Alcohol

Why?

In Canada, for a long time, the government owned a quasi-monopoly over the distribution of alcoholic beverages. They have no incentive to offer their product at competitive prices like in the US, which means my dreams of purchasing a 4$US gallon of bagged wine to wash down my 1$ whopper are shattered. This means that in order to get giga crossfaded daily without breaking the bank, we need to make our own hooch.

“But won’t you go blind?” I can hear you ask from across the hall. “Isn’t that dangerous?” The answer to both of those is no. Even distilling in small quantities is quite safe, assuming you know what you’re doing. Fermenting things into wine is foolproof.

A brief warning from someone who’s made a lot of repulsive-tasting alcohol

There’s no point in making 18% ABV kilju if nobody will drink it. Your disgusting 20% ABV, syrupy, barely-fermented, apple juice and piss-sulfur flavored swill will just end up down the sink. Be conservative with the ABV when making wine, because your drink will become more revolting the greater the ABV. A happy medium for “tastes like the juice I fermented it out of” and “pleasantly dry” is usually around ~7% for me.

What you need to understand to get started

Yeast is a cool fungus that does a lot of things. You may know about it’s most common application in the kitchen: eating sugar in your dough and releasing cO2, which makes your bread rise. That’s its aerobic (taking place in the presence of oxygen) chemical process. Its anaerobic (taking place with insufficient oxygen) chemical process produces cO2 and ethanol (that good shit) as a by-product.

When you want to make alcohol, it’s as simple as making sure this anaerobic process takes place. Feed the yeast, make sure the yeast is the only thing alive in your hooch, make sure no oxygen gets in, and deal with the cO2.

White sugar is probably the cheapest yeast food you’ll be able to buy. To make sure no oxygen gets in and that cO2 can get out, you need to fit your fermentation vessel with an airlock. This can be as primitive as resting the cap on top, or as complicated as a dollar two-piece airlock. If you don’t deal with cO2 correctly, you’ll have made a small pressure bomb full of booze.

Starting your first batch of hooch

The lowest effort recipe to follow to produce alcohol is the following: acquire a bottle of fruit juice (as large as you can find; check the ingredients, and purchase one without sulphites. I recommend apple). Pitch 1-2g/gallon of bread yeast directly into your juice. Do not transfer the juice to another container; it’s already pasteurized and sterile. This guarantees the yeast is the only thing alive in your brew. Place the cap atop, and give the bottle a light squeeze to ensure that cO2 can escape. Place the bottle in a dark place, and wait for it stop bubbling (typically 7-14 days depending on the amount of sugar in your fruit juice). Once it has stopped bubbling, carefully pour your fruit juice wine off the lees (the sandy by-product at the bottom of the bottle; this will give you diarrhea, headaches, and make you want to vomit… but it won’t kill you) into some sanitized container to age. If you don’t sanitize your container, you’re gambling as to whether or not your hooch will spoil.

The sugar in the apple juice is the food for the yeast, cO2 is heavier than air and will settle in the bottle (stopping oxygen from getting in, and creating your anaerobic environment), and excess cO2 will be pushed up and out of the bottle.

What’s my ABV?

You can estimate the ABV of your beverage by estimating the specific gravity of your solution, or by reading the specific gravity with a hydrometer. I’ve copy/pasted a formula from stackoverflow that will help you do that.

1) A simple way to calculate density
mass = x g of sugar + (y L of water*1000 mL/L*1g/mL)
1 g/mL = water density
Then measure the total volume (total mL) of the mix:
density = (x g of sugar + (y L of water * 1000 mL/L * 1g/mL))/(total mL)
answered May 21 '18 at 18:02 Gabriel F

If you want to actually know your SG instead of ballparking it, buy a hydrometer. I typically just estimate the amount of dissolved sugar (g/L) using the nutrition facts that exist on every Canadian food product, then plug that into any one of a number of online calculators like this one.

For example: say you have a 2L bottle of apple juice that contains 25g sugar/250mL serving. Your whole bottle is 8 servings, and 825g is 200g sugar in a 2L bottle. 200g sugar/2L = 100g/L. Online calculators estimate that to be about 5.06% ABV. Bread yeast will typically ferment up to 8-10%. Champagne yeast (EC-1118 is available at specialty stores for ~2$CAD/5g: enough to easily start 5 gallons of hooch per package) will ferment up to 18%. Dry active distiller’s yeast will easily ferment to 22%+ before slowing (not stopping), but will taste disgusting without additional cleaning agents. If you wanted to maximize the amount of booze in your bread yeast apple juice hooch, you would need to bring the dissolved sugar (g/L) to 194. 94g2L is 188g added sugar to bring your 2L of apple hooch to 10%. 18% ABV requires 343g sugar/L.

Hooching at scale: no longer buying booze

To start fermenting large batches of hooch, you need some small amount of equipment. A 5 or 6 gallon glass carboy, bleach or commercial sanitizer, cork and airlock, and food safe hose will be enough to get you started. I can’t recommend a bottle filler enough for the sake of completely avoiding spillage, but if you’re ok mopping cups of spilled booze off the floor you can skip it. Buy bottles if you’re uncomfortable with the idea of reusing commercial bottles (I would recommend flip-tops, or bottles of spirits with screw-on caps), or if you want your hooch to look fancy.

Assuming you start a new batch immediately after you finish the first one, you should have great difficulty drinking 2-3 gallons of wine a week, even split amongst two or three others.

A sample of some of my fermenting madness

Going turbo

Note: This is illegal in Canada. This is not an admission of guilt, but rather an observation of common historic practices. I do not advocate for anybody performing these actions.

Eventually, you will have built a sizeable backlog of mediocre-tasting hooch, and will be more open to experimentation. Turbo yeasts allow you to produce hooch that tastes like utter garbage (before being subjected to cleaning agents) very quickly: 5 gallons in 4-6 days. Tragically, this is a mere 21%: not nearly a spirit.

Freeze-concentration is a common and relatively safe practice, assuming you don’t deviate greatly from established processes. When you freeze-concentrate a liquid, you are separating water from the solution. This means that everything – trace fusel alcohols, ethanol, leftover flavorings, etc – will be concentrated. This can be observed in the historical case of eisbeir (freeze-concentrated beer) or applejack (freeze-concentrated apple cider).

Brewers would simply place their brew outside in the winter in wide, open-mouthed containers. Then, once solid blocks of ice formed, they would crack them with picks or hammers and pull them out. Whatever remained would be an ABV sufficiently potent to remain liquid in the temperatures of their harsh winter.

More modern practitioners might freeze their individual gallons of alcohol in a home chest freezer, then invert them and collect roughly half of the original volume of liquid over a long period of time (8-10 hours). Optimistically, we can assume that a 21% Vodkat fermented using dry active distiller’s yeast or turbo yeast from a 5-gallon sugar wash at 361g/L, bottled into individual gallon carboys, frozen individually, then had their original volume reduced via freeze concentration by half could be up to 42% ABV. It will likely be closer to 30%. They could use a hydrometer to get the actual figure. This near-spirit would contain much more fusel alcohol (poison) than anything they could produce naturally, as it concentrated everything that was in the original product. It is known for bestowing wicked hangovers upon its imbibers.