I can be a lazy sonofabitch, sadly. I let something sit for a while, because I'm too autistic (not literally) to do things in a sensible and linear fashion.
Well, what do you know, it turned out good anyway.
I just turned a gallon of store-bought juice into actually fucking delicious 14%+ ABV fruit wine.
Tastes a fair bit like a brandy. And very on-brand for my current piratical mood.
I. MADE. GOOD. BOOZE.
Get on my level, scrubs.
Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me.
Imagine unironically speaking like a zoomer.
Imagine.
For real though good job. I've only made a beer from a kit the fam got me for xmas a few years back during the coof but that turned out ok, I know wine can be a lot more sensitive.
Again, I wasn't even trying to brag. If anything, I think beer is a lot more intensive than wine. Wine you just kind of do the thing and let it sit. Beer you've got heating, and carbonation, hopping, and all kinds of things.
A decent beer is, I think at least, more impressive than a decent wine.
At this point, that's a phrase that a 30 year old would use, not even a 21 year old.
"Fire" as a euphemism has been around at least 20 years. It's not a zoomer thing. Or if it is, they didn't invent it.
I'm 40+ and I say fire, fuck you.
I've been making mead for...7 or 8 years now I think. It's usually better than anything I can buy in the store. Wine is a hell of a lot harder to not fuck up though, so good job on that. It's always been a mad gamble when I've attempted it.
Saw a Max Miller Tasting History YT vid recently where he made black spiced mead and talked about how mead fell out of favor in medieval England as monasteries began to close because monks and their apiaries were the main source of honey.
Mead is 200% on my list. Then again, it has been on my list for almost two years.
Before I hit up mead, though, I want to do some cider. I've got some apple juice and some yeast. Now that I broke through my lethargy, maybe I'll finally do something with it, and make it happen.
I'd love to take credit, but it's literally Juice + Sugar + Yeast + Time = Potentially Delicious Alcohol. It wasn't my skill that made it work, or anything, baka. I just did the thing. And it worked. Maybe I got lucky.
This does get me thinking, though. An IRL meetup would be interesting.
One of the best things I've ever made was a cyser, which is a mead fermented with apple cider. It was sweet like a unfermented cider but also like 10% alcohol.
I think each of the two yeast manufacturers sell a "sweet mead" yeast which is designed to top off a bit below a wine yeast, so you can get some residual sweetness.
For cysers I tend to default to the ale yeast US-05. It always finishes out pretty smooth and is rated for 9% so you get those residual sugars to keep if from going completely dry.
I've used that formula enough with sufficiently varied outcomes that I can attest that there is something more to it when it comes to wine. Mead is dirt easy though.
My understanding with wine is the specific strain of yeast makes a big difference with wine and that's why just using bread machine yeast or rolling the dice on wild yeast might go badly. Also you have to be careful with sanitation because you don't want bacteria to get into your batch and screw it up.
I've had three big crowd pleasing flavors I've cultivated over the years. A simple cinnamon mead is pretty easy and consistently turns out drinkable. The next step up from that is to straight up create a batch of homemade cider and use that as the base for a mead in place of water. Then I've got the most labor intensive flavor: Kiwi mead. It takes forever to actually prep the kiwis but it is worth it when it's finally ready to drink.
I've been brewing beer from hand crafted home made wort for a while now. When I bought this new house, it had a full wet bar in the basement. So the natural thing to do was to buy a refrigerated keg, a commerical CO2 canister and rig my own tap. So now I have custom wort hand crafted beer... on tap, at my own home bar. The next order of business will be to find a way to custom mill the handle and make a custom label to put on it.
Living the dream.
I've been brewing beer for several years. We'll I had been, but haven't for some while. I think I will. 👍🏾
Heck, yeah, get it, champ!
AHHHHHHHHH!!!
LOL
I'd make fun and accuse OP of being Cobes, but I've seen how he types, and this is clearly done by someone with two front facing eyes.
I literally don't know what that means, and search didn't help me.
Thanks, I think/hope.
Not OP, but pretty sure he's referring to a Kiwifarms lolcow King Cobra who is a bugeyed American who streams, plays guitar, drinks and makes gross culinary fare.
KingCobraJFS. A lulcow who infamously makes some of the most vile food hacks and """mead""" you will ever see. He also has a really bad lazy eye. So yes, it was a compliment.
Back when I was college aged, and hung out with college going people, we would make wine from juice all the time. At any given time at least one person in my social circle would have a few gallons going. The results were never consistent and not always tasty. So, awesome you made something good!
We figured we were saving money but at the time we could also buy a case of local glass bottle beer for 10-15 bucks. This was around 2006.
Real chads don't even drink.
Get on my level with my constantly functioning brain and my extra money, bitch.
I didn't drink for like a decade.
But, what can I say, I like whiskey, and I like brewing my own stuff too.
That said, I'll never look down on people for not drinking. In fact, I respect the hell out of that.
Not drinking is a big power move, not even joking. Drinking alcohol is easy, fast fun, but not healthy or productive.
So, legitimately, respect. I'm still happy with how my brew turned out, though.
I'm glad it turned out good for you, my nigga. The problem with never drinking is never getting a taste for it to make any of it taste better than piss. So if it tastes good to you and its fun, that's all that matters.
I'll just keep raw dogging life. I don't even take more than a day or so's worth of my pain killers after surgery I'm so anti- anything.
Perhaps now you can work on your speech, and vocabulary.
"Nigga" is not a real word, it's you speaking like a nigger.
It amuses me to speak like a monkey, and I will continue to do so whenever the whim takes me.
We're taking it back.
I get it, and I respect it.
Drinking to get drunk: beta cuck behavior.
Drinking to enjoy peaty, woody goodness, in moderation to avoid intoxicating effects: just fine.
I'll cheers to that plan.
3d print an airlock.
Buy pure apple juice in 2L containers.
Drill hole in lid, insert airlock.
Add 1 heaping tbsp of any kind of baking yeast.
Replace lid, and wait one week.
Cider!
First batch of beer I made was in the dorm kitchen freshmen year of college. Just one of those liquid malt extract kit deals fermented in a 5 gallon bucket. And it smelled so strongly while it was fermenting the only place I could keep it without attracting unwanted attention was my car. By some miracle it turned out OK.
About 2010 or so I got on a kick making wines out of store bought juices. I think I still have a bottle of some Welch's grape juice wine I made back then sitting in the fridge. It's either vinegar or amazing.
Keep it up bro, that is a useful apocalypse skill.
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