I can't afford to drink all the time anymore so I decided to make my own alcohol at home What are your thoughts on making alcohol at home? have you ever made some and if so do you have any tips This is my first bottle I put the width of like 2 fingers of sugar in the bottom of the bottle and then I filled it with apple juice and put a tea spoon of yeast in, it's been bubbling for 3 days and now it smells like wine
>>21949391Making alcohol isn't hard. Making alcohol you'd want to drink while having store-bought options is the hard part.Rainford's Brew Lab is a great resource, he has tons of info and ideas.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roJtSrDIJ1w
>>21949391I’m all for making it but given the amount of time it takes is it much cheaper?
>>21949521toilet wine like OP is making only takes a couple weeks to become alcoholic. you can let it go longer to get stronger but it isnt necessary. ideally you have a few jugs going at once on a stagger so you always have fresh bottles. for something like closet mead, people usually make gallons at a time so you could drink that for a while.
>>21949391Tips:-Learn to sterilise everthing. You could be brewing apple wine but you could also have acetobacter and be brewing vinegar.-Sucrose (table sugar) will give your booze a cidery, sourish character. Get glucose/dextrose if you can.-If you insist on using juice, make sure it’s preservative free.-Specialty yeasts are inexpensive and freely available in most countries. Lalvin makes good wine yeasts that will produce 15%ABV without issues. Lalvin EC-1118 is super reliable and alcohol tolerant up to 18%ABV.-Learn to rack, that is, drain off as much as you can once the first flush of fermentation is done, leaving behind the lees (cruddy yeast residue). -Secondary fermentation is super useful. Once you’ve racked into a fresh bottle or vessel, add more sugar/dextrose to maximise ABV, then rack again after second lees settlement. You can pressure-seal to create a sparkling drink- 2 liter soft drink bottles are great racking/brewing/secondary containers.-Temperature control is super important. If wherever you keep the bottles doesn’t feel slightly warm to you, the fermentation will slow and you will get off flavours and lower ABV.-Learn how to ‘freeze distil’ if your booze tastes like shit.-Once you have a set of ingredients, brew at least five or six batches, experimenting with temperature etc. You’ll develop a skill baseline. Too many starter brewers fuck around with variables in their first few batches then wonder why their skills aren’t improving.-Avoid acidic fruit juice! Best juices for prison wine are grape and apple.-Avoid anything carbonated, carbon dioxide is acidic and yeast doesn’t like acidic conditions. -You can always look up ‘kilju’, it’s the cheapest way to make booze if you’re truly desperate.
>>21949391Oh and learn to hydrate your yeast before pitching. Warm sterile water with a little sugar ten or fifteen minutes before you add it to the wort gets it going and helps it ferment a lot faster. >>21949529Mead’s a bad choice for a beginner, fruit wine is a much better choice. Good mead needs lots of time and racking.>>21949521Almost always. I’m a long term brewer and distiller and I can make a litre of 92%ABV for about $3.
>>21949567Pic related, a nice crop of grape toilet wine undergoing secondary fermentation in soft drink in my kitchen.
>>21949624You need sugar to ferment, retard.
>>21949521yes it is cheaper>>21949529its not toilet wine its hard cider
>>21949391It will always taste bad. Even if you use some real yeast strains. It's also not even that much cheaper.
>>21949640Kek
>>21949391I've just been dumping yeast into store bought bottles of stuff like lemonade and grape juice. Works pretty good, but you have to filter it when it's done to get rid of the yeast residue. Also, if you have any fruit flies that you didn't know about before, they'll come find it.
>>21949675Not true. My moonshine just tastes like the smell of a dentist’s office. For wines, you can use campden tablets to kill remaining yeast the flavour or ‘backsweeten’ to improve flavour.>>21950038You could put in 10% more effort for 100% better results you know.
>>21949529>>21949575Infographic for people determined to try mead. My recommendation is to get your hands on ‘Mangrove Jack’s’ mead yeast as it deals well with honey’s slightly antimicrobial properties.
>>21950360Saved, thanks!
>>21949521Garanteed yes. If you are thinking time is money logic most time investment is passive as it ferments in the background.
>>21949529>weeksNah. Here are the hypothetical academic purposes steps:1. Befriend a guy who is a postgrad lifesciences researcher in uni2. Pay him to gift you some 99% pure lab grade Ethanol (undenatured). Very important that it is NOT DENATURED, or you'll go blind.3. Dilute the ethanol to 2-4% using fruit juice etc. Use the M1 x V1 = M2 x V2 dilution formula and solve for V1. (M1: original concentration; V1: volume needed to dilute; M2: desired concentration; V2: final volume). Just make sure the units are the same each side of the equation. For academic purposes only.
