hard apple cider, made from trader joes brand filtered apple juice. It tastes great even before aging. Though, we used wine yeast instead of bread yeast :) The strain we have found to work best is Red Star's "Pasteur Champagne." Other strains of wine yeast from Red Star, we have found, leave hints of sulfur when making hard cider. Also, while you are ordering stuff you should get yourselves some "yeast nutrient" or ammonium phosphate. Without it, the yeast can take days before it starts bubbling, because apple juice is nearly pure sugar with very little other organic matter for nutrients. It only takes a teaspoon for a few gallon batch.
Adding cane sugar is inadvisable since the yeast produces off flavors and hangover inducing compounds when processing cane sugar -- but I guess this wouldn't matter to a thug in prison. Apple juice has plenty of sugar in it, as is, but if you want more kick to your jack you could try adding white grape juice or even white grape juice concentrate, used as a sweetener in many packaged food products.
Happy adult beverage making.
Seriously, there's a lot of ways to make good drinks on the cheap, and this ain't one. Fermenting table sugar isn't going to make you anything you want to drink, and doing it with bread yeast, well, that's just damned embarrassing.
While I commend your enterprising spirit, I suggest that if you're looking for an easy home-fermentable you try making some apple cider instead.
Free apples are easy to come by in the right time of year, and the recipe has even fewer ingredients. As in one: apples.
Don't drink what you've made. I mean, in the name of science, you're probably going to want to give it a taste, but I wouldn't advise you to swallow any, and you'll probably want to have something stiff, say, whiskey, to wash the taste out of your mouth and kill any contaminants.
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