There are also organisms that produce lactic acid during anaerobic respiration just like humans do. As you might guess from the name “lactic” these are the organisms that turn milk sour and create yogurt.
And funnily enough although it makes sense if you think about it for a moment, many of the organisms that produce a diversity of cultured dairy products are found on human skin. Yum. And these organisms can find their way into your fermentation mash and produce lactic acid and much funkiness instead of precious ethyl alchohol. If your beer ends up tasting like old gym socks, contamination by these critters is the reason.
I make beer at home because I can; it’s the pride of accomplishment. It’s not longer true that there are no good, American beers available for purchase commercially. The truth is, there are hundreds! You may have to avoid Kroger and go to Meijer (or local equivilent), or a local party/liquor store, but there’s more than just Bud out there these days.
Granted, what I make costs roughly the same as purchasing Labatt by the half-barrel (which I also do). But it’s significantly cheaper than the “good” beers commercially (which I also buy). I’ve never had a biologically-bad batch yet (knocks on wood), but some have been better tasting than others. I continue on though, not for economy but for just doing it. I also make bread (I have a starter made from – guess what? – beer yeast). I suck at it, but keep trying. My steaks are superior to those from any restaurant except in Hermosillo, Mexico. And I cook other things. Making beer at home is the same thing. Labatt’s in store == wife who cooks, just as homebrew == my fun in kitchen.
I cannot buy rhubarb wine in Kansas City. So even if it wasn’t a fun hobby to do, it’s worth it if I really want to have something I can’t otherwise easily get.
Thanks all - this has been a very helpful thread. I’ll have my husband get a wine kit back in the states, and under no circumstances will I do any distilling!
To sailor and a few others who expressed doubt that homemade alcohol ever makes practical or economic sense - we live in Indonesia, and right now they are making it almost impossible to import alcohol (it is a protectionism thing, not an Islamic thing - most foreign-produced goods are being kept out).
So, there is very little alcohol for sale here, and the prices on what there is have skyrocketed - a bottle that should cost about $10 goes for $50, if you can even find it. I want to have a party with lots of people, but I can’t afford to serve them store-bought wine at those prices.
Besides, some of us like to do things like make homemade spirits just for the creative experience - at one time or another I have made my own yogurt, bread, pasta, pesto, chutney, chicken broth, curry paste, grenadine, pickles, and many other products that can easily be bought in a well-stocked grocery store. In fact I make several of those items, in particular bread, regularly. It’s just for fun and in some cases to produce a more nutritious product.
And I’m trying to grow tomatoes even as I type, though so far they are refusing to fruit
CairoCarol, as a homebrewer who also makes (some more or less frequently than others) homemade pickles, jams, yogurt, and bread - oh yes, and a bit of dabbling in home cheesemaking - I completely sympathize. If you were doing homebrewing (beer) I’d have more hints for you, but I’m kind of stuck. The magazine Brew Your Own is great for beer, so their sister magazine’s newbie page might have some good tips and resources.
When I was little, my dad used to make wine. (He recently handed down some of the equipment to my nephew.) There’s a family legend that one night, they had the pastor over for dinner, with wine. The pastor liked the wine, and checked the label to see what it was. It read “Tuesday”.
I know a guy who started a brewery (and made a success of it). He said that any careful and competent amateur can reliably make good beer. The big difference for a commercial brewery is that the beer must be consistent from batch to batch, as the market will not tolerate a brand that isn’t the same this week as it was last week.
IOW, he would certainly endorse the view that there’s nothing especially difficult about producing good homemade beer.
I think I have told this story on these boards before so stop reading if this is old news.