>>21950512that's not brewing, that's just adding alcohol to fruit juice. for someone who knows a bunch of science words you sure are dumb, dummy.
>>21949567What’s the easiest way to sterilize containers?
>>21949391picture looks gross like a jar full of semen
A lot of things have natural yeast on them so you can just forage. Pine needles/bark work good this time of year. In summer clover/dandelion flowers work and add flavor.
>>21950554you oughta know sweetie
>>21949675untrue and it is much cheaper when you are making cider
>>21949675>It's also not even that much cheaper.It absolutely fucking is.
>>21949391once it stops bubbling it's done fermenting and you can drink it. usually takes a week or so
>>21950552Use glass containers. Wash in hot water to bring glass up to temperature, then fill with boiling water and a few drops of bleach. Leave to sit for 10 minutes then empty out and place upside down to drain, no need to rinse. You can get glass ‘carboys’ pretty cheap with the added bonus of having holed silicone bungs that you can stick a fermentation lock into.
>>21950512‘Ethanol absolute’ is 100% pure ethanol and by definition non-denatured. Still wouldn’t be drinking it, diluted or not.
>>21949391There’s this youtuber who made his own mead and other high quality alcoholic beverages, kingcobrajfs. Check out his informative tutorial videos. I think he’s still making them.
>>21949391Just search for "kilju" and "pot still"There's a reason alcohol is the most prevalent drug through all of history; it's really easy to make.
>>21949521Protip; you don't have to stand there and watch it fermen. Retard.
>>21950573Dandelion wine is a pretty traditional drink but is a powerful diuretic so drinking it recreationally is a bad idea unless you love pissing three times an hour and waking up dehydrated.As far as collecting wild yeast goes, why would you do that when commercial yeast is cheap, freely available and much more reliable?
>>21949575>>21950356Distilling is a different art than fermenting, but that said I'm curious as to how you can get a liter of 92% at under $3, even if you exclude the electricity/gas cost for heating the still. Even if I was just doing a straight sugar wash I feel like I would need to spend more than $3 for the sugar to make enough wash to distill down to a liter of spirits at 180+ proof. Granted I work in larger volumes and make brandies from fruit that I grow myself without chapatalizing, so my sense of proportions may be off.
>>21950921I buy huge sacks of bulk dextrose monohydrate and use a yeast that’s alcohol tolerant into the low 20% range. Still is a reflux model that doesn’t use a great deal of power or water.
>>21949624>>21949529>>21949645I always wondered if I'd ever have an opportunity to post this.This is a cool thread. I had to quit drinking years back. I still think about it and miss the good times. But the enjoyment ran out finally. I hope you guys enjoy your homemade hooch. I never did make any myself. Drinking was my hobby. No time for anything else. Always managed to find money for booze too. Now it seems like it would be a fun hobby even if I didn't drink what I made.
>>21950360>ballonNot once, but every time he wrote it.
>>21949391One of the easiest brews is Tepache, or pineapple beer.You buy a whole pineapple and peel it, and save the skinsThen you mix the pineapple skins with sugar and water.After a few days the natural yeasts from the pineapple skins ferments all the sugar and makes a tasty pineapple cider or beer, around 4% ABV
>>21950651>>21950663If you would just go to work in that time you could buy much more alcohol.
>>21949675This is pretty much true for most people because young wines taste like shit always. You need to age the cider for 3 months minimum for it to taste any good.>>21950038This actually gives you a nice sweet cider-like thing pretty quickly if they have some non-fermentable sugar in them>>21949575>I can make a litre of 92%ABV for about $3.Lol unless you're doing industrial quantities labour costs on distilling rule out it being cheap at allYou can go to a minimal wage job and make more alcohol/h than what it takes to distillingHuge waste of time innit. Fun hobby though.
>>21950831Multiple reasons. Fun to do things the old fashioned way, like hand carving wood vs CNC machining. I like the gambling aspect, get a good brew and you feel like you rolled a 7, get a bad and it's the yeast's fault not yours. As I mentioned it can affect the flavor. Elderflower champaign tastes unique and all you need in the flowers, water, and sugar. Last an most importantly I just like foraging. Makes hiking more fun and learning about which plants are good, which are poisonous, gives me a sense of security.
>>21951150This one is great. You can get three batches out of one pineapple too.
