/diy/ - Do It Yourself

You used plastic and baking yeast. What the fuck were you expecting?

>>124961
jesus in a bottle. duh.

>bitter

That usually means a bacterial infection and of course a bad batch. Sour is still good though, depending on how sour.

>pic

The biggest mistake is the airlock. At the very least, use a balloon with a few pin pricks in it as the air lock.

>>124961
Plastic and baking yeast is not a problem with wind making if you use them correctly. Contamination is the most likely problem with the OP's brew. I recommend HDPE #2 plastic and Fleischmann's brand baking yeast if you must use either. The Fleischmann's yeast must be used like Lalvin EC-1118 yeast.

>>124966
that looks like an interesting mix
might try that. i plan on running a couple batches at once
more than like it is contamination. poured it out.

>>124974
>>124966
That's 2.5 cups of sugar, FYI. It turned out to be one of the best wines I ever made.

>>124980
Hmm....I guess that measuring cup was filled to the rim. It's more like 3 cups of sugar then.

Shit, you reminded me how wasted I got with home-made blackcurrant wine, at the age of 13.
Damn, good times. Helicopter mode was an interesting experience.

Moar flavors of wine please?

>>124958
>Twelve 2-litre coke bottles
>23 litres

wat

>>124982
i'm just in college and can't exactly afford a ton of stuff to buy so figure this is a good way to get around it :P

so... OP would have had a "good batch" if used glass container instead?
<- very interested

Hold on, me and a friend basically did what's shown in the OP picture. We made two different gallon jugs: Really cheap apple juice, $4/half gallon cider. Surprise: the really cheap apple juice one tasted like SHIT, the good cider one tasted GREA-decent. Left them 2-4 weeks(don't remember, based it on how many bubbles).

Make sure you CLEAN THE FUCK OUT OF THE CONTAINER. WITH SOME BLEACH. Then rinse it like a mothercunt. Everything must be clean.

Another difference is that we used a proper air lock($1.50 I believe) on the cider one, the other one, we just used capped the gallon container and barely poked through the cap with an exacto knife.. air could get out, but I doubt anything got in.

There's nothing wrong with food grade plastic containers for making shitty concoctions like this.

>>125001

No, there's a number of factors involved and it depends on what you define as a good batch.

>>125001
Plastic, glass, BetterBottle, stainless steel, etc are all fine for brewing. The OP's problem was a contamination. It could have occurred from a faulty airlock or something was not sanitized first.

A good batch is a batch you personally like. There's far too many variables for that. For instance, a contamination may turn out great or horrid.

>>125020
StarSan is better than bleach and does not need to be rinsed out. If you do use bleach, make sure to rinse it out with boiled water that has cooled enough to use with your equipment. Rinsing it with non-boiled water is a contamination risk.

The only time an airlock fails is near the end of the fermentation cycle when outgassing CO2 pressure drops very low or stops. Then outside air can get in. During that time the microbe resistance of the yeast and brew will be dwindling and contamination can occur rapidly.

Do you guys know how to make some absinthe, I don't want to get high and shit, I just want something that is green and have a fennel taste.

>>125029
what in the hell.
how.

>>125029
>Dandelion wine
>how??

>>125255
>>125127
Dandelion wine is pretty easy to make, but picking the flowers is horrible and plucking the petals is worse than horrible. You can google several recipes. I recommend Jack Keller's website this dandelion wine and other wine recipes as well as tons of wine making info,

http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/dandelio.asp

>>124966
dont listen to this guy, balloons are NOT the right way to homebrew. balloons and bakers yeast a prison tier homebrewing.

for the price of a pack of balloons you can get a real airlock with grommets and a bung, and for the price of bakers yeast you can get real brewing yeast. its utterly stupid to go with anything else when the real stuff is just as cheap as the prison tier stuff.

>>125279
Truth.

I've done prison brew simply because it was easy to get all the stuff on a trip to safeway. Tasted like shit, but got me drunk. If you are looking for anything more, take your time to do it right.

>>124958

When brewing, can you just scale up/down the size in proportion?

>>125290
yes

14%...drunk as shit?

