The essence of being a Mad Scientist on a Budget is fascination with the little things. Whether it is trying to find the answer to a scientific question or making an exotic rocket, it never takes very much time, effort or money. But the exciting answer or gadget should be useful or interesting to the average person.
Today's subject is alcohol, booze, fire water. Whether you are a P.O.W. in a World War II prison camp or a survivor of the Zombie apocalypse, the cool kid in the group is the one who can make the hooch. It turns out that it is easy and inexpensive.
A documentary on the Roaring 20's (1920's) when alcohol was illegal caught my fascination when it was said that people not only made gin in their bathtubs (scary) but also made wine. Prohibition wine won't make you go blind. All you need is yeast, sugar and fruit juice. So I bought what I needed and turned an unused bathroom in my house into a Mad Scientist's lab for a couple of months.
1. Clear fruit juice. Clear as in there is no pulp. You can drink wine with pulp but it doesn't look right. My mango and peach experiments were failures because they had lots of pulp.
2. Yeast. You can use bread yeast from the grocery store but it will yield a lower alcohol content. It you don't reach 10% then you'll need to drink the wine within a couple of months. If the alcohol content is 10% or higher you can bottle it and put it on a shelf like store bought wine. Champagne yeast and Distiller's yeast are commonly used in wine making. I bought a pound of distiller's years off Amazon for $12. I only use one tablespoon per batch of wine.
3. Sugar. The kind of sugar will effect the flavor. Common table sugar (Cane sugar) is a popular choice. You typically use between a half cup (dry wine) to a cup (sweet wine) of sugar per quart of juice.
4. An airlock. Buy this first. They cost between $3 and $4 each. Buy two to four so you can have more than one wine experiment going at the same time. Trust me. It takes five minutes to mix up the contents then five week of waiting. The first week watching the bubbling on the airlocks and taking in the aromatic scent of fruity bread is interesting. The following month, impatiently dying to taste the result can be agonizing.
You will probably break down and have a taste every few days. Following the changing flavor of the wine can be educational but risks contamination. Contamination never stops a true Mad Scientist! After all, the bottle of juice only cost about $3. If it goes bad, throw it away and start over! This is why I recommend having a couple bottles going at the same time.
If you don't want to buy an air lock you usually can get away with it by putting the bottle's cap on loosely so the gas pressure doesn't build up.
5. Sterilized bottles. The trick is to use inexpensive plastic bottle rated for food. Water bottles, especially from the dollar store are terrific. They are sterile. Just dump out the water before being used. Likewise, the juice bottle itself is sterile. The important detail is that the air lock and it's bung fit the opening of all of the bottles. Again, buy the airlock first.
6. A funnel. This is a $2 item at a grocery store. It's $1 at a dollar store. I also bought a reusable coffee filter for $4 at the grocery store. The filter comes in handy once in a while even though it won't filter out the individual yeast particles. Letting the yeast settle over time is how we remove it.
7. The temperature of the room needs to be between 70 and 90 degrees.
Blackberry Wine
The easiest to get right are the non-grape wines. I have been happy with Blackberry, Cherry and Apple. The only challenge is figuring out how much sugar to add to the juice. As a general rule, a half cup of sugar per cup of juice results in a dry wine. A cup of sugar per per quart gives you a sweet wine. You can always make the wine sweeter later on but can't make it less sweet. The video steps you through the five week adventure.
Apple Cider and Apple Wine
I found that I liked the dry Apple wine the best. It struck me like a white wine suitable to drink with dinner. Watch the video and in 4 minutes you'll be an expert on the subject.
White Wine
This is where you discover that there is a reason why some types of grapes are used for wine and others for drinking with your breakfast. They have different qualities. But to understand what these qualities are, a curious [person has t experience them for one's self. Having done this a couple of time, this has to be slightly sweet to mask some of the deficiencies of these mystery white grapes.
