nights on earth

March 18, 2009 5:08 PM

if i were stranded on a desert island -- or to stray from the cliche, in a postapocalyptic abandoned mall -- how would i make booze?

give me the best and easiest recipes for making alcohol on the sly, on the easy, quickly and with a macguyver-esque fetishism for utility. i mean, the world's ending in said location, and what else do you need?

posted by yonation to food & drink (27 comments total)

Pruno.
posted by torquemaniac at 5:11 PM on March 18

Forget the orange juice in the back of the fridge for about six months.... instant screwdriver.
posted by Green Eyed Monster at 5:14 PM on March 18

From The Sneeze's "Steve, Don't Eat It": Prison Wine. Comes complete with appetizing photos.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 5:14 PM on March 18

Yeah, pruno. Here is an in depth look.
posted by fire&wings at 5:15 PM on March 18

I've often seen documentaries on various tribes which make booze by chewing on something like a sweet potato, spitting the chewed-up stuff plus saliva out into a pot, and letting it sit there until it ferments.

I'm not sure of the details -- e.g. how long it has to sit there -- but I bet if you google saliva ferment or maybe tribe saliva ferment you'll find all the disgusting specifics your heart could ever desire.
posted by Flunkie at 5:22 PM on March 18

Here's the Pruno recipe with which I am familiar.
posted by torquemaniac at 5:24 PM on March 18

If you were on a proper desert island you could, of course, make palm wine from the sap of, say, a coconut palm. The fermentation process is very quick and you will have your alcoholic drink within hours. Don't schedule anything too hectic for the following morning.
posted by rongorongo at 5:25 PM on March 18

Sugar dissolved in a liquid, and exposure to yeast. That's pretty much it - everything else is just frippery and pretension. Once you've got a yeast culture going that doesn't make everything taste like sock, you can reuse it.
posted by zamboni at 5:53 PM on March 18

omg - pruno sounds great - but i'm looking for things that are more easily doable, without those ingredients (ie the saliva ferment). i'm not caring about taste here, people, i'm interested in how to laugh and be drunk when life seems dim...
posted by yonation at 5:56 PM on March 18

Sandor Ellix Katz claims in his book Wild Fermentation that if you leave unpasteurized apple cider sitting out for a while (two weeks?), it will go hard. However, my brother tried it once and he said it just grew mold (but your mileage may vary -- it's something I want to try, but the key is unpasteurized). I don't have the book, but I remember he offered some other pretty simple recipes for alcoholic beverages, although some do have to sit for quite a while.

In an issue of Craft (yes, everything I've learn came from Craft magazine), they offered a recipe for berry wine using just berry juice and yeast (I remember it said that you could use bread yeast, but your end product would taste, well, bready). Basically, you mix it in a plastic water bottle (sterilized if you care about such things, which you probably should, but seeing as this is post-apocalypse, maybe it doesn't matter so much) and shake every couple of days and let out a little bit of pressure, and at the end of seven days or so, you have wine. Or something that will at least give you a buzz.
posted by darksong at 6:09 PM on March 18

You can also ferment glutinous rice.
posted by Upton O'Good at 6:44 PM on March 18

Making booze with minimal resources is easy. If you look at ripe fruit like grapes or plums, you'll see a powdery blush on the skin. This is yeast.

To make a simple wine, mush up your clean ripe fruit into a clean container, add water, and wait. After a couple of weeks strain into another clean container, cover and wait a few weeks until the bubbling stops. Strain/decant and enjoy.

Of course such a simple process has its drawbacks - the main one being if you don't have an airlock, your wine can become contaminated [think vinegar] and/or oxidised. If you can keep air away from your brew, there's much less risk. Also, you never know quite what you'll get with wild yeast - but I've had good success, and people did make wine this way for thousands of years before yeast was discovered.

The other thing that is good to have is sugar. Grapes [when ripe] have a good balance of sugar and acidity for winemaking. A lot of other fruits require a sugar boost. A hydrometer is useful to get the sugar content correct.
posted by HiroProtagonist at 7:00 PM on March 18

Well, if you were in an abandoned mall, your best bet would be to ferment all those old bags of high fructose coca-cola syrup hanging around the food court. If your mall had a backup generator, I'm sure you could rig up a distillation apparatus in back of the Sbarro's and cook it out to 190 proof.
posted by aquafortis at 7:00 PM on March 18 [1 favorite]

1) Honey. As much as you can get your hands on.
2) Water. Heat it up, but it doesn't need to boil. Add a little to the honey (1:4 or 1:3 water:honey would be a decent shot.)
3) Time. Ignore it, leave it semi-covered, someplace neither hot nor cold.

