So…. What’s the worst idea you went through with?
So…. What’s the worst idea you went through with?
From the picture, this tops my list, flaming hot Cheetos… after mentioning it yesterday, my enzyme came in later than expected but I decided to send it anyways. It’s so greasy it’s probably turned me off Cheetos forever. However, science must ensue. Here we have 15 pounds of flamin hot Cheetos mashed with enzymes for an hour and 8 pounds of sugar. Honestly, after tasting the mash, the heat doesn’t come through, and frankly it mainly tastes/smells like a corn mash. Personally I’ll be surprised if I can tell the difference between this and a white whiskey made from straight corn. So, what’s the dumbest thing you’ve done?
Amazing! Maybe you can rim the glass with crushed hot cheeto too
this reminds me of r/prisonhooch which I miss dearly.
Be the change you want to see in the world my friend. Here’s the list of what’s on my radar for distilling next lol. Milk wine sounds whacky but I made it before (called blaand) and it’s surprisingly just tastes like white wine.
SUCH a good choice of image!
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?
The spams probably going to be a maceration in the still, but no I haven’t thought of miso yet. Might have to add it to the list. And hey as a fan of sour beers, the wood chip one sounds interesting lol. Any fun discoveries you made with an interesting shakeup in the process?
In retrospect, I should have saved it, but it was my second beer ever and went for an overly complex recipe also. Knowing what I know now, it would have probably aged nicely.
I've discovered boiling is not fully necessary to get a good brew and that heather tips make it awesome. I've just added maybe 1-2 handfuls now to the mash. Next autumn I plan to go nuts on collecting the thing and will try to fit maybe half a kilo in there, see how it comes out.
Honorable mention to red yeast rice, I have this notion of doing a rice mash for maybe a week with it and then plopping that into a raw ale mash to get enzymes and flavour of red yeast rice wine in a beer, as I've noticed that its enzymes also work up to 70ish Celsius.
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.
Yesss! Let me know how it goes! I ended up following a post on Facebook about a dude who reduced orange soda into a syrup and used it for a beer. As it was a more… traditional, group everyone was horrified. Apparently it turned out super awesome. Love the creativity and I’m curious about how your adventure turns out :)
A local brewery down here did a Tang run. It was pretty on point taste wise.
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.
Oh man, the key is gummy bears! I got a giant gummy bear (1 pound/0.45kg or so) once and soaked it in vodka. The bear was so big the alcohol barely penetrated through it, but the vodka it was soaking in was delicious, if you have a sweet tooth. The skittles colored vomit however doesn’t sound like the best of times though lol. Learning experiences are priceless though 😅
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.
Oh yeah from the smell and taste of the mash it tastes almost exactly like a corn/cream ale I made ages ago, but it’s always worth a shot
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.
Sounds almost exactly like my recipe for my apple pie brandy base lol
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.
Oh man that’s a shame! I actually really wanted to try a maple syrup fermentation too, but the whole cost of syrup (or even honey) is what always put me off the idea.
Out of curiosity, have you come up with a reason why it tasted so tree like?
What colour did the mead end up being?
It's really simple when you think about it, the taste of any fermentation is going to be the taste of what you put into it minus any of the sugars. Maple syrup is sugar and the liquid extract from a tree. So once you remove the sugar, all you have left is alcohol and the liquid extract from a tree.
It's actually one of the reasons that I think my need made from honey turned out to be so lovely, is once you take the sugar out of honey what you're left with is extract from flowers.
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.
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.
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?
You could probably grow horehound or costmary in pots on a porch or deck, I grow them in my garden but I don't think their root system is too huge and they don't get big like mugwort or gigantic like hops. Obviously coriander works in pots, so that's another option.
How’d the coco thing come through? That sounds interesting. And oooh the lemon sounds fantastic. I love super sour drinks. Any chance you have a more or less recipe for it? 😅
I never do recipes with anything. The lemons were a combo of a couple of dozen that were juiced and like a cup of brown sugar. The lemons were all fresh off a neighbour's tree, and the water was all rain from the patio, but I'm a half city block from the Pacific too, so interesting water. I also took around a dozen or so lemons and sliced them into cubes. I removed the seeds and added something like 3 garlic cloves and an equivalent amount of ginger. I was just using a bunch (8) small like 6oz jars. I filled those 3/4 with a 3% brine and maybe a couple of tablespoons of honey. They barely did anything and I thought they were all duds. I left them for 2 months and barely had to burp the jars at all. I ended up pulling the contents, drying and grinding them to make a zesty lemon spice that was alright. I poured the remaining juice from the small jars into the raw fermented juice I had made at the same time with just some added sugar that also wasn't super active. I then crushed and processed a whole crab apple I was given, also locally grown, and let it go off wild for a few days. Then I added this to all the lemon juice combined and added a bunch of brown sugar. That really took off strong and needed to be burped a couple of times a day for a week or more. Finally I let it sit in the fridge for a few months before trying it. That one was really good. Probably the best lemon liquor I've ever had.
The rice thing was in a bad container and went sour. It is still curiosity but I can't really get around using tap water in excess and needing to reduce it for more starch density. The first wash is probably viable but it did not seem particularly active.
About the best thing I've tried is pineapple by itself. Pineapple is insanely active to wild ferment. Something about it will go absolutely nuts and the juice has a really good flavor to sip or sauce. I only did a tiny amount. Like I was given an old fruit platter and put each thing in a 6oz jar for the heck of it. The pineapple generated higher CO2 pressures in 8 hours than anything else by far that I have tried.
The only other one I've done a few times are blueberries that were on the brink of going bad. They basically make a slightly fruity soy sauce flavor that is nothing like blueberries.
I guess you could say my recipe is always, "Thing going bad? Thing go in jar with salt brine." Deep stuff ;)
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.
Yep! My last one was a watermelon wine I made into a brandy. The key is to only get the red guts and avoid anything slightly white. definitely dont boil the juice either or youll get a carrot flavor. Once it’s done fermenting if it was a good fermentation it’ll taste almost like cucumber, a bit of back sweetening makes the watermelon flavor come back with a vengeance.
The key is to only get the red guts and avoid anything slightly white
Did that
definitely dont boil the juice either or youll get a carrot flavor
I did heat pasteurize, but not boil. Just 160/180F (I can't remember exactly).
it’ll taste almost like cucumber
Eh, I'm not getting cucumber. Maybe? It's mostly just SOUR with some watermelon notes.
a bit of back sweetening makes the watermelon flavor come back with a vengeance.
this is what I'm thinking
