Drinkable alcohol is an incredibly easy to make product, requiring very little initial investment and very little expertise. Brewing good alcoholic drinks is another topic – this one is about learning from doing, or at least trying, and seeing if brewing is the right hobby for you. If you are interested in it, but don’t want to buy a kit or any specialized equipment, this is your tutorial. There are no guarantees that this is going to be the tastiest treat you’ve ever tried, but you will find it is not bad – and if you do it right, you can come out with something very appealing. I’m proposing a short and sweet recipe that should be easy enough for any adult, and only requires a few very basic items. Hopefully, the things in the recipe are things you already have around your house, but if they aren’t, they are common items you can buy anywhere quite cheaply. I love brewing ciders for the holidays and beers for the summer months, but in between, I can usually be found brewing jugs of hooch while I’m waiting for a batch of wine to age long enough to open and share with friends and family. This process will get you familiar with the brewing process, and hopefully make you aware of how easy it really is. For this recipe we’ll make a half a gallon of hooch that should be plenty for a small party. Make two batches if it is a big party. It is technically a cider.
For the pre-brew liquid you’ll need a jug of fruit juice preserved either with nothing, or with citric acid. You can find the regular half gallon (16oz or 1.89L) jugs of fruit juice almost anywhere. That is the most common size jug you’ll find in the unrefrigerated juice aisle of any market, and nearly all of them are going to be preserved with citric acid. They are usually pretty cheap, too, if you just get apple or grape – but don’t limit yourself if something interesting is on sale. Don’t worry about whether or not it is “coctail” instead of juice, either. Corn syrup will convert to alcohol just as well as the fructose found in the 100% pure juices (though there is a flavor difference, it is an issue of preference, not quality). Stay away from anything with citrus fruit or cranberries in it and don’t even consider buying some kind of sports drink. They all have properties that will make you brew a catastrophe.
1 16oz (1.89L) Jug of Fruit Juice or Fruit Coctail Beverage
For our high tech tools we’ll need a large rubber or latex balloon. That is it. Thought it was going to get tricky, didn’t you? Don’t try to get by with using a tiny one, though – the balloon needs to fit over the large opening of the jug as far down to to the base as you can get it without breaking, even if it is stretched a bit more now and then.
1 Large Rubber or Latex Balloon
The high tech tools you be using will need to be sanitized before we do anything. Invisible mold spores and bacteria are on everything, and there is a possibility of brewing a colony of something toxic instead of alcohol. Bleach is often used to purify water and is drinkable if diluted enough. Though we won’t be drinking it at all, a bit of it will be on things that could come into contact with the brew. Stay away from the scented bleach – the scented stuff added to it can be more toxic than the bleach (since it doesn’t break down into table salt and water like bleach alone does). For this recipe you will need a single teaspoon of bleach added to one cup of water. This is likely plenty to sanitize the balloon.
1 Large Cup Filled with 1 Cup (1/4 Liter) Room Temperature Tap Water.
1 Teaspoon of Unscented Bleach Per Cup of Water (5 Milliliters of Bleach Per Quarter Liter of Water)
Now for the catalyst, baker’s yeast. Not much to say there. Baker’s yeast is not the optimal variety for brewing, but it will get your hooch up to 5 or 6% alcohol levels pretty quickly. All yeast varieties are just unicellular fungi, but many of the cutlivated ones can withstand quite high levels of alcohol. I usually use a fruit wine yeast when I make hooch, getting the alcohol up to a bit over 10%, but 5% is perfectly respectable. You don’t need to be precise with how much you use – a regular little 1/4 oz. packet is fine. The more yeast you use, the faster the sugars will be converted to alcohol, and we use the balloon or visual cues to see when things are ready, not a specific timeframe. Yeast will leave an undesirable taste in the hooch, though, so don’t pour in five ounces thinking you are going to get a jug of drinkable booze in a four days – it won’t be toxic, but it won’t taste terribly good, either.
1/4 oz. to 1/2 oz. (14 to 30 grams) Baker’s Yeast
To carbonate the hooch (you don’t have to if you don’t want to), you’ll need just a bit more sugar. You can use corn syrup, maple syrup, beet syrup, pancake syrup, brown sugar, white sugar, green sugar… you get the idea. Something that consist primarily of some form of sucrose. This will snap awake a bit of the yeast and get the pressure up high enough to carbonate things and make it taste a little better, along with becoming palate cleansing if you want to eat it with pizza or something. You don’t need a lot, and it isn’t an exact science the way we are doing things here.
1 Tbsp. (14ml) Sucrose or Fructose Sweetener
That is it for ingredients you’ll need. I don’t think any of these things are out of place in a usual household. Maybe the balloon, but how hard is it to pick one up the next time you are at the grocery market?