Red Wine and Fake Merlot
Wine from Concorde grape is a challenge. You certainly get a wine you can drink. In this video I make red that then take an extra step to try to turn it into a wine you might want to drink. One trick is to add brandy to turn the red into Port Wine. Another is to add oak wood chips for a week or two. The oak flavor gives a wonderful sophisticated quality you'd find with a bottle of Merlot. I bought the bag of Hungarian Oak chips (for wine making) for $10 off Amazon.
Tricks & tips
1. As an option, you can add a teaspoon or two of Yeast nutrients. This helps is you can't seem to get the yeast to stay active long enough to give you the alcohol content you desire.
2. With some juices, CO2 gas stays suspended in the wine. This hurts the flavor. A $11 degassing wand and a reversible electric screwdriver can get the gas out of the wine. I needed this when I made wine out of cran-grape juice. If you try this flavor I recommend adding the yeast nutrients.
3. You need to label the bottles with the date and maybe the flavor and how much sugar you used. These are the stickers I use.
4. The yeast had trouble settling completely out of the white wine. There are a lot of clarifiers. Sparkolloid is a type of volcanic ash. It worked will for me. After the white wine settled for 4 weeks it still tasted of yeast. I added this and let it settle for an extra week.
5. The wine is going bad if it turns sour. Your first clue is the smell. So, taste it. It it taste's sour give it a week or two. It it still taste's sour then it has gone bad. But it it doesn't taste sour, it is the yeast that has settled at the bottom that has spoiled. Racking the wine can fix this. Racking is slowly pouring the wine into a new bottle, not disturbing the settled yeast. Throw away the settled yeast and sadly some of your wine that it is suspended in.
6. Freeze distilling is an old technique to up the alcohol content. The idea is that water freezes before the alcohol. Partially freeze the wine and throw away the ice. Makes sense but the Wikipedia says it doesn't work. So which is it? I had to give it a try myself. I did discover that the wine sometimes tastes better.
Trivia
Question: What is yeast?
Answer: A fungus. It eats sugar and excretes alcohol and carbon dioxide (C02).
Today's subject is alcohol, booze, fire water. Whether you are a P.O.W. in a World War II prison camp or a survivor of the Zombie apocalypse, the cool kid in the group is the one who can make the hooch. It turns out that it is easy and inexpensive.
A documentary on the Roaring 20's (1920's) when alcohol was illegal caught my fascination when it was said that people not only made gin in their bathtubs (scary) but also made wine. Prohibition wine won't make you go blind. All you need is yeast, sugar and fruit juice. So I bought what I needed and turned an unused bathroom in my house into a Mad Scientist's lab for a couple of months.
1. Clear fruit juice. Clear as in there is no pulp. You can drink wine with pulp but it doesn't look right. My mango and peach experiments were failures because they had lots of pulp.
2. Yeast. You can use bread yeast from the grocery store but it will yield a lower alcohol content. It you don't reach 10% then you'll need to drink the wine within a couple of months. If the alcohol content is 10% or higher you can bottle it and put it on a shelf like store bought wine. Champagne yeast and Distiller's yeast are commonly used in wine making. I bought a pound of distiller's years off Amazon for $12. I only use one tablespoon per batch of wine.
3. Sugar. The kind of sugar will effect the flavor. Common table sugar (Cane sugar) is a popular choice. You typically use between a half cup (dry wine) to a cup (sweet wine) of sugar per quart of juice.
4. An airlock. Buy this first. They cost between $3 and $4 each. Buy two to four so you can have more than one wine experiment going at the same time. Trust me. It takes five minutes to mix up the contents then five week of waiting. The first week watching the bubbling on the airlocks and taking in the aromatic scent of fruity bread is interesting. The following month, impatiently dying to taste the result can be agonizing.
You will probably break down and have a taste every few days. Following the changing flavor of the wine can be educational but risks contamination. Contamination never stops a true Mad Scientist! After all, the bottle of juice only cost about $3. If it goes bad, throw it away and start over! This is why I recommend having a couple bottles going at the same time.
