Booze

RobertDyck · 2016-02-10 17:13:43

Plot 0037

We have talked about it many times. We should really stay on-topic. So here's a topic for booze.

RobertDyck · 2016-02-10 17:14:48

From topic "Swine".

GW Johnson wrote:
And you can bet that somebody will figure out ways to make beer, wine, and booze (it's never not happened).
I could give you a long-winded explanation how to. I grow grapes in my back yard, make red wine every year. This year it ripened early. Normally you do want frost to touch the grapes for maximum sugar/sweetness. It's the sugar that yeast ferments to make alcohol. So I expected to harvest the usual time, but the birds picked them clean. When I lived in Toronto, the house I rented was an the Italian part of town, owned by a retired couple. They had to move to a nursing home, the family rented the house to myself and my fiance at the time. The property had 14 fruit trees and 6 grape vines. Three vines were white (Muscato blanc or Giallo), one I thought was Concord but later learned was a dark variety of Muscat, and the other two were varieties of Rosé. When I asked the owner he said he brought the vines over from Italy himself. And he left his wine making equipment. I had to! I went back a few years after moving back to Winnipeg, the new owner had cut down most of the vines, only one vine of blanc remained. She let me take a cutting from the vine. But it didn't survive, I didn't get it to grow. Too bad, the fragrance of grapes on the vine is much better/stronger than the fragrance of the wine.
When I moved to Winnipeg and bought this house, I went to nurseries to look for a variety of grape vine that would survive Winnipeg's winter. I was told there were 2, developed by the South Dakota experimental research farm. They're crossbred between a Manitoba native grape that's basically just seed and skin, with a commercial grape. Beta produced a large grape, but barely survives winter here. Valiant thrives, grows like a weed, but produces grapes about the size of blueberries. I bought two vines of the latter. It covers a 6-foot fence from top to round, over the top and down the other side. The two vines cover a 50-foot length of fence. When a new neighbour bought the house nextdoor, she commented on the grapes. I told her any grapes that grow on her side are her's. She said "Ok". Problem solved. But then she got a boyfriend who doesn't like them; he cuts off the vines on her side. She said she misses the grapes. Well, she bought the house, it's her's, so dealing with her boyfriend is her problem. Usually I get enough grapes to fill my 12-gallon (54 litre) demijohn. Some years a little less, some a little more. One year I got enough to fill that plus a 5-gallon (23 litre) carboy, and still had grapes leftover.
I also make beer from kits bought in a store. I looked up the detailed procedure, how to make beer from grain. One local store that sells supplies for home-brew beer and wine making has a home distillation unit imported from New Zealand. The provincial government owned liquor store believes people are allowed to home-brew beer and wine, but not distilled beverages. I checked the law, there's no distinction between distilled vs non-distilled beverages. Prohibition existed in this province from 1916 to 1921. It didn't last long. A court case in 1967 set the precedent that home-brew is legal. You can't sell it, or trade, it can only be made for personal consumption. Since the law doesn't distinguish between distilled vs non-distilled, that applies to home distilling as well. The unit being sold is about the size of a home bread machine. It doesn't use any water, just a heat sink and fan for cooling. Put a gallon of fermented beverage in, and a jar or bottle under the spigot to collect the output, plug it in and push the button. It takes hours to complete. Fermenting wine will produce brandy. Fermenting beer will produce whisky. Usually whisky doesn't have hops, but but some do. The store that sells the unit also sells one brand of malt that doesn't have hops. And sells rose hips, dried lemon peel, dried orange peel, and other additives traditionally added to whisky.
Vodka is traditionally triple distilled, then diluted with water. Yes, it's distilled to 70-something percent alcohol, then watered down before bottling. Potatoes are boiled, mashed, then barley added. Yeast consumes sugar, so you have to break down the starch. Barley is sprouted to produce the enzyme which breaks down starch, then boiled to kill the sprout. Actually they use hot water that's almost but not quite boiling; not enough to kill the sprout, but not hot enough to break down the enzyme. To make beer (or distiller's beer) you add barley grain and keep it at the perfect temperature for the enzyme to break down starch in that too. However, to make vodka you add the almost-boiled barley sprouts to mashed potatoes. Then filter. To make beer, add hops while it's hot. After the filtered liquid cools, add yeast. To make a can of malt for sale in a home-brew store, that liquid is boiled down to concentrate it. Commercial breweries don't, they ferment the liquid directly.
I've also described a life support system to recycle CO2 and water to produce oxygen. It's based on chloroplasts harvested from leaves of a plant. Instead of the byproduct being toxic gasses that have to be dumped in space, the byproduct is carbohydrate. If you get the chloroplasts from the leaves of a pea plant, you get pea starch. I described a couple useful foods you could make with that, one a starch pudding. Yeast adds protein, lipids, vitamin B, and gives it the flavour and aroma of freshly baked bread. Simple enough to be automated, small enough for a spacecraft. Food as a continuous byproduct of life support! But once you have a continuous supply of starch and grow yeast on it, now long before someone makes booze? That starch can be processed the same as potatoes to make vodka. You will need a grain sprout of some sort to produce the enzyme amylase, you could use wheat instead of barley. Vodka is triple distilled to get rid of flavour, so the difference between barley vs wheat is moot for vodka.
Cheers

