I'll Have a Bucket of Booze

So I guess that pretty much everybody knows that it is possible to buy home wine and beer making kits. They are pretty popular, and I've made batches myself several times over the last decade or so. I never had much success with making good-tasting home-made beer, although I did manage to pull off a few good batches of wine. However, I just learned last week from a friend of mine that it is possible to make hard liquor now!

Basically, if you buy a package of the right type of yeast (which cost me $7.95), add it to 25 litres of water, and add eight kilograms of sugar, then stir it up and cover it so air can't get in to contaminate the yeast, it will slowly turn into a form of edible alcohol. It would sort of be like "alcool" or "grain alcohol" I guess, just ethanol mixed with water, without much flavor. After about a day or so, the bucket reaches 20 proof (10%) and eventually, after about a week of fermenting, the strength tops out at 40 proof, or 20%. At that point, it just needs to be run through a carbon filter to clean out the yeast in the mix, and voila, a big bucket of booze.

As long as I don't resell it, I can't get into trouble for bootlegging. As long as I don't distill it to try to make it stronger, I don't run into safety issues or get in trouble for running a still. I did pay a fair amount of money for the initial setup (a glass bucket to ensure better sterility, carbon filters, yeast, spoons, bubbler to allow gas to release without air getting back into bucket, etc.) but it came in at less than $80.00 overall. Now that I have all the equipment, I just have to buy packets of yeast and the sugar, so a batch of about 20 litres of 40 proof alcohol will cost me well under a dollar per litre.

Now the big test will come next week when I taste the first batch. Because my liquor is made with refined white sugar as a base, it will be fairly tasteless. Other types of alcohol use different bases (and additives) to give them flavor. For example, I believe that bourbon is made with corn mash, Canadian rye whiskey is made from rye & other grains, vodka is often made with potatos, rum is often made with sugar cane and/or molasses, etc. The neat thing here is that I can buy little bottles of additives that will change the taste of the alcohol to make it taste like certain categories of liquor. These extract bottles are expensive, because it costs about $3 for enough extract to "convert" one litre. However, that still puts the total cost per litre at only about $4, compared to the scandalous price of $32 per litre from Canadian liquor stores.

Obviously, this is just a fun little project for personal consumption, not for redistribution, but I'm looking forward to bottling my own personal brand of "Bolivia Bourbon."