>>125096

As an absinthe drinker, let me inform you of two things.

1) It is legal to purchase and consume.

2) It does not get you high. At all. No, fuck you.

The green fairy does get you drunk in a different way than other alcohol, but it is in no way a high. More like... Even though you're drunk, you're more aware of things than you would be if you were inebriated on rum, beer, vodka, or any other drink. Less obnoxious annoying asshole, more "oh, that's what I act like."

The myth about it getting you high was spread by French winemakers I believe, so they could remove their competition. Lawmakers, being ignorant fucks that they are, believed it, even though everyone drank it. I suppose they were paid off or something, I don't know nor care honestly. That being said, if you want legitimate absinthe, no, you should not attempt to brew it yourself. You will likely fuck it up and it will taste horrible, or you will brew poison and kill yourself.

When you go buy yourself a bottle of Kubler or La Bleue Clandestine, be smart about it. Mix it with icewater in a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio, with absinthe itself being the smaller portion. You can add sugar to it as your taste demands, but do not drink it straight. You will miss out on so many delicious flavors.

>>125391
I know all you said, but I have no idea were to buy absinthe, anyway Thujone does get you high in high quantities, and cheap absinthe made with oxides of copper to it gets greener does make harm to your health, and at France there was a lot of people dieing of liver failure due to consumption of too much copper oxides.

>>125391

As a febblow absinthhe drinker! Iwould also like to staytea that erblough de groublier blouuuuurgh.

Good day slir.

>>125260
My mom said my great grandfather made dandiline wine. His secret was child labor in the form of my mom and aunt. They picked and plucked and he brewed. So protip: use local children give em a buck a bucket or something.

Status: Told

But hey, after you master this maybe you can throw out 1000s of years of development in some other subject.

just stick the buck fifty airlock on to a 4L bottle of storebought grape juice. use wine yeast. i dont even filter it i just toss in some gelatin and let it sit in the fridge a couple days to settle. works fine. tastes fine.

>>125423
>storebought grape juice
Translation: use stuff that has preservatives in it, which will make your yeast sick and make your wine taste like ass.

>just toss in some gelatin
Translation: I think it will be funny to make people go blind from methanol poisoning.

This is why we can't have nice things, folks.

>>125429
well obviously you read the fucking label and check for preservatives. guess what: most juices don't have them! just drank a bottle of no name grape-cranberry juice wine a couple weeks ago

methanol poisoning from gelatin? what is this i don't even... the gelatin just forces the sludge to the bottom thus clearing up the wine. you add a little pinch. winemakers using glass carboys and all that other stuff use gelatin all the time for early drinking wines, it's very common.

you're either a troll or totally fucking retarded spouting his mouth off about things he knows nothing about.

>>125396

If there are no booze shops nearby that carry absinthe, drive a little farther out. If there aren't any within an hour from you, I feel sorry for you. Luckily, there's the internet. You can order things online and have it shipped to you. A quick search led me here, although I've never had to buy alcohol online so I'm afraid I can't vouch for them. http://www.alandia.de/absinthe/index.php/language/en

>>125408

Stay classy, friend.

>>125279
>>125283
I've brewed nearly 1,000 gallons of wine and mead. I've won a couple of local contests with my mead and wines. About 200 gallons of that was with balloon air locks in plastic jugs when I first started out a few years ago. The reason I advocate balloons is for beginners how want to get brewing ASAP while waiting for an order of brewing equipment or when you've all your current air locks are being used and you need to brew more batches. They also make great air locks when used properly.

Prison wine is called Pruno and is made in an entirely different way and with quite different ingredients that you make standard wine. Pruno will always be the absolute worst tasting alcoholic beverage ever created because of the ingredients and methods used to make it.

You are most likely thinking of hobo wine. Hobo wine uses store bought fruit juice, sugar, and baking yeast. Which, if done correctly can make an excellent wine. Some of my best wines have been hobo wines.

>>125412
Great idea, only there's no children where I live.

>>125429
Potassium sorbate is the only preservative you need to watch out for in store bought fruit juices. Even then, baker's yeast isn't affected by it all that much. Regardless, One should use fruit juices without anti-yeast preservatives.