RobertDyck · 2016-02-10 17:59:58

GW Johnson wrote:

Hi RobertDyck! We do think a lot alike, don't we?
You're way ahead of me at bootlegging. All I ever made was "raisin jack" wine from grocery store grape juice and baker's yeast, sitting on top of the water heater. If the grapes are red, it's weak but not bad. If it's the purple concord grapes, it makes lousy "raisin jack".
I did make one batch with wild mustang grapes (native in Texas), plus added sugar. That really was quite tasty. It's been a lot of years since I did that stuff. High school years, and I'm an old retired man now.
You've heard the Jeff Foxworthy thing about "you might be a redneck if"? One of those has it that you're a redneck if "you have to go outside to get a beer". Well, my sisters gave me a keg refrigerator as a birthday present a couple of years ago. So I keep a keg of beer in the garage. Foxworthy would be proud.
That's out here on this small cattle ranch a few miles from anywhere in central Texas, where I have quite literally used a .22 pistol as a re-roofing tool on an old barn. (A .22 is just not good for much else out here. Too damn small, no stopping power. I usually use buckshot in a 12 gauge.)
I've never yet tried it, but there's lots of sweetness to a prickly pear cactus fruit, which my wife makes into jelly/jam every year now. There's no shortage of it down here, either, in spite of my best efforts to eradicate it. I bet I could make a wine or a fruit beer out of that otherwise mostly noxious stuff. It'd be unique.
Distilling works on just about anything. I bet I could combine a little heat with vacuum flash in a 3 or 4 pass still and hit the azeotrope with the cactus juice. Some of it might even be worth drinking; as for the rest, my farm tractor runs on ethanol (I converted the ancient thing myself). Sort of a "drink the best and burn the rest" proposition.
(insert smiley face here, which I don't know how to do)
GW

RobertDyck · 2016-02-10 18:01:51

When I was a kid, we visited my grandparent's farm two weeks every summer. Grandsons were expected to help control vermin. This was my father's parents, and where he grew up. It was his grandfather's farm before his father took over. Family farm for two generations, but alas, no one in my father's generation nor cousins wanted to take over the farm. When I was a "tween" to use the modern term, my father taught me to use his bolt action .22 rifle. The farm yard was 10 acres, and they had several quarter-sections of land where they grew wheat. In western Canada, farm land was divided into sections, 1 mile x 1 mile, with a gravel road at every mile boundary. A quarter section is a quarter of that, half mile by half mile, which means road along two sides of the square. I'm not sure but I think my grandfather owned 6 quarter sections. His father built a subsistence farm in the late 1890s, with chicken coop, pig sty, two section barn for cattle and horses. My grandfather converted it to a modern wheat farm. The old barn became grain bins, he built a large garage for the tractor and combine, and a modern two-story house with detached double car garage. I live in Winnipeg, but my grandparent's farm was in Saskatchewan. The farm house was in a small town, but that town shrunk to nothing when a new highway was built that bypassed all the small towns. It was 20 miles from the nearest city. Canada is metric now, but we used Imperial measure like miles and gallons back then.

I took my father's .22 bolt action rifle with steel sights to shoot gophers. That's the Saskatchewan name; the scientific name is Richardson ground squirrel. There's a reason I used a squirrel gun. With .22 short ammunition. And reset leg-hold traps. We checked the traps in gopher holes at the barn too, but they had barn cats. We were warned the cats were wild, don't pet them. Mostly the cats were supposed to hunt gophers, so my grandparents didn't want them tamed. One year a flock of pigeons nested in the loft of the old chicken coop, so my cousin cleared those out too. The hear with pigeons we had a barn owl living in the barn's hay loft. Beautiful bird. It hunts pigeons and gophers, so leave the owl alone.

