Homebrewing - Beer, Mead, Wine, Cider

Amazing! Maybe you can rim the glass with crushed hot cheeto too

this reminds me of r/prisonhooch which I miss dearly.

Loving the goblin fermentation vibes you re giving off there. Never stop.

Mostly beer brewer here, so dumb things I've done were mostly process related. Fermenting beer with unsanitized wood chips - turned sour. Adding too much rye or pumpkin - took me 12 hours to get the damn thing made - stuck mash.

Fermentation wise, not brewing, messed around with some koji with varying degrees of success.

If you're doing things like spam alcohol, have you also considered miso as an ingredient?

I'm currently brewing up a batch of Tang! We'll know in a week or so if it was a success.

I'm hoping the synthetic chemicals that give it a citrus flavor are anathema to my yeast so I'll have something refreshing in a month or so.

It's coated with powder, but the actual seasoning there actually isn't much of it. I learned this when I tried to make Hot Cheeto fried chicken. The flavor barely came through.

On my 25th birthday, my roommate and I had the great idea to do Skittles vodka. If you're not familiar, you basically separate each color of skittles and use filters (think coffee filters) to infuse the color/flavor into the alcohol you poor over.

It mostly tasted like vodka. And even though I had a brewery tour and bar outing under my belt, it still tasted like pretty much pure vodka.

What I remember of the night was pretty good overall. But waking up in Skittles-colored vomit... both hilarious (in hindsight) and gross.

I assumed this was V8. Well... nothing to report here.

I made a few jugs of apple wine by pitching gallons of apple cider in the end table under my TV, (plastic) bottle conditioning and forgetting about them for a while.

Huge alcohol content, decent taste, nightmarish poops.

You win.

A long time ago my buddy thought lobster would be fun. (He was a legit winemaker)

Thankfully, I was the one who built the still and stored all the mash.

I hate shellfish to start. I could not imagine it after 4 weeks.

It wasn't a terrible idea, but I tried to make maple syrup mead, and it tasted exactly like breaking a branch off of a tree and trying to suck it. Like, that green tree taste. Complete waste of some very expensive maple syrup.

Coco powder sugar and the starch from rinsing some rice... dumb.

I currently have a 4 month BBQ sauce that is in part a fermented stale baguette, but also a ton of other wild ferments, stocks and stuff that have gone through many reductions. So far, the only thing I've fermented and drank was some lemons with garlic and ginger with a good bit of honey. That came out super sour like candy in a raw Sour Patch Kids candy but more clean and natural kinda flavor. Most of that still went into sauces. Almost everything I make goes into sauces because fruits turned savory juices, mixed with stock, and reduced make far better flavors than anything that can be bought in a store and were optimised for cheap mass production.

I'm really curious what anyone might be growing at small scales, like on a patio for brewing. Maybe even just bittering agents too?

A number of years back someone posted the idea of pumpkin gin to the homebrewing subreddit. Supposedly some senator arguing against prohibition in the early 1900s claimed you could just hollow out a pumpkin, fill it up with sugar and you'd end up with booze. So I gave it a try. One pumpkin I filled up with apple juice and another I filled with brown sugar. The apple juice pumpkin actually fermented and I got a somewhat drinkable hard cider out of the deal. the sugar one just turned to sludge and grew mold.

Another thing I tried was to make my own amylase producing mold using millet and rice cakes and ginger root to inoculate it. They grew mold (some of it white, some of it green) and I used them to inoculate some steamed rice that sort of fermented. It went sour of course, and it ended up tasting a lot like lemon juice, so I must have gotten some citric acid producing mold in the mix as well.

Nothing so meme lord. Pure watermelon. It's so sour, and not in a good way. It tastes like underripe watermelon rind. It probably didn't need acid added and it should be back sweetened.