To sum up the items you need, here is your official scavenger hunt list:
1 16oz (1.89L) Jug of Fruit Juice or Fruit Coctail Beverage
1 Large Rubber or Latex Balloon
1 Large Cup Filled with 1 Cup (1/4L) Room Temperature Tap Water.
1 Teaspoon of Unscented Bleach Per Cup of Water (5 Ml of Bleach Per 1/4L of Water)
1/4 oz. to 1/2 oz. (14 to 30 grams) Baker’s Yeast
1 Tbsp. (14ml) Sucrose or Fructose Sweetener
Now to get to business, we’ll first need to take care of the sanitizing. Grab your cup of water and mix in the teaspoon of bleach. The concentration of bleach could cause slight discoloration of dyes in clothing, but it isn’t likely to damage your skin. Plop in your balloon and make sure you get as much bleach water inside the balloon as you can. Swish the bleach water around inside of it – the inside of the balloon is what we are most worried about because it will be sharing airspace with prime breeding ground for bacteria. Most balloons are made in fairly clean conditions, but bacteria is pervasive, so DO NOT SKIP THIS STEP. Once you’ve swished the bleach water around for a bit, go ahead and take the balloon out and set it somewhere clean. Don’t bother drying it.
Grab your jug of juice and your yeast, next. Be careful about exposing your juice to the air for long periods of time. Every second it is exposed is another second for an agressive mold or bacteria to float on in and make it their home. Open your jug of juice carefully, pour the yeast into the jug of juice, put the lid back on, and give it a good shaking. Yeast likes aeration in the beginning, so shake your jug it until it is a bit foamy at the top.
The balloon is there to keep your jug from exploding. Remove the cap to your juice jug and replace it with the balloon. Make sure you get the balloon on there snugly – the amount of gas released by a sugar to alcohol conversions is sizable and it could completely ruin your batch of hooch if it comes off and a colony of bacteria gets in and kills off the yeast. You may want to put a rubber band or two over the base of the balloon, just to be safe.
Set aside the lid to the juice – we’ll need that later.
Let your juice and balloon sit in a dark area of your home for the next week or so – a warm environment will speed things up and a cold environment will slow things down. After two to three days you should notice a good bit of bubbling starting. After three to five days, you’ll see some very vigorous bubbling going on. If after five days you don’t see any bubbling, you have a case of contamination and will need to throw the batch out and start all over again. You’ll need to check on the balloon daily to see if it is overfilled. If it is getting to a point where it may explode or go flying off, you can VERY CAREFULLY lift the edge of the balloon and let SOME of the trapped air out. Don’t let it all out, and don’t let the balloon slip and come off. If it can be helped, don’t touch it at all.
Eventually the bubbling with slow down to nearly nothing. You’ll see maybe a bubble or two reach the surface of the juice every three seconds. That is an indication that we are ready to condition the hooch soon, or move to secondary fermentation if you aren’t going to carbonate. Condition is just a fancy word for carbonate, by the way.
This is a good point to look carefully at the brew for any signs of contamination. Bacteria or mold colonies that may have invaded will usually be visible or have an odd odor about them. If you used that bleach and followed the procedures carefully, the risk of contamination is low, though.
Conditioning a beverage in a plastic jug is a dangerous procedure. If you’ve added too much sugar or the bubbling is still to vigorous, you are going to either have leaking or the lid will pop off and your hooch will shoot out. I suggest you wait an extra day after the bubbling has slowed down to a bubble or two every three seconds. You’ll need the lid from your juice for conditioning, and it needs to be sanitized. I don’t often use more than a bit of soap and a scrub brush for this, but you really should use bleach (in the same concentration as before) if you want to guarantee a good brew every time. If you choose not to carbonate your hooch, replace the balloon after the next step instead of replacing the juice jug’s lid.
Remove the balloon from your jug and quickly pour in your tablespoon of sweetener. Don’t use your fingers – an alcohol level of 6% is not enough to kill all bacteria and mold spores that could get in there, though it will reduce the variety that can survive. Once the sweetener is in, tightly replace the lid on your jug. If you aren’t saving it to do a secondary fermentation, throw out your balloon – they aren’t reusable.
The primary fermentation of your hooch shouldn’t have taken much over a week – three weeks at the absolute most, though it isn’t likely. Now you’ll have to wait for another four or five days. I often condition my hooch in the refrigerator when I’m not at home and leave it out when I am. This is to slow down the process and keep an eye on whether the container is bulging from pressure or not. If you aren’t conditioning, go ahead and replace the sanitized juice cap after the four or five days and put your hooch in the refrigerator.
Make sure you refrigerate your hooch before you drink it, and keep it refrigerated after opening it. Now you can tell all of your friends you are a brewer.
If you enjoyed this process and plan on repeating it, an airstop and bung instead of a balloon makes it many times easier, and a set costs around three US dollars around where I live. An entire brewing set usually retails for a modest amount of money, and can be reused for a very long time. I’ve still got a carboy I inherited five years ago that was already ten years old and I use it to this day. The parts that do wear out are very inexpensive. I hope you’ve learned something new and enjoyed the brewing experience. After this tutorial, you should be familiar enough with the basics that you can continue brewing ciders cheaply and easily and are ready to move forward with trying out new things.