My father said his will gives my brother his shotgun, high power hunting rifle, and the double-barrel shotgun from his grandfather. The double-barrel is not any condition to fire, but the only heirloom he has from his grandfather. My father said his will gives the .22 rifle to me.

In the 1980s I was part of a medieval recreation society called the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA). One activity was archery. One individual hand-made long bows. I contacted about ordering one, but had to cancel when I lost my job. Later that year I met him at the annual event. He was selling his wares and had the exact bow that I talk to him about. One third price! So I have a laminated long bow with ebony outside laminates, cherry wood handle, 45 pound draw weight. And a cloth bow bag to store it, half a dozen cheap arrows, and a good quality 3-finger leather glove for shooting. I later replaced the cheap string with carbon fibre. Graphite fibre isn't authentic medieval, but it doesn't stretch. Archeologists in the UK raised a wooden ship that sunk at the time of King Henry VIII. It had a box of war bows. They cleaned them up and measured them; draw weight was 110 pounds to 185 pounds! I had to exercise to build muscles to draw 45 pounds, no way I could do 110! I had bid to host a feast for the local chapter of the medieval club. My sister's husband at the time was into archery hunting, so I asked him if he would teach me to archery hunt. I was going to shoot a deer for the feast. But the club didn't let me host, and my sister divorced years later. I still have the bow.

So we have some things in common.

SpaceNut · 2016-02-10 18:10:02

Thanks for doing this as it sure is a life support item, self medication....

All kidding aside the more that we make it seem like home the quicker we will conquer mars....and colonies will follow..not to meantion some of it could be liquid rocket fuel.....

RobertDyck · 2016-02-10 18:30:46

My grape vines. Yes, that's me in 2004. The green fibreglass corrugated panels were part of the fence when I bought the house. That part of the fence needs repairs now. Always wanted to replace them with vertical wood planks.

I had 2 demijohns, each 12 imperial gallons (54 litres). However, one broken when washing. That's a big round botton flask in a basket to hold it. The house in Toronto had one with a wooden basket around the glass, the "new" ones I bought in 1989 have plastic. Also have a 5 imperial gallon (23 litre) carboy. That's a big glass jug, cylinder with a flat bottom. And a couple one gallon glass jugs. One friend said a woman at his church lost her husband, died of old age. She gave away his carboys. My friend said his wife didn't want them in his house, so asked me to keep them in mine. They were "our" carboys. However, he was older too, and he passed away with cancer. So I inherited 6 more carboys, some 5 imperial gallon (23 litre) and some 5 US gallon (18.9 litre). I also have one 12-gallon primary fermenter, two 5-gallon primaries, and one 2.5 gallon. A "primary fermenter" is a food grade plastic bucket, use for the first phase of fermentation. The bucket shown above is one of the 5-gallon primary fermeters; I use it to collect grapes.

I don't have a distiller. Income has been rediculously tight for a number of years now. Below is from the store's website. Today they have two, stainless steel and plastic with stainless steel liner. The stainless steel one is on sale today, same price as the plastic one. (You can click images for the store's website.)

And composing this I see they now have a third model. This one brags to produce more concentrated alcohol, up to 93% ethanol, but this one must be connected to your kitchen tap for cold water as coolant. Business must be good. (Image also clickable.)

Last edited by RobertDyck (2016-02-10 18:32:13)

RobertDyck · 2016-02-10 19:00:41

Recipe I got from my father. Not sure where he got it. I use this recipe for my Valiant grapes. The paper is getting worn so rather than scan, I'll type it in.

