Spirits vs wine making and other assorted questions

[ibglowin]

[Obi-Wan Kenobi/ON]

These aren't the drunken fools your looking for......

You can go about your business.......

Move along.......

[Obi-Wan Kenobi/OFF]

 

[WI_Wino]

To be technical it would be like .18*750= 135 ml pure alcohol..

Where as a single beer at 5% abv and 354 ml is 17.7 ml pure alcohol. Thus 135/17.7 yields 7.62711864406 beers. This is assuming the beer is of actually 5% and not natty light lol. BTW not a bad guess Wino!

Honestly, if you want to make hooch go make hooch, but for gods sake don't call it wine lol. I had my days of hooch making, but I have moved on and I have not looked back since.

Your math has an implicit assumption of no errors and a number of significant digits unheard of when talking about milliliters.

Let's do a quick error analysis:

yeast alcohol tolerance: +-2%

alcohol % in beer, let's give AB/MillerCoors the doubt: +-.2%

actual volume in beer can, again the pros have this pretty well established: +-.5%

actual volume in wine bottle filled by amateur winemaker: +1% to -10%

actual volume of wine consumed before drunkard knocks it over: -30% to 0%

So after I dust off my BA in physics we end up with something like

After solving for x, we get 7-8 beers

QED

 

[seth8530]

Heh heh, very clever. But did you remember to integrate over the whole volume of the beer?

 

[WI_Wino]

damn. I knew I missed something.

 

[CBell]

Alright. Wine-makers don't appreciate hooch makers. We ALL get it. But if we help the kiddo get some info now, and get into this, he will want a better product, join our lovely little gathering, and ask intelligent questions. So let's do that for him, shall we?

I started out a year ago making hooch, progressed to DB/SP and variants, progressed to cheap kits, and am now considering purchasing juice buckets/skins kits.

So, to make something that will get everybody messed up cheap(since that seems to be your current end-game right now)

1.Get a gallon of apple juice (or whatever juice)
2.Take a glass, and drink it, or give it to a child to drink.
3.You just created airspace.
4. Fill the airspace with sugar. Couple of cups. Measuring doesn't matter for these purposes.
5. Put the top on your container and shake it real good. blender is obsolete. Just more dishes to wash.
5.5 If you want to be able to calculate your ABV, use your hydrometer here
6. Add yeast. You want Lalvin EC 1118. It makes alcohol up to and occasionally exceeding 18 percent, and is very forgiving of having a very crappy work environment.
7. Do not shake after you add the yeast, it is hydrating and doing it's thing. It will FIND the sugar.
8. Cover your bottle with a towel, and stir daily for the first couple of days.
9. When fermentation slows down (no visible foaming anymore) put an airlock on. The cheapest airlock is a condom. My personal favorite ghetto airlock is taking the original cap from the juice and just leaving it partially unscrewed. TADA!
10. When you can stick your hydrometer in the bottle and it reads at less than 1.000, you're golden.

You now have dry wine to get messed up with. Do yourself a favor and grab a hose and siphon off the 2 inches of dead yeast that are invariably sitting at the bottom of your bottle. This will make you not get headaches and diarrhea. Which you may still get. That's sometimes the price of hooch.

Once you separate from the sediment, you can
1. Drink
2. Kmeta and sorbate so that you can backsweeten your wine (not drink it dry)
3. Kmeta and bottle dry.
4. Pour down the sink and try again.

Total Cost: $5 for 1 gallon of apple juice, at the most ridiculous eastern prices. $1.29 for yeast, $2 for sugar, and you've got 5 wine bottles worth of alcohol for less than 9 dollars. less than 2 buck chuck
And as an aside, to make a smaller batch of Dragon's Blood, yes, you want to take those division skills you learned in 4th grade and use them like they're going out of style.

Night all, and drink on!

 

[sour_grapes]

Heh heh, very clever. But did you remember to integrate over the whole volume of the beer?

I would try to add something clever here, but the humor would just be a fraction too derivative.

 

[DaveL]

Make the Db. 5 gallons. You'll like it. It will take 30-45 days. As soon as you dump it from the bucket to the carboy start another batch or you'll regret it. ingredients cost less than $2 a bottle. Start collecting bottles from local restaurant. Wineries having festivals will give you empties by the truckload. Don't cork screw cap bottle throw them out. Otherwise the bottles will be your most expensive ingredient.
Just so you know several of these individuals offering you free advice are not just home brewers but owners of wineries and vineyards sharing information and gaining knowledge just as the rest of us do. These people will help you accomplish whatever your goal is just show some respect as these 500 word replies do take time which they do not have to give as there are plenty of other threads available.
Good luck with the cheap buzz. Be careful though a endless supply of cheap alcohol can lead to the hospital. I know this from experience when I was much younger and in search of the cheap buzz.

 

[JohnT]

I find it hard to stay silent. Please forgive, it's the Hungarian in me.

I grew up with classic winemaking at the center of my family. I do not look down on "Hooch" makers. There are those that make both skeeter pee (myself included) and DB.

