Happy home brew Wednesday. Let's get right into it, eh?
After I'd brewed two beers with my Coopers Kit, I felt hungry for some more brewing experiences, and did some homework. That, friends, is how I stumbled upon Inmate Brew.
Inmate Brew itself is notorious throughout countless correctional institutions across the United States, and abroad I'm sure. It is also called pruno, which is not what I made, as that is made with bread as a yeast substitute or relies on rotting fruit for fermentation. Yum. Obviously I have a touch more freedom with my materials as I'm not a convicted felon doing five-to-ten in Leavenworth.
At least, not yet.
Tehee!
Anyway, the basis of Inmate Brew (IB), for those of us who are not incarcerated at least, is essentially the addition of yeast to fruit juice to make cheap wine. The most basic method of making IB is to crack a bottle of juice, pour out a quarter of it, add yeast, and then cap it with an airlock. Most people can do this as there is no techinical know-how needed; the bottle the juices comes in is already sterilized and airlocks are fairly self-explanatory.
The resulting yeast-party yields carbon dioxide and alcohol. The latter being the the goal of the project; to get crunked!
I was lucky in that I already had some spare gear laying around and I was able to take this up a notch and ferment bigger vessels instead of the juice bottles and take gravity readings (used for calculating how much booze you get at the end). For my first batches I opted for BIOES juice, and I have no idea how to pronounce that, so don't ask. Jerk.
I bought a whole mess of this stuff because it's cheap, readily available at Carrefour, and has no added preservatives. That last point is a crucial one because any juice that has added sulphites won't ferment.
Batch one consisted of:
- 4 liters BIOES Raspberry, black currant, youngberry, apple juice
- 2 cups of white sugar
- 1/2 cup boiled raisins
- 1/2 sachet of DIY yeast powder
I let this sit in a plastic bottle (PET #1 recyclable, so no worries) for three days before I bottled it. Yea, only three days. I didn't do a damn thing about temperature regulation, and the heat combined with the amount of sugar I added made the yeast go fucking insane. I could hear it fermenting from three feet away.
The picture on the left is when I went to bed, and the picture on the right is when I woke up.
As you see, I was not equipped with proper airlocks. But, as I found, that was ok because condoms are sterile and do just fine. Though, I did search high and low through every pharmacy near my house and I could not find even a single box of unlubricated rubbers to use.
They don't exist here.
Although I did find one brand called "Damage."
Ew.
Once I had all my fix-ins together I got all excited to be brewing something again I pitched my yeast before I took an OG reading. Not a huge deal, lots of people brew without a hydrometer, but I'm so annoyingly meticulous about these things. Many sailors blushed in the minutes that followed.
So, I don't have an ABV to list, but it was strong. And dry. Really dry. My mouth puckered every time I took a sip. I did measure the final gravity and that came out at .997, which pretty low. There had to be a good bit of alcohol in there. I wouldn't have thought so if I had a higher final gravity and the wine were sweeter; both would indicate low attenuation.
After I bottled it I froze it to kill the yeast and freeze out other stuff to try and clear it up a bit. The bottle I put it in was too tall to stand in my fridge, though, so all the sediment I froze out settled to the bottom and then ended up back in suspension. At any rate, Eric and I scarfed a fair bit of it one night and we both came to the conclusion that it packed a helluva punch.
I affectionately named it Weisswine- Blitzkrieg.
I had two glasses and got pretty loopy. It was one of those drunks where you feel fine sitting down, but then the hammer drops after you get up to take a piss. After Eric left I was marching around my apartment spouting all kinds of nonsense. Sue raised her eyebrows a lot and kept asking if I were drunk, which I vehemently denied.
Heh.
The next morning sucked all of the joy out of the night before. It was great to get crunked off of something I had made myself, but the resulting hangover was brutal. I actually still have a second bottle of Weisswine in my closet that remains unopened, 4 months later. That was batch two and not significantly different to merit it's own entry, but you will see it in some of the photos.
If I had to guess I'd say that the ABV for Weisswine batch 1 was around 13%, if not higher. I've heard that bread yeast ferments out to around 10%, but I reckon that I put so much sugar into this batch and it came out so fucking dry that it had to be higher than that.
Definitely not something I'd serve in order to impress. But, it was certainly something I'd dish out in quantity to watch the resulting alcohol fueled adventures. So, next time, put the Franzia back on the shelf and ol' Uncle Ah-Wei a call.
Just make sure you do it a few weeks in advance.