RED OR BLUE GRAPES GROWN ON THE LOWER MAINLAND OF B.C., OR CONCORD GRAPE WINE
INGREDIENTS:
5 to 6 lbs. Grapes
1 gallon Water
3 lbs. White Sugar
2 Pectic Enzyme Tables
2 Campden Tables
2 Yeast Nutrient Tablets (or ½ tsp. Yeast Nutrient)
2 Sparkaloid tables (or Sparkaloid Finings at rate of 1 oz. per 20 gallons)
Wine Yeast
Crush grapes and remove as many stems as possible. Dissolve the sugar in warm water and pour over grapes. Crush the Pectic Enzyme, Nutrient and Campden Tables and stir thoroughly through the grape, water and sugar mixture. Cover the primary fermentation vessel with a clean plastic sheet, tied down. Wait 6 to 8 hours and add Wine Yeast. The temperature of the must should be 70 to 75 degrees F. Stir with wooden spoon or paddle twice daily for 4 to 7 days or until desired color is extracted from grapes. Under no circumstances keep the must in the primary fermentation vessel for longer than 10 days.
If you have a hydrometer, take the wine from the skins when the Specific Gravity has dropped down to between 30 and 50.
Do not try to strain the new wine too well, just be sure to remove anything that floats. Everything that sinks will be removed at the first "racking".
Move the wine into gallon jugs, carboys or barrels, and attach fermentation locks. Rack in 3 to 4 weeks making sure that all the containers are topped up. Rack again in 3 months and fine with Sparkaloid at this time. When the wine is clear (about 10 days after the addition of Sparkaloid), you may if you wish, sweeten the wine and add Stabilizer to prevent further fermentation.
Should be aged 1 year for best results.
If you have not made wine before, please read "Explanation of Recipe Words and Ingredients, and on Outline of Wine Making" available from

The bottom of the sheet is empty. There's a space for a stamp. Probably intended for wine stores to give out with their stamp on it. When I started in Toronto, I got a book available at that time in the local store. Paperback, still has the price sticker from 1989: $3.95. The book I use is available used on Amazon. Mine is second revised edition 1972, this is first revised edition 1971. Amazon.ca (from Canada)... (click image)

And from Amazon.com (from the US), this one published 1991. Same title, same authors, so I assume it's similar. (click image)

The 1991 book is also on Amazon.ca (Canada) here.

Last edited by RobertDyck (2016-02-10 22:43:17)

RobertDyck · 2016-02-10 19:26:56

GW Johnson wrote:

I've never yet tried it, but there's lots of sweetness to a prickly pear cactus fruit, which my wife makes into jelly/jam every year now. There's no shortage of it down here, either, in spite of my best efforts to eradicate it. I bet I could make a wine or a fruit beer out of that otherwise mostly noxious stuff. It'd be unique.

Blue agave is fermented and distilled to become Tequila. Saw a TV show called "How it's made" about making Tequila. It's available on YouTube here. (5 minutes long)

I found a Prickly Pear Wine Recipe. (Click the color or underlined words (link) for the original page.)

Prickly Pear
Makes one gallon.
Ingredients:
3 qts. Prickly Pear
1-1/4 cup Raisins
2 pints Water
2 lbs. Sugar
3/4 tsp. Yeast Energizer
2 tsp. Acid Blend
1 tsp. Pectic Enzyme
1/8 tsp. Potassium Metabisulfite
1 pkg. Wine Yeast
Keep your acid tester and hydrometer handy. As with all wild fruit the sugar and acid content varies greatly from year to year and even from one location to another. The recipe above is a general recipe to use which you may have to adjust.
Directions:
Break or singe off stickers. Wash, chop and mash up prickly pears and chop up raisins.
Put prickly pears and raisins in the nylon straining and place in the primary fermenter.
Add water and all remaining ingredients, except yeast. Stir well.
Cover primary fermenter.
Wait 24 hours, then add yeast and re-cover primary fermenter.
Stir daily, check S.G. and press pulp lightly to aid extraction.
When S.G. reaches 1.040 (usually 3-5 days), lightly press juice from bag. Then syphon juice into glass container and attach airlock.
When S.G. reaches 1.000 (usually about 3 weeks), fermentation is complete. Syphon juice off sediment into clean glass container. Re-attach airlock.
To aid in clearing, syphon again in 2 months and again, if necessary, before bottling.
Allow the wine to age.
To sweeten your wine, add 1/2 stabilizer, 1/8 tsp. potassium metabisulfite and stir. Then add 1/4 lb. dissolved sugar per gallon and stir again.

Last edited by RobertDyck (2016-02-10 19:38:57)

RobertDyck · 2016-02-10 19:45:46

GW Johnson wrote:

(insert smiley face here, which I don't know how to do)
GW

I'm a professional computer programmer, so I have to know how to do this stuff. It's not hard. Notice the link BBCode at the bottom of every page of this form. If you click that, it takes you to a page that explains BBCode. You can write tags that affect formatting and style. The software for this internet forum translate those tags to be displayed with your post. The "drunk" one above is actually an image. I used Google to search for an image, copied the image location, then added that image using BBCode. Normal "Smilies" have a short code you can write directly. Click the link to read that page.