>>21949391I just recently learned to do it. It is incredibly easy and cheap. I made mead and cider. The cider cost me about $2.50 a gallon, and the mead cost ~$10 a gallon. I made 9 gallons of cider and 5 gallons of mead. It is cost effective, but requires a lot of time and patience. Waiting months for it to clarify and be tasty. If all you care about is the alcohol and not the flavor, it is mostly ready after 3-4 weeks or so.The inital cost of the "tooling" can be a bit high if you want nice things. Mostly you can get by with the big gallon waters you can buy at wal-mart for like $2-3 for a container. But the big carboys are much easier. You will also need airlocks. Do not do the balloon trick. It attracts bugs - fruit flies for me because of where I live. A proper siphon is useful too. They sell ones that have a cap at the bottom so you dont accidentally suck up the lees.It is quite a fun Saturday project that takes an hour or two to do, is cheap, and provides you with alcohol later. Be careful with making liquor though. Once you get into using a still, it becomes illegal without a license - gov gotta get their cut I guess.
my brother from another country. here's a easy guide for some 1-2% alcohol: https://www.finlandforum.org/viewtopic.php?t=41161
>>21951127Ah, ok got it. So you're not making a liter at a time then, but are instead doing larger batches and then back-calculating the cost for a liter of end product.I use corn sugar to bottle carb the ciders I make, but I only make maybe 10 gallons a year or so so I have no need to buy dextrose in bulk.
>>21951481If you want REALLY cheap alcohol just buy turbo yeast and dump a few kg of sugar into thereThe finnish call it kilju. I think they're the only country alcoholic enough to drink that shit. It doesn't taste very good from my experience. Takes a few days of waiting.
>>21951811>It doesn't taste very good from my experience.Not worse than any other stuff made from shitty baking yeast.
>>2195183417% turbo yeast mash tastes way worse than a 10% baking yeast juice+sugar mash. The smell is highly unpleasant too.
>>21951843I had so much shitty selfmade wines made with baking yeast. The worst was mead made from honey and baking yeast. Smelled and tasted like vomit. My stupid friend dumped a lot of money on honey but was too stingy to order some wine yeast.
>>21951811I have seen it mentioned throughout this thread and immediately looked up how to do it. I think making a mix of tasty alcoholic beverages and "get drunk quick and cheap" is what I will do from now on. I am glad to see so many people sharing all kinds of ways to get fucked up cheap.
>>21951481>Once you get into using a still, it becomes illegal without a licenseTechnically only selling it does.
>>21951900No, production is illegal almost everywhere, even for your own useOfc in most countries cops don't give a fuck if you don't sell it and in some it is de jure illegal but de facto legal by stare decisis
>>21949567This guy brews>>21949575I've been brewing for a couple years now, mostly simple cider, mead, and some other hooches, but I never have noticed a tangible taste difference between rehydrating yeast prior to pitching or just tossing it in from the packet. Is it mainly just fermentation startup time?>>21951481Also if you do want to get equipment more than just balloons and plastic litre bottles, check local garage sales, craigslist, etc. People sell their shit all the time.
>>21951235The same skins over and over or three batches at once? How much liquid is produced?
>>21949575>Mead’s a bad choice for a beginner, fruit wine is a much better choice. Good mead needs lots of time and racking.Depends on how strong you make it maybe. If you make a lower ABV wine then it's pretty drinkable even fresh unless you added too much yeast at the start.
>>21949640lol
>>21951212>unless you're doing industrial quantities labour costs on distilling rule out it being cheap at allUntrue. I live in a socialist hellhole where even a 700ml bottle of 37%ABV bottom shelf rotgut vodka costs US$30. Distilling is significantly cheaper.>>21951609Yeah my low wines I brew 60 litres at a time.>>21952015Hydrating the yeast is more about ensuring it out-competes any otter microorganisms in the first few hours of fermentation. You want the yeast already alive and reproducing when you pitch, it’s more of a preventative measure than a taste measure.
>>21949391There's also a homebrew thread on /diy/ at pretty much any time:>>>/diy/2962625
>>21952446Fuck /diy/ their homebrew thread is full of elitist faggots. Which is weird because all the home brewers I know irl are actually pretty cool dudes, which leads me to believe their thread is full of larpers.
>>21949391i used to make it at homemake sure u have the proper equipment and use a container that fills up approximately to full to make sure ur brew doesn't get oxygen
>>21953179Bad advice. Firstly, yeast needs oxygen. Secondly, you need head space to deal with the yeast foam.
>>21949391Learning to brew, and the whole process behind it was one of the most fun and rewarding things I've done.You realize how little people actually know about alcohol. Pretty much nobody in this thread knows anything beyond the basics. Brewing is like a magical artform to normies.
>>21953915>whole thread is about making cheap alcohol>spergs out because nobody takes it seriously