Or, you can substitute water+honey for apple juice, right off the shelf. It will ferment all by itself, if you let it. In fact, if you buy a Sigg bottle, they advise you not to leave apple juice in it for more than a day, as a mostly-filled bottle will rapidly ferment the juice into a hard cider.
posted by paisley henosis at 7:04 PM on March 18

There's a how-to for superbasic 'wine' here.
posted by pompomtom at 7:31 PM on March 18

Assuming I was in someplace where it got cold in winter (or I had access to a freezer): Fractional freezing to make applejack or icewine.
posted by kickingtheground at 7:57 PM on March 18

In my experience, if we leave apple juice out on the counter for three or four days, it's got a kick to it.
posted by musofire at 8:26 PM on March 18

People used to make hard cider by juicing apples, then dumping the juice in a barrel with a lid.

The trick, now, is to have this stuff ferment (there's natural yeast floating around and a bunch of it get stuck to the outside of apples) in the absence of oxygen. Yeast can happily turn sugar into ethanol in the absence of oxygen. Much of the other microbes (some of which make toxins, almost all of which will make metabolic waste [ie., bacteria shit], and lots of it will give you food poisoning just by the nature of what they're made of [pubmed or google PAMP] don't get by as well without oxygen.

People used to do this by making sure that the barrel was topped off every day (ie., there's bung hole on top of the lid, unplug hole, add water/sugar-water/more juice, plug hole). iirc, about 6 weeks will get you something alcoholic (enough to be worth drinking) but once there's a certain amount of alcohol, it will prevent the growth of other bacteria and people would let the cider age for months to a year. You can google up apple cider recipes and see if you can find a vintage one.

There are lots of different kinds of yeast. Baker's yeast (with which pruno is typically made) makes horrible alcoholic beverages.

Don't most malls have a u-brew type place or a supermarket? Find yourself an upscale shopping mall and get yourself some 'champaign yeast.'

If you're doing this for real, when you rack (pour off the liquid into another container so you get rid of the sludge), you can save some of the sludge. You should be able to preserve some of the yeast by air-drying some of the sludge (yeast can form long-lasting spores when slowly dehydrated) for use when you have access to sugary liquids again (which may not come with their own yeasty friends).

If you experiment with distillation, make sure you use equipment that doesn't have any heavy metals in it (ie., lead welding), and never never never let it boil dry. It, more often than not, goes *BOOOM*

Also, you might get methanol contamination in your brew; drinking it as-is, there's probably not enough methanol to make you go blind (iirc your body preferentially metabolizes ethanol before methanol; your liver can get rid of the methanol fast enough - common care for methanol poisoning is to get the poisoned person as drunk as possible for as long as possible on ethanol so the kidneys can excrete the methanol). Distilling it, though, methanol evaporates a few degrees before ethanol does so you end up concentrating the methanol. It isn't worth it unless you have enough raw material, but to avoid this, you can throw out the first 10% of the distilate (and maybe re-distill the distilate, throwing out the first 10%) to 'drive off' the methanol.
posted by porpoise at 8:27 PM on March 18 [1 favorite]

You know those little "survival kits in an altoids box" type of things that are so fondly viewed among the nerdly set? You need to construct an "emergency brewing set" - brewing yeast (will need a rotation schedule), corn sugar, fermentation lock, collapsible liquid container. You must carry it with you whenever you travel by air or sea! Or go to the mall. Don't mess with this wild fermentation bullshit.
posted by nanojath at 9:20 PM on March 18 [3 favorites]

Don't be too concerned about methanol, see www.homedistiller.org for more details.

Quote:
# Home distilled spirit (untreated): methanol 0.0067%, ethanol 99.632%, fusils 0.361%
# Commercial vodka: methanol 0.013%, ethanol 99.507%, fusils 0.48%
posted by HiroProtagonist at 9:24 PM on March 18

Ah yeast. They eat sugar and shit alcohol and we love them for it.