SpaceNut · 2016-02-10 20:42:44

The grapes should be one of those crops to try on mars as it can go along ways towards our health...not to meantion sanity....

louis · 2016-02-11 15:46:34

It could also be sold on Earth at $100,000 a bottle.

SpaceNut wrote:

The grapes should be one of those crops to try on mars as it can go along ways towards our health...not to meantion sanity....

GW Johnson · 2016-02-11 16:01:27

Sold on Earth for $100 K a bottle? Only to the likes of Donald Trump. Market is too small.

GW

RobertDyck · 2016-02-11 20:01:19

Blood Wine

We could make something themed. Science fiction. This is a new drink that I thought up, but based on a science fiction show. We could make this and sell for profit. It could be made freely at science fiction conventions. But to produce for profit we would have to get permission from CBS Interactive Inc., current owner of intellectual property for the Star Trek brand.
Star Trek - Terms of Use

Star Trek - Deep Space Nine introduced an fictional alien drink called Blood Wine. Supposedly a Klingon favourite. This raised the question: What is that? An episode of Star Trek - Voyager included a holodeck simulation of Klingons, Blood Wine was said to be twice as strong as whisky. So it is a strong alcoholic beverage. Any alcohol is made by fermentation of sugars, and a drink that strong is result of distillation. The word "Blood" is prominently in the name, so must be included in the recipe somewhere. But source of alcohol must be fermentation of carbohydrate.

An alien planet would not have the same crops as Earth. But there would be something similar. Klingons are supposedly a war focus civilization, and much of their economy focussed on war. So production of a beverage would have to use minimum industrial resources. What produces the most carbohydrate per unit area of crop land? Potatoes produce more than three times as much as barley, or any grain. Potatoes are already used on Earth for vodka, so how do we make this different? My idea was sweet potatoes. It's different, and has starch. A quick google revealed sweet potatoes produce as much mass of produce per land area as potatoes. They have different growing conditions, but yield is the same if you compare potatoes in their ideal growing conditions to sweet potatoes in theirs. However, sweet potatoes have much more carbohydrate per kg of vegetable. I guess that's why they're called "sweet". So they have the most carbohydrate per land area anyway.

First step to fermentation is to convert starch to sugar. With beer or whisky, that's done with enzyme amylase. Beta amylase is produced by sprouting barley then killing the sprouts in hot water @ 185°F. That is mixed with crushed barley, then soaked in hot water to extract starch and break it down to sugar. Vodka is made from mashed potatoes, mixed with the same barley sprouts in hot water. What if Klingons did not invent this process? Cheese was first developed by processing milk with digestive enzymes from the fourth stomach of a calf. Cow's milk is intended for a baby cow, so their stomach digests that. The stomach is harvested from a slaughtered calf, the stomach cut into pieces and dried for safe long-term storage. For use, those pieces of calf stomach are soaked in hot water. The solution this produces is called rennet. That is added to milk to cause it to coagulate into clumps, then that is filtered with loose weave cotton cloth. That cloth was called muslin, but has been used to make cheese so long that it's become known as cheese cloth. Klingons are supposed to be violent and value hunting, so what if they did something similar? Amylase breaks starch into sugar, but there are three types: alpha amylase in digestive juices of animals, beta amylase in sprouting seeds, and gamma amylase in some types of mould. Beta amylase produces a type of sugar called malt, but both alpha and gamma amylase produce glucose. Let's say Klingons harvested the part of an animal that produces amylase. That's produced in the pancreas.

