Drink


A word on alcohol production

Let me first explain that I am an unrepentant lush. I am a very busy and (usually) productive guy. By the time I get home at night I am usually ready for a few drinks to take the edge off. The problem is, thats a pretty expensive habit to have when you earn as little as I do. Fortunately, producing your own alcohol at home can cost as little as $8 for a 3 gallon batch.
The benefits of making your own booze go far beyond the financial however. I also find great pleasure and enjoyment in producing my own alcoholic beverages. I have lots of fun experimenting with and creating beverages I wouldn't have any way to purchase in the store. I've made ginger wines and fermented mojitos, cranberry wines and hard apple ciders from wild organic yeasts. Getting started is actually quite simple. The most important part is learning good sanitation practices, without that, you will undoubtedly end up with some rather foul tasting swill that can give you a pretty nasty headache (although rumours of blindness and death are greatly exaggerated. Most of these were the result of prohibition era rhetoric and people drinking denatured industrial alcohol).
Where to start

In my experience, what puts off most would be home brewers is spending a lot of cash and time on a home brew kit or individually purchased malt extracts, hops, and brewing equipment, and then brewing a pretty mediocre beer. What often seems to happen is that people will make something that resembles beer, is alcoholic, but just doesn't quite come up to par with spending $7-8 for a six pack at the local corner store. It's a shame that most home brewers aren't willing to start small when it comes to fermentation.
To put it simply, Fermentation is merely the process of using yeast to convert sugars into alcohols. Sugars come in a multitude of forms. In the case of beer, sugars are the result of converting starches from grains (usually barley or wheat) into fermentable sugars. In the case of malt extracts, this has already been done for you. Malt extracts come in both liquid and dry, powdered forms. More experienced home brewers prefer to use whole grains as it gives them far more options for adding flavors and distinct qualities to their beers. However, this requires very precise temperature controls in order to properly harvest all the sugars in the grain. Hops have very little to do with producing alcohol, but are mostly there for flavor although originally hops were added as a preservative.
Anyway, there are countless resources and forums about home brewing out there, it is not my intention to teach anyone how to brew beer as there are plenty of people out there more qualified than myself to do just that. What I hope to do in this section is to talk a little about my experience producing inexpensive, drinkable beverages that require a minimum of technical skill or specialized equipment. For about $40-50 you can get together the necessary equipment to make endless batches of drink for far less than what you will pay in the store for uninspired, corporate brewed swill containing all kinds of nasty industrial crap.

What do I need?

