So grains can make beer and vodka. Grapes wine. Cactus tequila. Honey mead. Corn, apples, etc… What’s the most unusual, rare, or interesting material that has been used, is used, or you personally have used, to make an alcoholic beverage?
Hardly rare, but definitely odd for brewing–I have brewed fermented cola. My niece, who suggested the notion in the first place, dubbed the result “DrunKola”. The sugar was roughly half from corn syrup in the cola and half from cane sugar added to the brew.
It was…not horrible. I never got it to carbonate, so it had a “flat cola” taste to it, but it was sweet, mildly alcoholic, and had a surprisingly fresh flavor.
Just about anything that can ferment and produce ethyl alcohol can (legislation aside) be used to make vodka. It’s basically distilled and filtered alcohol with added water.
I made a potato beer once. It was… OK. I didn’t add nearly enough barley to the mash to convert all the starches and it was cloudy and tasted like liquid potato. I’ll try it again and add more rice hulls too to get more drainage some day.
I had a friend in Cameroon who could not afford the pricey beer, so he set up a rather prolific banana beer operation.
Cameroonians would ferment whatever was at hand. I became a fan of light bubbly fresh palm wine, but not so into the sludgy opaque corn beer.
Fermented mare’s milk. Blech!:eek:
I recall an article in the Washington City Paper about homemade hooch from western Virginia. IIRC, the most interesting flavor the reporter found was mulberry.
Fermented potatoes? Try vodka instead.
Well, it’s arguable… but maybe Mc Ilhenny Tabasco Sauce.
It involves fermented distillate barrels filled with fermented and aged, annum, naturally evaporated pepper mash (three years). Then it is mixed with long gone wine vinegar. All of these are really distillates.
Clear brandy distilled from mulberries is also fairy popular in Hungary, although it tends to be only available as homemade brandy. (In Hungary, you can ferment your mash at home and then take it to the local distiller, who will distill it legally for you. What a country!) The white mulberry version (fehéreper palinka is particularly interesting if you can get your hands on it, and it is sold commercially.
Pretty much anything with sugar or starches that you can convert enzymatically to sugar is fair game for fermentation and distillation. Tequila is interesting, but have you ever had the undistilled version (IOW, just the fermented juice of the agave) known as pulque? That’s an oddball milky white beverage that’s a little sweet, a little sour, with a slight sauerkraut-like funk to it.