This would be harvested from the pancreas of an animal that eats a great deal of starchy food. So something like a hog. The show depicts an animal called a "Targ" that looks like a nasty wild dog, about the size of a wolf, but story describes it as a wild boar. We don't have any "Targ" on this planet, so a purist would go to a butcher and ask for secretions from the pancreas of a pig. However, I don't think most people would want to drink something made with that, so the alternative is gamma amylase. That's made from a mould grown on waste from starchy food. For example, after juice is squeezed from sugar cane to make sugar, the left over pulp is used for this. Actually, the particular type of mould grown on waste sugar cane pulp can be processed one way to isolate gamma amylase, or processed another way to isolate citric acid. That's how they make industrial citric acid. Because gamma amylase produces glucose, it's also known as amyloglucosidase, or simply "AG". Stores that sell supplies for home-brew currently have something called "Turbo Yeast". This is a mixture, and constituents vary a lot by brand. The good stuff has "AG" with distiller's yeast and yeast nutrients. Distiller's yeast is different than beer yeast or wine yeast because it's tolerant to higher concentration of alcohol. All yeast will die when alcohol gets too high. Distiller's yeast can tolerate 15%, 18%, or 20% alcohol by volume (ABV). Higher concentrations take longer, but the combination of enzymes and yeast strain result in much faster fermentation than beer or wine. One brand promises 20% it takes 3 days. Another 14% in 48 hours, or 20% in 5 days.

Making beer or wine requires 1 week in a primary fermenter. That's a food grade plastic bucket, with a plastic sheet held down with string or an elastic band to keep out dust and flies. I use a new bucket purchased at a home-brew store specifically for this purpose. You can use a used bucket from a restaurant, they get bulk groceries in these buckets. However, make sure you get one that has never had vinegar touch it. Vinegar soaks into the plastic, and vinegar loves the same conditions as yeast. If you get one with vinegar, you'll make malt vinegar instead of beer, or wine vinegar instead of wine. After 1 week of open fermentation, beer is siphoned off with a hose to a glass secondary fermentation vessel. For wine, filter through cheese cloth to remove grape skins, pulp, and seeds. A layer of yeast will have grown across the bottom of the fermenter; be careful to not siphon this into the secondary. You will waste about a shot glass full of beer or wine with the yeast. Transferring from one fermentation vessel to another is called "racking". A fermentation lock is added, which allows CO2 gas to get out, but has a little water to ensure air can't get in. To keep the water sterile, use water with sodium metabisulphite, commonly known as sulphate. CO2 gas is heavier than air, so as CO2 builds up, air is pushed out. Remaining fermentation is anaerobic. Anaerobic fermentation greatly improves the flavour. Beer requires about 3 weeks in the secondary, wine about 3 months. But with distillation, you transfer directly from the primary fermenter to the distiller.

Blood wine: Start with sweet potatoes, scrub off all dirt, then boil in a big pot until they're cooked. Don't strain or remove them from the pot. Once cooked, remove from heat, and mash them in their own cooking water. This will produce a mixture of mashed sweet potato with water that is already scalding hot. (Be careful not to burn yourself.) Then add turbo yeast. "AG" requires acid, it's from mould that evolved to grow on citrus fruit. Your turbo yeast mixture may already have a powder acid in it, but to increase acidity I want to add a berry. I recommend red current, because it's both sour (acidic) and tart, red in colour, and unusual. The only beverage that I know that uses it is grenadine. You don't want grenadine, that's got too much other stuff, use fresh red currents and crush them. Add that to the hot water. This will cool to room temperature. Enzyme requires hot water, but yeast requires room temperature. Timing may require experimentation. I recommend starting with instructions on the package of turbo yeast.

While fermentation is vigorous, the plastic sheet will pillow up with CO2. Once fermentation stops, the plastic sheet will fall down. Check the fermenter; when it stops producing bubbles, fermentation is complete. Don't wait for it to become a calm liquid surface, there will still be bubbles. Just wait for it to stop producing new bubbles. To be scientific, check specific gravity with a hydrometer. I would have to check the hydrometer reading for distilling, with wine it's ready for racking at 0.995.

Transfer to the home distiller, and start it running. The home distiller uses a lower temperature than traditional copper pot stills. This takes significantly longer, but it also means you don't have to worry about "head" or "tail". At higher temperature, the "head" or first product from distillation has chemicals you don't want to drink, like methanol. The "tail" or last part of distillation also has stuff you don't want to drink. But a home distiller uses a lower temperature so you don't have to worry about that. Just put the collection jar under the output spout, and wait for the until to turn itself off.

Advertising claims a home distiller will produce up to 60% alcohol with a single pass. We want flavour. Vodka is triple distilled to eliminate flavour, then diluted with water to 40% alcohol. We don't want vodka, we want flavour. So single pass to the final concentration. To produce the maximum alcohol with a single pass, you must start with high alcohol. That's why I recommend distiller's yeast. Most commercial whisky is 40%, strong liqueur is 35%, so 60% is good enough.