If you don't want to buy an air lock you usually can get away with it by putting the bottle's cap on loosely so the gas pressure doesn't build up.
5. Sterilized bottles. The trick is to use inexpensive plastic bottle rated for food. Water bottles, especially from the dollar store are terrific. They are sterile. Just dump out the water before being used. Likewise, the juice bottle itself is sterile. The important detail is that the air lock and it's bung fit the opening of all of the bottles. Again, buy the airlock first.
6. A funnel. This is a $2 item at a grocery store. It's $1 at a dollar store. I also bought a reusable coffee filter for $4 at the grocery store. The filter comes in handy once in a while even though it won't filter out the individual yeast particles. Letting the yeast settle over time is how we remove it.
7. The temperature of the room needs to be between 70 and 90 degrees.
Ready? Lets make some wine!
Blackberry Wine
The easiest to get right are the non-grape wines. I have been happy with Blackberry, Cherry and Apple. The only challenge is figuring out how much sugar to add to the juice. As a general rule, a half cup of sugar per cup of juice results in a dry wine. A cup of sugar per per quart gives you a sweet wine. You can always make the wine sweeter later on but can't make it less sweet. The video steps you through the five week adventure.
Making Blackberry Wine
Apple Cider and Apple Wine
I found that I liked the dry Apple wine the best. It struck me like a white wine suitable to drink with dinner. Watch the video and in 4 minutes you'll be an expert on the subject.
Making Apple Cider and Apple Wine
White Wine
This is where you discover that there is a reason why some types of grapes are used for wine and others for drinking with your breakfast. They have different qualities. But to understand what these qualities are, a curious [person has t experience them for one's self. Having done this a couple of time, this has to be slightly sweet to mask some of the deficiencies of these mystery white grapes.
Making White Wine
Red Wine and Fake Merlot
Wine from Concorde grape is a challenge. You certainly get a wine you can drink. In this video I make red that then take an extra step to try to turn it into a wine you might want to drink. One trick is to add brandy to turn the red into Port Wine. Another is to add oak wood chips for a week or two. The oak flavor gives a wonderful sophisticated quality you'd find with a bottle of Merlot. I bought the bag of Hungarian Oak chips (for wine making) for $10 off Amazon.
Red and Fake Merlot
Tricks & tips
1. As an option, you can add a teaspoon or two of Yeast nutrients. This helps is you can't seem to get the yeast to stay active long enough to give you the alcohol content you desire.
2. With some juices, CO2 gas stays suspended in the wine. This hurts the flavor. A $11 degassing wand and a reversible electric screwdriver can get the gas out of the wine. I needed this when I made wine out of cran-grape juice. If you try this flavor I recommend adding the yeast nutrients.
3. You need to label the bottles with the date and maybe the flavor and how much sugar you used. These are the stickers I use.
4. The yeast had trouble settling completely out of the white wine. There are a lot of clarifiers. Sparkolloid is a type of volcanic ash. It worked will for me. After the white wine settled for 4 weeks it still tasted of yeast. I added this and let it settle for an extra week.
5. The wine is going bad if it turns sour. Your first clue is the smell. So, taste it. It it taste's sour give it a week or two. It it still taste's sour then it has gone bad. But it it doesn't taste sour, it is the yeast that has settled at the bottom that has spoiled. Racking the wine can fix this. Racking is slowly pouring the wine into a new bottle, not disturbing the settled yeast. Throw away the settled yeast and sadly some of your wine that it is suspended in.
The wine smells sour!
6. Freeze distilling is an old technique to up the alcohol content. The idea is that water freezes before the alcohol. Partially freeze the wine and throw away the ice. Makes sense but the Wikipedia says it doesn't work. So which is it? I had to give it a try myself. I did discover that the wine sometimes tastes better.
Freeze Distilling Experiment
Trivia
Question: What is yeast?
Answer: A fungus. It eats sugar and excretes alcohol and carbon dioxide (C02).