People seem to think that you need all kinds of expensive, specialized equipment to make your own alcohol, and while its true that this kind of equipment exists, its not strictly necessary if you are willing to start small. I don't want to discourage anyone from setting out to become a top notch brewer, making really great home brew is possible and if you want to devote a lot of time and energy learning the skills to do it, more power to you. If however, you just want to make something thats drinkable, cheap, and gives you a little room to experiment and play with different ingredients, I suggest you avoid beers to start, which require massive heavy bottomed kettles, bottlers, hydrometers and all kinds of gadgets and additives to fine tune your flocculence and measure your specific gravity. The easiest (and cheapest) thing I have found to make is a simple hard cider or apple wine.
Before we get into recipes though, lets talk equipment. The very first thing you need is a fermenter. These come in many shapes and sizes. The first thing you need is an airtight, non corruptible (that is to say no cheap plastics with BPA) container to ferment in. I strongly recommend purchasing a container made specifically for brewing in. I have seen people making wines in plastic trash cans with holes drilled into the lids, used plastic juice containers, glass jars with the lids slightly ajar...all kinds of things. Through my own experimentation, Ive found that buying a fermenter from a home brew supply shop, while more expensive, is worth the money when you consider all the ruined batches you'll be throwing out because of contamination or because your last batch has leached into the non food grade plastic in your trash can, or your plastic juice bottle explodes in the closet, making your girlfriend complain for years about how you made her clothes smell like partially fermented peach juice (learn from my mistakes folks!). The other benefit of buying something specifically made for brewing in is that there are already a wide range of products that are designed specifically to be used in conjunction with that fermenter, and as you grow your operation, its easy enough to add more components.
There are really two main types of fermenters on the market: glass carboys and plastic better bottles. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Carboys are a bit more expensive, and while glass is an amazing material for so many reasons, it has the inconvenient attribute of having the capacity to crack, shatter, and scratch. Plus, lugging around a 6 gallon glass carboy filled with liquid can put a little strain on your back. Still, glass is great, its more environmentally friendly, easy to clean, and it's stood the test of time.
Your other commercially available option is to buy a better bottle. These are relatively new on the market. Its a fermenter that is made of a specially formulated BPA free plastic that is designed to withstand the rigors of home brewing. The nice thing about these is that they are about 20-30% cheaper than carboys (between $20-25 vs. $30-40 depending on size), and they are super lightweight making shifting your brews around a lot easier. Plus, unlike glass, they are incredibly difficult to break. The only danger I have read about is scratching the insides while cleaning with a bottle brush, but I understand that can be an issue with glass as well. Personally, I use better bottles, they fit my apartment better (the 3 gallon size is more rectangular in nature, making them good space savers) on top of having the above mentioned advantages. This is really a personal choice though, I wouldn't discourage anyone from going with glass. Both types tend to come in a 3 gallon, 5 gallon and 6 gallon size. Most of the home brewing community seems to go for 5 gallon batches. Most recipes for beer are 5 gallons, and malt extracts and other ingredients tend to be sold in sizes appropriate for 5 gallons. However, If all you are doing is fermenting juices or other types of sugars, this doesn't really matter as much, you can make as much or as little as you care to.
So, if you've chosen your fermenter, you'll need some fittings. What you need is a bung (the rubber stopper that fits in the top) and an air lock (a nifty little gadget that allows gases to escape while prohibiting foreign contaminants from getting in). Both can be purchased very inexepensively. A single bung and accompanying airlock will run you just over $2. You have two options for airlocks, a three piece and a double bubble. The double bubble has a serpentine design with two bubbles connected by a u-shaped tube that one fills with liquid to keep air out, but allows gases to escape. Think about how a toilet works (if you've ever bothered to look). The three piece is a little more difficult to describe. Basically, its a little reservoir with a tube sticking up through the middle and a little cap that sits on top, settling in to the liquid in the reservoir, prohibiting any air from getting under its sides and down the tube. Both kinds of airlocks work fine but I tend to prefer the double bubble as it has fewer little pieces to lose and it tends to handle blow off better. Thats for another discussion....Just get an airlock. They only cost a buck so you can get one of each if you want and see which you like better
At this point, you have everything you need to convert sugars into alcohols in a sanitary environment. However, you will need a couple other items in order to successfully complete the process of making a drinkable product. When yeast eats sugar, it excretes alcohol. Eventually, the environment that your yeast is living in (i.e. your booze) becomes too toxic for the yeast to survive (yes folks, alcohol is a toxin! Luckily for us we are much, much larger than yeast and are able to metabolize that alcohol in reasonable amounts without killing ourselves). As the yeast goes about eating and excreting and then dying in its own excrement (mmm...doesn't making booze sound so TASTY!) it develops a sediment at the bottom of your fermenter, kind of a murky brown slime that you really don't want in your finished product. Getting your nice clean booze out of your fermenter without getting it mixed up with that primordial ooze at the bottom is tricky business. For this you will need an auto-siphon. These run about $8, and are pretty much a necessary part of your operation. Essentially, an auto siphon is a glass tube with a smaller glass tube inside with a rubber widget on the end that creates suction as you draw it up through the first tube, sucking your booze up like soda from a straw. Ever hear of someone siphoning gas out of a car by sucking it up a tube with their mouth? Well in this case, we aren't worried about getting petrol in our mouths so much as getting our mouths (and all those nasty bacteria that live in them) in our alcohol. An auto-siphon allows you to do this in a sanitary way.
Speaking of sanitation, another vital component for anyone who wants to make alcohol is having a good sanitizer. There are several sanitizers on the market specifically for home brewing. USE ONE OF THESE. Do not think you can get away with just using a cap full of bleach. Bleach can cause all kinds of problems, the worst of which is a faint bleach flavor in your glass of cider or wine. Bleach can also corrode glass, causing microscopic cuts that will collect bacteria and other contaminants over time. Honestly, I don't know what its likely to do to a better bottle but I wouldn't recommend finding out. The only time you might want to use bleach is if you have been negligent about cleaning your fermenter and it needs a seriously brutal cleaning in order to evict a particularly rank crew of nasties that have developed after leaving some gunk in your fermenter for too long. This is easily avoided by rinsing everything thoroughly when you are done fermenting. Anyway, pick a sanitizer that works for you, follow the directions and you will be fine. I like to use LD Carlson's Easy Clean because I am a lazy sod and it does not require additional rinsing. Its really not too expensive. If you want to start small, an 8oz jar will cost just under $5. If you plan on doing a lot of brewing, I recommend buying a 5lb pail for around $18. it will last you many months.

Ok, so lets recap.

Fermenter: $30.00 (depending on size and material)
Bung: $1.50
Airlock: $1.00
Auto-siphon: $8.00
80z Easy Clean Sanitizer $5.00
$45.50 TOTAL

This should be everything you need to get started, the only exception being your yeast and fermentables! There are many purveyors of brewing supplies out there, you shouldn't have a hard time finding one online. If you are lucky enough to live in a decent sized city you will probably be able to find a shop that has knowledgeable, friendly staff that can help you through the shopping process (plus this way you can avoid shipping fees).