I've seen a homemade set up for making beer that was a 5 gallon salvaged pickle bucket with a hole cut into it, a couple of quart sized yogurt tube with the bottoms cut out and an unlubricated condom between them with a capillary tube to make an airlock. It was pretty clever, and way more complicated than it needs to be, as my freshman roommate and I made hard cider in our room by cutting a straw sized hole into the lid of a gallon of cider, sticking in a bendy straw, sealing around the lid with poster putty, and keeping the other end of the straw in a cup of water.

If you have a good solid supply of yeast, and a large enough batch, you don't need an airlock as the yeast will get to work quickly and make a nice layer of CO₂ over the mash which will kill most other things that would make your mash go bad.

If I wanted to make hard stuff in a post apocalyptic abandoned mall, I'd head for the subway or any other place that bakes on site and grab their yeast. Hot Dog on a Stick for sugar and maybe lemons. That will get you most of the way there for some pretty craptacular hooch (cane sugar doesn't make particularly good wine/beer). The food court is really all you need - you'll find pickle buckets and sanitizer, I'd probably grab as much fruit juice from the smoothie hut as I could get. Hell, if there's a Crate and Barrel and a Sears, you can get big enough pots, Sterno and tools to make a proper still. If there's a hippie store that has wheat grass - maybe, just maybe there is grain that can be malted for making beer - but good luck finding hops. Honestly, a postapocalyptic mall is easy.
posted by plinth at 10:10 PM on March 18 [2 favorites]

Hard cider is dead simple, open a bottle of apple juice, toss in a big pinch of bread yeast, cap, and shake. Unscrew the cap but leave it resting on the lid and you have a jury-rigged airlock. Three to five days later at room temperature the fizzing will stop and you'll have a decent hard cider that's about 5% alcohol.

iirc, about 6 weeks will get you something alcoholic
Close, but you mixed up one detail. The primary fermentation, where the vast majority of alcohol is produced, only takes 3-5 days. This will leave you with a beer or wine that's drinkable, but rough around the edges. The 6 week period is for the secondary fermentation which only produces a tiny amount of alcohol, but gets rid of a lot of the harsh tasting crap. Extremely cheap beers skip this step, which is why they taste like ass.
posted by TungstenChef at 11:48 PM on March 18

Making hard liquor would be easy in a mall. You'd need a pot with a hole in the lid, a coil of copper tubing (say from an ice maker, refrigerator, or AC unit), and a cold or ice water bath.

If you're in weather that's below freezing, you can do a simple form of alcohol concentration by leaving your brew out in the cold overnight, and skimming off ice crystals in the morning. The crystals are primarily water, so what's left will have a higher alcohol content.

I think you're out of luck for making hard liquor on a desert island, you need a condenser which is really only doable with metal or glass.
posted by TungstenChef at 11:57 PM on March 18

wow, so many great answers! thank you everyone - and lucky to know i'm not alone in thinking about this...

but the question of making hard liquor without equipment is another good one - what about "homemade" potato vodka in north, north siberia and finland? don't they do that with without distillers?
posted by yonation at 5:18 AM on March 19

Oh, and remember to use evolution for your own advantage.

After your first batch, save the yeast from it (as described in various posts above), and split it into two (or more). Thereafter, always make two (or more) batches at a time, and only save the yeast from the batch or batches that turn out better than the others. Use only that yeast for your next set of batches, and repeat ad infinitum.

If you are a Creationist, feel free to ignore this, and continue having shitty brew for the remainder of your life (but you should probably also note that the Bible says it is good to neither eat meat nor drink wine).
posted by Flunkie at 7:01 AM on March 19 [1 favorite]

This guy: Popcorn.
posted by Area Control at 7:35 AM on March 19

kickingtheground mentioned fractional freezing - yonation. Water freezes at a less cold temperature than ethanol. Just leave it in the cold, water ice crystals will float to the top. Skim and discard until you get something strong enough for your taste. After a certain percentage, the water will stop freezing out of the mixture and the ice crystal mass will contain ethanol as well as water (or ice crystals stop forming, depending on the temperature).

You'll have to keep an eye on it and skim the water crystals as they form. I've had up to 35% ethanol/water solution freeze completely (overnight) on me in a normal ~ -20'C freezer (it might have been a little colder).

Ah, thanks TungstenChef, I did misremember.
posted by porpoise at 8:07 AM on March 19