If you want to get fancy, you could add flavourings. Scotch whisky adds flavourings that were in the special beer made by Picts who lived in Scotland before the Scots. They used heather instead of hops, and added yarrow and sweetgale. I was thinking of rose hips and prairie rosemary, just because they grow wild here. But yarrow and sweetgale (bog-myrtle) are also native to North America. Yarrow has too many alternate names to list. And yarrow may be an herb, but has medical effects, so perhaps not that.

I suspect some science fiction purists will complain this recipe doesn't have any actual blood. They could use actual secretions from a pig pancreas purchased from a butcher with distiller's yeast, instead of turbo yeast with "AG" and red currents. Amylase from an animal requires strong alkali instead of acid. Animal pancreatic secretions include baking soda, so that already includes the alkali. And yes, pancreatic secretions from humans do too. Not sure you would want to drink the result, though. That would probably be something to shut up the whiners.

SpaceNut · 2016-02-11 21:21:05

I have heard of sweet potato mash but never tried any...

http://www.sweetpotatospirits.com/distillery/
http://homedistiller.org/fruit/wash-fruit/pot
http://www.appropriatetech.net/files/ST … POTATO.pdf

RobertDyck · 2016-02-11 21:28:16

And I thought I came up with something unique.

SpaceNut · 2016-02-11 21:36:49

I think the touch of color is.....all yours.... I see that most want to distill it into jet fuel....to run in an engine....
could be a good crop for mars fuel......

RobertDyck · 2016-02-11 22:40:57

SpaceNut wrote:

I think the touch of color is.....all yours.... I see that most want to distill it into jet fuel....to run in an engine....
could be a good crop for mars fuel......

Is it green?

RobertDyck · 2016-02-12 20:21:52

I do have to point out, many people here believe alcoholic beverages are one of the pleasures of life. And the American Declaration of Independence says: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Emphasis on "pursuit of Happiness". Even NASA had a study which alcoholic beverage was safe for consumption in space. But some puritanical voters didn't like the idea, so they abandoned it. I consider puritanical or Victorian values to be mental illness. And I'm putting this in strong words because of the "Holier than thou" attitude that I've suffered from certain individuals all my life. Alcohol is one of the pleasures of life, and "pursuit of Happiness" is an unalienable right. Prohibition existing in the Canadian province of Manitoba from 1916 to 1921; it only lasted 5 years, and has been dead for 95 years. It's a very bad idea from a century ago that was quickly squashed.

Besides, one potential livelihood on Mars is construction worker or grocer to supply luxury villas for billionaires. How many billionaires want to go to Mars? The rich love their fine spirits. I dream of building a home on Mars, mining/smelting/refining materials for construction, and vast greenhouse farms to grow not only staple foods, but luxury foods to supply a community of luxury villas. Each villa a significant distance away, probably not within sight of each other, but all close enough that I could drive from my place to theirs to deliver groceries.

IanM · 2016-02-15 22:20:15

In the vein of some of my recent posts on this forum, I shall calculate how much materials would be needed to make enough beer for a colony of 100. The Per-Capita consumption of beer in the US is around 28 gallons per adult per year (http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/bus … /29574619/). 31.1% of Americans have not drunk in the past 12 months (http://www.who.int/substance_abuse/publ … es/usa.pdf), but for defensive pessimism I shall account only for the 12% of lifetime teetotallers. As such, I'll apply the data to 88 people, leading to an Earth-annual value of 2,464 gallons (9,327.3 L). 8-15 lb of Barley produces 5 gallons of beer (http://www.wikihow.com/Brew-Beer-Using-All-Grain-Method), leading to a total of 19,712-36,960 lb of Barley being used to booze up the colonists. Knowing that there are 48 lb in a bushel of barley (https://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/scales/bushels.html), and using data from the Chickens thread, this leads to a maximum of 12.83333 acres of land for barley devoted to beer production, which can be rounded up to 13 (=566,280 sq. ft., ~52,609.1 m^2, around 1.5 Chicago city blocks).

