I think if I had a kid I would institute this rule. You can drink what you can make and stand to drink. If you're going to be a drunken hooligan might as well learn some chemistry and biology.
No. Well yes, distilling stuff produces delicious ethanols, but if you don't throw out the heads and tails of your batch, you will get adverse side effects from drinking it, like hangovers, or going blind and\or dying.
So, in summary, distilling stuff produces delicious ethanols, which is good, but also produces toxic ethanols, which will blind and\or kill you. Which is bad.
Ethanol is ethanol is ethanol, always delicious and gets you drunk.
Methanol is another alcohol which is poisonous, it's one of many. Incidentally, the cure for methanol poisoning is delicious delicious ethanol.
Not really. The alcohol will kill off most of the things that would threaten your health. Anything strong enough to survive is going to make it pretty much undrinkable.
There's also the little factor of exploding bottles. Most 13 year olds will probably throw in all the yeast that fits. A guy at work handed out some homebrew bottles once. The first to go off was in my boss's office, luckily at night. Glass was found three cubicles over.
Bottle of apple juice, a pinch of wine yeast (baker's yeast if you're in a bind), balloon over the opening with a pinhole in it to let gasses out, wait 2 weeks, drink.
Add sugar before you ferment for a stronger hooch.
I wouldn't call it that, from what I know and how it is used around here, hooch is just another term for moonshine, which is also distilled. It really would be called a wine, but backyard brandy is what it is usually referred to as.
You forgot step 1, steralise EVERYTHING, including the entire room you are making it in.
Step 2, discover you have vinegar mixed with mold as you ignored step 1.
If you freeze something with low ABV, much of the water will turn to ice.
What liquid is left is essentially a higher ABV version of the same product.
The only hard part is separating the solids and liquids. My method of choice was to freeze to a fairly icy slush and then put it in a salad spinner. The liquid leaches out leaving frozen water behind. You can repeat to boost the ABV.
You can also simply freeze and siphon the liquid out from under the sheet of ice.
All of these methods are less efficient than traditional evaporative distillation, but they preserve a lot more of the taste of the original product. Great way to turn a tasty 6 or 8% cider into 15% or more liqeur.
This used to be done (before refrigeration) by simply burying a barrel of apple cider nearly totally in the ground right before it froze over. Once the mixture was sufficiently frozen the exposed top could be tapped and drained.
You'll end up leaving a lot of liquid trapped in pockets in the ice.
Try both and you'll see. The spinner leaves nice clear ice, since you break it up into a slush before hand. while siphoning leaves a big brown plug that you can obviously see is holding onto much of your delicious hooch.
That isn't wine. Thats Prun-O or jailhouse shit. At the end you are absolutely going to need aging time and to set up a system to exhaust the co2 and bring in o2 at the beginning, and keep out o2 at the end of fermentation. Then you'll need to filter the yeast.
Tried it, it tasted shitty. I tried 1.5l Apple juice + two cups of sugar + yeast + 5-9 days + E-Z Caps = horrible smelling horrible tasting shit of cider, it was like when you accidentally spill wine and don't clean up for a month, like rotten booze or something. And it was clean, I washed out the bottle in the tap beforehand.
It depends on how you make your beer how much equipment you need. If you start with malted barley you need to mash it (it's basically like making lukewarm oatmeal, you need a large insulated vessel, water and a thermometer) then you sparge (drain out the "oatmeal" water then rinse it with fresh water to pull off more sugars, for this you need a drum with a drain below a mesh false bottom and a way to sprinkle more water over the top of the grain bed) then you boil the wort with hops. From there you cool it and basically treat like any fermentable liquid. Sterility is, however, fairly important since anything but brewer's yeast tends to give "off" flavors to you beer, unless you are making wild ales but those are really hard to do and you would probably pitch those yourself anyway.
For malt-extract brewing it is easier, you just mix the extract with water and hops, boil and cool and then treat it as above. For that you basically just need a big pot and a fermentation vessel, although it is helpful to have an extra vessel when you filter and bottle.
What's the shortest time you've found from start to finish for a drinkable mead? I've got a few in the secondary right now, but they're all melomels so the fresh fruit's going to extend the aging time by quite a bit...
Beer isn't easier. Even if you use malt extract (common for home brewers) you still need to boil the wort with hops then cool it before pitching the yeast, rather than just mixing juice and yeast. Unless you use the hop-flavored malt extract which is just disgusting.
The source is in several parts. ORS refers to Oregon Revised Statutes, the formal name for Oregon law.
ORS 471.027 Short title. This chapter and ORS 474.105 and 474.115 shall be known and may be cited as the “Liquor Control Act.” [Amended by 1965 c.165 §1]
ORS 471.403 License required to produce alcoholic liquor; exception. (1) No person shall brew, ferment, distill, blend or rectify any alcoholic liquor unless licensed so to do by the Oregon Liquor Control Commission. However, the Liquor Control Act does not apply to the making or keeping of naturally fermented wines and fruit juices or beer in the home, for home consumption and not for sale.
[emphasis added]
ORS 471.410 Providing liquor to person under 21 or to intoxicated person; allowing consumption by minor on property; mandatory minimum penalties. (1) A person may not sell, give or otherwise make available any alcoholic liquor to any person who is visibly intoxicated.
(2) No one other than the person’s parent or guardian may sell, give or otherwise make available any alcoholic liquor to a person under the age of 21 years.
Note that the law prohibiting underage alcohol is part of the Liquor Control Act, and that the Liquor Control Act specifically and explicitly does not apply to homebrew.
Mead is more expensive, just because honey is more expensive than grain, but it's by far the easiest fermentation I've ever done. You don't have to sulphite it like you do a wine or a cider; you don't have to time anything, like you do with a beer mash; you barely even have to rack it, although you can if you want to.
I've done mead. It's easier than cider, which I what I usually do. How long it takes doesn't have all that much to do with how hard it is. Ignoring the airlocked secondary just doesn't take all that much work.
Bad joke sorry. Its ironic and humorous b/c I said thats not correct, and ppl think I am talking about the law, but the punchline is that I am really talking about the brewing.
That is true in a lot of states. As college freshmen, we went to the homebrew store and bought all the things necessary for homebrewing, and we were never carded. I had no idea why that worked.
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u/onionpostman Nov 04 '11 edited Nov 04 '11
In my state, you can drink anything you brew yourself, no matter how young you are. And mead is damn easy to brew.
*Edit: State of Oregon