What I find a little offensive is that you assume that the goal is alcohol. believe me, getting drunk is NOT the primary goal of members here. The primary goal is making something that you personally like. We more experienced members spend a lot of time to help and guide others in achieving this goal.

Why do we do it? Simply because we found so much joy in this artform that we want other to experience that same joy.

here are dozens of members here that create their art on shoestring budgets. They manage to make something that they are proud of and want to keep, store, and savor.

I say all of this to simply make you aware of our mindsets. Hearing "I want to get drunk as fast as possible" will be offensive to a lot of us.

I am glad that you are part of this forum, but I think that you should have been a little more mindful of those that are trying to help you.

 

[Julie]

Thank you JohnT, those are my thoughts as well and I couldn't have said any better than you have.

 

[jswordy]

For me, it's not the wine so much I want as it is any easy to make alcoholic drink - just so happens wine is easiest and cheapest to make - even if it's just an alcohol infused mixture of colored sugar water.

Sorry if that offends some hard core wine lovers.. on second thought.. heck no, I won't apologies for that.

My goal is to make my own alcoholic drink to keep the house supplied 24/7 so I won't run out. I plan to figure out the best materials to use so in the long run it works out to be cheaper than any alcohol I could buy in the store.

I understand completely. Here you go:

-- 4 cans Welch's concord concentrate per gallon of water
-- Add sugar to reach 1.100-1.150 specific gravity reading on a hydrometer (buy one for $10). That's usually about 1-1/4 pounds per gallon.
-- 1 red Irish potato, peeled, per 5 gallons made
-- Yeast (RC212 works good but any wine yeast or even bread yeast will work)

Place everything in a bucket. Mix very well with nonmetallic spoon. This is called the must. Sprinkle yeast packet on top. Cover with a cloth or towel.

Stir morning and night every day. After 5 days, siphon contents to a carboy. Allow to settle. Siphon off less back into bucket. Clean carboy, siphon back to clean carboy. Do this until wine is clear, then put it in a clear carboy and stir it well to remove excess CO2, wait a day or two, then bottle. It may take 1-3 months to get clear and stable enough to bottle. Do not be hasty in bottling, it will cause the bottles to explode from CO2 gas production.

There should be residual sugar in this wine, as the yeast will give up before all sugar is consumed. This is drinkable right away and improves to a year. if you find used bottles at a recycler and you watch your prices on the Welch's, you can make 25 bottles of this (5 gallons) at a cost below $2 a bottle.

If you want to go a bit nicer, use potassium metabisulfite to sanitize everything you use, and use 1/4 tsp of it in the must you make, then wait 12-24 hours before adding your yeast.

One bottle will get a heavy drinker smashed. It may take a bottle and a half or even 2 to smash a true alcoholic. So your buzz costs about $3-$4 a party. Even taking the 911 with Steel Reserve isn't that cheap, and the Welch's wine is better for you.

Once I can prove to myself that I can do it, I'll have cheaper bottles as a standard and then i'll have breathing room to experiment with some better, more proper wine recipes.

You'll want to after you get your feet wet. Welch's wine is a "gateway drug" for many home winemakers. It gets them hooked on the process and the fascination of winemaking. The next step, after you begin to realize it is indeed more than alcohol infused colored sugar water, is to up the quality. You might be able to do that by finding free grapes locally or buying them cheap from a vineyard. Or perhaps you will graduate to a cheapo kit, then onward after that.

The thing is, even if you spend $100 for a kit, you will still have only about $4 a bottle in the wine. But that wine would sell for $15 a bottle in the store.

So you are correct, it is cheaper to make your own, no matter what quality level you try to attain. I still make Welch's, even though I make a lot of quality and sweetness levels now.

UNDER EDIT: I did not see CBell's post and the others or I would have saved myself a lot of typing.

 

[ShelleyDickison]

-- 4 cans Welch's concord concentrate per gallon of water -- Add sugar to reach 1.100-1.150 specific gravity reading on a hydrometer (buy one for $10). That's usually about 1-1/4 pounds per gallon. -- 1 red Irish potato, peeled, per 5 gallons made -- Yeast

I don't understand why you add a potato.

 

[jswordy]

-- 4 cans Welch's concord concentrate per gallon of water -- Add sugar to reach 1.100-1.150 specific gravity reading on a hydrometer (buy one for $10). That's usually about 1-1/4 pounds per gallon. -- 1 red Irish potato, peeled, per 5 gallons made -- Yeast

I don't understand why you add a potato.

It's the redneck's cheap yeast nutrient. Only use a red tater, not a baking tater. A baker will disintegrate completely.

 

[JohnT]

JS,

Why is the room spinning?

 

[jswordy]

JS,

Why is the room spinning?

You and I are a lot alike in many ways and a lot different in others when it comes to wine.

I have known so very many people exactly like the JohnPhoenix, myself included. We start out cuz we want a cheap buzz. And it is cheap, mostly because the onerous taxes are removed from homemade product.

But then somewhere along the way we get hooked on what I like to call "yeast farming," and we advance to the point where we can appreciate that the flavor and quality of the stuff we are getting buzzed on makes a big difference in the experience.

