Home Brewing 101

Alcohol at Home: The Super Duper Basics 

By Megan

 

a small brew project

I had been considering doing my own home brew for a while, but I didn’t really get into it until recently.

All the research I did made home brewing sound intimidating and complicated, like you need a lot of equipment and a chemistry degree to do even the simplest brew.

The truth is people have been making alcohol since the dawn of time. Early humans certainly didn't have sanitizer, glass carboys or chemistry degrees! They credited this stuff to supernatural forces, so let's tap that old magic!

yep, that's a re-used Carlo Rossi bottle

Yeast is a fungus, it lives to eat sugar. Rather than letting this fungus sit around doing whatever it wants, like a lazy boyfriend, we've learned how to harness it's power and collect the fun things that it produces.

If you've ever left juice out overnight, it was probably started to breed yeast (when it turns sour and boozy or turn into vinegar).  This is the whole basis behind beer, wine, and mead. Even old fashioned sodas and fermented drinks like jun or kombucha are carbonated with the action of yeast (and other bacteria in the case of jun and 'bucha, but that's another post!).

For a one gallon batch of mead, beer, wine, or even soda, these are the things I would use:

·         A glass jug CLEAN

·         A rubber stopper that fits your jug and has a hole in it for...

·         An airlock

Depending on your recipe, you will need some additional equipment:

·         A stock pot

·         A strainer (the stronger the better)

·         A cotton drawstring bag

·         Stirring utensil (wood is preferable)

·         Sanitizer (Star San is what I recommend)

·         Siphon tube

·         Racking cane

·         Hydrometer and jar*

Rubber stopper, siphon tube, Star San, and capper

*Only if you're curious about what sort of ABV your boozy drinks end up with. I fermented things for almost a year before I bought one.

After everything has fermented you'll want bottles.

Swingtops are my favorite, because they have a reusable lid that's attached and can’t get lost. I've used a variety of recappable glass bottles, that originally had something fizzy in it, and been okay. To re-cap bottles that had a pry off cap, you can buy caps and a capper at your local home brew shop, or amazon.

I also have a bench capper, but I prefer my hand capper

For those curious preppers out there, come the apocalypse, you can very carefully pry a bottlecap open and use a capper to replace it, but I've only tested this a few times. Your results may vary...

Make sure your reused bottles originally came with something carbonated in them!! If you reuse something that wasn't designed to hold fizzy drinks and you put fizzy drinks in them, THEY CAN EXPLODE. Glass shrapnel is brutal stuff, don't waste time with bottles that aren't rated for pressure!

Megan’s first wine recipe:

Go get grapes. Oh, say, half a bucket full.

Get a clean pillowcase. Put the grapes in the pillowcase and then the whole thing in a bucket. Smash the grapes. Smoosh them till there's no whole grapes left. Now hang the pillowcase full of the smashed grape mess over the bucket and let it hang for a day. Squeeze it occasionally to get as much juice as you can out of it, it’s fun.

After the thing has drip dried for a day or so, most of the grape juice should be in the bucket. Pour it into a jug, stick the rubber stopper on, and attach the airlock. Let it sit for at least year, occasionally checking on the airlock to make sure it has water.

After a year, carefully pour it into swingtop bottles, leaving the sediment behind.

I recently opened the little sample bottle and shared some with a friend, who said it was "surprisingly decent" and "if you hadn't told me that, I wouldn't know this was made in a pillowcase."

I consider that a success!

You may notice, in this instance, I didn't add anything besides the grape juice to the jug. I let the natural yeasts in the fruit be the fermenting agent in this wine, but you can also buy specialty yeasts at brew shops or online. These commercial yeasts have been carefully bred or isolated by scientists to give the exact results you want. One type makes things smell like banana,  another type makes alcohol up to 22%, or you can get one that  ferments happily at a really cold temp, etc.

So now that I've given you the super duper basics of fermentation, go explore. Read some recipes, learn some more about the science, get excited. Later this week Laura and I will share a little about a specific ferment, a drink that's steeped in some ancient history and folklore: Mead!

(Okay so, I know one of you lovely readers knows more about this than I do. Did I seriously mess up some science somewhere? Care to expand on my first-grade-level explanation? Lemme know in the comments!)

~ Megan