In the Army in Vietnam you weren’t allowed to buy alcohol if you were under 21 and lower rank than Sergeant. So I had an arrangement with the unit cooks. They would give me a case of large cans of apple juice and some yeast and sugar. It was 12 large cans of apple juice to one case. I would turn all of the apple juice into wine by fermenting it in IV bottles with a surgical glove on the opening with a slit in one finger (you guess which finger) to act as an airlock (I taped the other fingers down). Then I would take half of the wine and distill the alcohol from it with a still built from glass tubing and add the distilled alcohol to the remaining wine so we ended up with six bottles of fortified wine. I would give three bottles of fortified wine back to the cooks and keep three for myself. Then we started over again with them giving me a case of apple juice. None of us went blind.
I used to live in Dubai, which is in the middle east, which has a large population of muslim peoples. There was alcohol, but it was expensive, so me and my dad made wine… It was really easy, all u had to do was get any bottle of juice, throw in some sugar, like a cup, and one packet of instant yeast… and let it ferment in a dark place, with the cap unscrewed. You also had to make sure the juice didn’t have any preservatives in it… In the middle east, there’s alot of juices with preservatives, you just had to find the ones without them. The taste of this wine would really depend on how long you would leave it to ferment. After about only three days of fermenting, you could get drunk, but it would taste like $%^&. There would still be too much yeast floating around… So the best way to do it, is simply wait until all the yeast fell to the bottom of the bottle, and the liquid cleared up… This usually took about like a week to a week and a half…
Right now, I’m back in the states, and I’ve tried this process again, with some US made juices, and I’ve found that the juice that makes the best tasting wine, is Welch’s Grape Juice. I’ve made some wine out of this, and let it sit for a month, and wow! It’s amazing. It tastes as good as, or maybe better than bottled wine u can get at the store… Not only that, but you get 3/4 of a gallon, or 3 quarts, for only 5 bucks… I don’t believe you can find any wine for that price, at that quantity… So this process isn’t just a hobby, or something “fun.” It offers an economical solution for the production of alcohol, for smart peoples. Also, it is pretty fun…
Hello, just to let you know since you’re new, this is a 3-year-old thread, but that’s okay. I make Welch’s wine too. Do you do anything to try to get the yeast out, like siphon the wine into another container? Because I’ve just been pouring it carefully to disturb the dead yeast settled at the bottom as little as possible, but it still gets disturbed, and I wonder if it would taste better if I got a siphoning tube or something.
you can use things like grape juice, apple juice, old shoes or zombies to make wine. careful siphoning is the best method to get most of the liquid away from the settled yeast.
In Spain the usual method for that is decanting it through a cloth strainer. Works both for fruit juices and for flat wine or cider; should not be done with drinks that contain gas (cava, champagne, vi d’agulla, asturias-type cider, beer).
I have brewed and won SCA brewing competitions with plain mead and with cyser [a apple and honey version of mead] and helped people brew beer and make wine. One of the best wines came from a batch my mom put in the fermenter and forgot in a back cupboard for 5 years :eek: For my stuff I use the classic 5 gallon glass carboy, but my mom liked to make wine in the little plastic 1 gallon cube that comes in the wine kit, with refills. She used the beer equivalent that looks like a sideways beer keg that is about a gallon. It made a drinkable beer, though my other brewing friends do the bucket o wort, the cooler, and whatever else the dog and pony show takes. Moms came out just as drinkable as all the strange chocolate coffee fofo heritage barley malt crap that they seem to have been playing with in the last couple years.
Cleanliness is amazingly important. Random yeast can taste crappy.
Yeast subspecies is crucial - some yeasts are best left in breadmaking. There is a reason breweries have a specific yeast they use. A sherry yeast is different from a beer yeast which is different from baking yeast.
You can get beer kits that have a can of barley glop, a can of malt glop, and hops extracts. All liquid, you essentially dump the first 2 into boiling water, let it cool a certain amount, dump in the hops extract, then spooge it into the primary fermenter, slam the lock in and ignore. They have wine kits that are condensed grape juice, plain generic stuff that is varietal like cabernet, rhine, whatnot, and some that are specific grapes that are a bit more expensive, and yeast. You can get reasonable results from the kits. They are actually big business [comparatively speaking] and fairly popular.