That's just for the barley. A good beer always needs hops. The first year of a hop plant produces around a few ounces of hops (http://drinks.seriouseats.com/2011/05/h … -beer.html), a figure that is vague but which I'll interpret as around 4 ounces, or a quarter of a pound, but at around the third year can produce up to 1-2 pounds (idem). I'll assume a really bitter, hoppy ale such as IPA will use 10 ounces (0.625 lb) per 5-gallon batch (http://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=402077), leading to a total of 308 lb of hops, or 1,232 plants of hops. One could argue that these hops can be imported, but that would get very expensive, into the tens of grands. So how much space would this number of plants take? Hops don't grow in the ground as barley does; they grow in bines, such that they need support in the form of sticks. That this leads to more than 1,200 sticks being needed by the community is considered irrelevant here, and the existence of such sticks is treated as a black box. There are 1,778 strings/acre (http://www.americanhopmuseum.org/hopgrowingseason.htm), and given 2 strings/plant, leads to 889 plants/acre, leading to around 1.4 acres (~60,366.61 sq. ft., 5,608.24 m^2), a comparatively negligible area, which combined with barley is still quite less than the traditional 40 acres of Americana.

Dexter2999 · 2016-03-17 17:59:16

While beer is wildly popular, I think wine, cider, and perhaps vodka of rice or potatoes might be a better yield of crops and diversity of use.

And we might yet want to revisit mead as bees could be useful for honey and crop pollination purposes.

IanM · 2016-03-20 20:34:29

Dexter2999 wrote:

And we might yet want to revisit mead as bees could be useful for honey and crop pollination purposes.

I remember something on here saying that processing sugar from beets was quite a bit strenuous. Perhaps second and third-wave colonists could use honey as a simple alternative.

Martians could make strong alcohol and use the good ol' Roman custom of watering it down prior to consumption.

SpaceNut · 2016-03-20 20:56:11

That is in this topic Beetroot by RobertDyck

Like this topic its one to focus on what is needed to be grown, processed and of what is its benefits to doing so. Plus if it has a secondary for growing it then its a real plus....

Edit :Sorry, removed my link as RobertDyck gave the correct address....

RobertDyck · 2016-03-20 21:11:41

IanM wrote:

Martians could make strong alcohol and use the good ol' Roman custom of watering it down prior to consumption.

I posted above the wine recipe I use. It's for Concord grapes, but I use it for Valiant grapes. It's 1/3 crushed grapes, 2/3 water. Today we add water and sugar to make wine. My understanding is that Romans did not add either water or sugar to make wine, they just fermented crushed grapes. And grapes have natural yeast on their skin, so crushing them gives yeast access to sugar and water within the grapes. We use packaged wine yeast to get consistent, reliable yeast. You never know what variety of yeast grows wild in your back yard. Since Romans didn't add water when making wine, what they produced was concentrate. They added water when it was poured into a glass, 1/3 wine to 2/3 water. That results in the same concentration we use today. Of course since they didn't add sugar, alcohol concentration was much lower. I estimate Roman wine (as served with water) would have the same alcohol as light beer today.

The expedition of Alexander the Great discovered India grew a strange crop called sugar cane. A strange plant that produced honey without bees. That expedition brought sugar cane to Greece in 300 BC, but it was a curiosity only, not produced commercially. It was brought to Europe around 1100 AD, but was only for the rich until the 1500s. Trade was blocked by war 1803-1815, so Europe looked for an alternative. They found sugar beets.

My point is Roman wine would have had the same flavour and colour as red wine today. Perhaps not the fine wines we know today, but "house" red wine. Adding water when you drink instead of when it's produced would only affect alcohol production. They didn't have mass production, every jug (amphora) had to be hand made. And transportation was by hand, or horse, or ship with canvas sail, so expensive. So transporting concentrate made sense.

RobertDyck · 2016-03-20 21:36:34

Spacenut started a topic for Beetroot. He quoted posts I made elsewhere. The link in post #22 goes right back here. Oops.

IanM · 2016-03-20 21:58:28

Ah! Well, the thing with Alcohol is that almost everything organic can be used to produce it. You could make alcohol from blood, a literal blood wine of sorts, but it'd be excruciatingly dry.

Dexter has a point with crop yield that might be better to grow for alcohol than others. From my earlier post a colony of 100 would use a total of 14.4 acres of barley and hops for 2,464 gal of beer, or 171.11 gallons/acre of cropland. By comparison, the equivalent value of wine would require 44,352 lb of fresh grapes (https://winemakermag.com/369-how-many-p … ose-groups). With the figure of 4 tons of grapes per acre (https://grapesandwine.cals.cornell.edu/ … ard-bottle), this becomes 5.544 acres to make the 2,464 gal of wine, or 444.44 gallons/acre of cropland.

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