That's why I always reply in the same tone to the folks like JohnPhoenix. If he gets started el cheap with the Welch's you love so much, I am sure he will move forward once he grows more confident of his techniques. He as much as said so in his post.

Frankly, I do not believe vinophiles who say they are in it just for the love of the grape, the flavors, etc. If you go to these large horizontal and vertical wine tastings, and I'm sure you have, people there are often completely inebriated by the end.

We all like to get drunk, it is just a matter of which excuses we apply to tell ourselves we aren't really doing that, is my take. If that were not the case, we'd be applying our energies to making better quality grape juices.

Yes, I make wines now that are in my own opinion many grades above what I made way back when I started (I fermented my first "wine" from Hi-C grape juice poured out of a can when I was 10). And yes, now I am entering some judged contests.

But I still primarily make drinker's wines and I still sit down with a bottle and make sure that bad boy is GONE almost every Friday night, and some Fridays, I drink two. As I have written before, it's a time machine in a bottle. Me likey!

 

[wineforfun]

Very well said Jim. You are always spot on.

I guess I am somewhat in the minority too. I don't make wine for the "love of it" or the "artform of the grape", etc.
I make it because I find it challenging. I am always looking for new things to do and that is how I got started into winemaking.
Now whether JohnPhoenix is for real or not, I understand that type of thinking as I was there once too. Just wanted to make something cheap, that would taste good and give me the buzz.
Shoot, I didn't even know if I would like doing this, so why did I want to spend/invest a ton of money up front (hence the reason I started off with a 1 gallon kit and making 1 gallon recipes to start).

So I personally take no offense with what he had to say. Everyone has their own opinions and reasons for doing this. And NONE of them are right or wrong.

I have progressed since starting a year ago and like to make something much better than I did in the beginning, but I will always have room in my cellar for plenty of Dave's DB and Jim's Welch's.

 

[Elmer]

Sure I can do that but what happens next week when I'm broke and out of everclear?

All of us here love our alcohol to some extent or we wouldn't drink it. If wine didn't have alcohol in it, none of us would be here. For me, it's not the wine so much I want as it is any easy to make alcoholic drink ......

Your logic baffles me. If you dont have money for a bottle of Everyclear (which is $15 at my local liquor store) than you would not have money for the ingredients to SP.

If you make wine and run out and have no money, you will be in same boat as if you bought a bottle and ran out of money.

If you are looking for a quick drunk, grab ever clear or do what my alcoholic uncle did drink rubbing alcohol or moutwash. Both cheap and potent. Dont worry folks he is 22 years in recovery.

Personally I dont drink my wine because it has alcohol.
If I am looking for an alcoholic fix I go right to the bottle of whiskey or make a Manhattan.
I drink beer for the taste as I do whiskey.

I consider my wine almost a form of art (my wife will tell you otherwise), and having a glass is enjoying the fruits of my effort.

If it was simply alcohol I was after my wines would be through the roof ABV. but there is no enjoyment in that. There is no flavor.

Please learn to distinguish between the need to enable a bender and hobby!

 

[jswordy]

Very well said Jim. You are always spot on.

H-e-e-e-e-ey ... yer not just saying that cuz I owe ya a bottle of wine, are ya?

 

[JohnT]

Guys,

I think the root difference here is upbringing and family background.

Since the age of 9 or 10, I have enjoyed wine with meals. My father, grandfather, and great-grand father had incredible pallets honed over a lifetime in the wine business. If an inferior wine made it to the table, the complaints would be insufferable. I can still remember the muffled voice of my grandfather saying "Johannes...Nem Jo, Meg akarsz olni?" (John, not good, are you trying to kill me?).

I was taught about good quality wines at a very early age (by American standards). I learned early on that it is far more enjoyable to slow down and savor every sip of a good wine. Except for big celebrations, we limited ourselves to 2 glasses of wine per day. "One for eating, and one for sleeping". That was it. A bottle of wine was shared by a family of 5 and only one bottle was opened each day. Believe me when I tell you that the wine was loved for its flavor, aroma, and body and not so much for its intoxicating effects. Complaints were normally made when the wine was too strong.

For most, it really is all about the flavor. This is why not all wines are 18abv (except for nighttrain or thunderbird that are made for the purpose of getting winos drunk). Wine was very much a major ingredient in our cooking as well. A goulash would never be right without some wine add into it. This was because we enjoyed the flavor of wine and not the alcohol (which would burn off during the cooking process).

I never started making "wine" from kool aid, welches, or hi-c in a can. I went straight into making wine from fresh fruit by helping my family for as long as I can remember. Growing up, we never even drank the unfermented forms of these products. Mom would simply never bring them home.

Having a family of former professionals to back me up and educate me was the biggest difference here. It is hard for me to not try and give lessons in the same manor that I learned. Unless you prefer wines made from these ingredients, my opinion is that you should not waste your time with them, but that is just me.

My biggest problem is that I forget that not everyone has grown up like me. I try to keep an open mind, but it is hard sometimes.