>gelatin

Gelatin is a standard wine fining agent.

>methanol

Fruit pectin is what produces the most methanol. In wine there is methanol produced. However, it is at such small quantities that it does not harm you. The ethanol helps protect your nervous system from its affects and the ethanol itself does more harm to you than the minute amount of methanol in wine. However, when you distill wine to make brandy the methanol content can, but does not always, increase to dangerous levels IF you fail to distill correctly. This also depends on the type of wine. For instance an orange or pear wine, that has not had pectic enzyme used in it, will have more methanol content than any other wine. If it was distilled IMPROPERLY there's a chance of mild methanol poisoning. Cases of methanol poisoning with distilled spirits come from when the person distilling it actually voluntarily puts methanol into the spirits in order to up the alcohol content cheaply. They normally do that by using denatured alcohol which is ethanol that has methanol put into it to make it undrinkable for industrial uses.

Essentially, if you are mentioning methanol poisoning in wine making you are either a troll or you are completely ignorant of the subject.

Here's all the old Homebrewmen archives, link list is copy/pasted from older threads:

-----

95.37mb
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=A0UQOL5Z

95.37mb
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=0H7BJ5I9

95.37mb
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=MKF29Q88

75.61mb
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=I96QJ2G4

Download all 4 parts. Use 7-Zip or WinRAR to open and extract only the first part. Then the rest will automatically extract at the same time.

I highly recommend that you extract this into a new folder with a very short name on your hard drive (C:\a\). This is because there are VERY long file and folder names that can exceed the maximum file+folder name length and give you an error while extracting. If that happens it'll look like the archive is corrupted when it's not.

I know Windows XP can have that problem, but I don't know if Windows 7 will have that problem since I think its limit is much higher.

Most recent part is a stand alone file and you need to open it separately from the above:

Filename: Homebrewmen Threads 98-110.7z
File description: Homebrewmen Threads 98 to 110 - Tepache
File size: 66.95 MB
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=BICQT6Z9

>>125442

Tepache, shouldn't you be in /ck/?

I've always wanted to do a dandelion wine, but fuck if any grow by me (funny for weeds right) and I don't want to pick any that are roadside. One day though.

>>125279
While I agree an airlock beats a balloon in every way and that they are cheap, there is not always a local homebrew store people may go to. I'd advocate a blow off tube in these cases, but people like to be lazy and a balloon is a lazy option. Still it does a reasonable job when treated right.

>>125440
>The ethanol helps protect your nervous system from its affects

Methanol have an intoxicating effect, this is felt.
However, the enzymes that metabolises alcohols have a much greater affinity for ethanol. Thus, as long as you've got ethanol in your system the methanol will just circulate and leave your body in it's original condition. It's the secondary metabolites of methanol that are the dangerous parts.

Treatment for methanol poisoning? Ethanol(among others, depending on stage and so on of course).

>>125445
Yes, blow off tubes are better than balloons and 3-piece airlocks. That is for sure. The problem there is you may not have a stopper to use them. You can make a rubber gasket using a balloon. You put the balloon over the carboy top, poke a hole in it and squeeze the tube into the hole. I had to do that once when I ran out of stoppers.

pic related

Dandelions are not weeds. They are food and resource. You can eat the entire plant. Make wine and fried food from the flowers, a coffee adulterant from the roasted roots, latex from their sap, etc. Get the seeds from the ones you can, plant them in a garden space. They will do very well.

>>125447
Thanks for the additional info.

>>125461
lulz. plant dandelions in backyard. now all neighbours backyards have dandelions too, probably for years. they don't like dandelions. trollface activated. u mad neighborhood?

So me and a friend made a batch of mead a couple of days ago. However, we couldn't find any good yeast so we used bakers yeast instead.
How badly will this affect the taste, given that nothing horrible will happen to the mead such as contamination?

>>125538
It should be fine, but depending on what brand you use will matter. What brand did you use?

>>125432
>check for preservatives. guess what: most juices don't have them!
>spouting his mouth off about things he knows nothing about.
Stay classy, kids.

>>125538
>>125538
It won't too badly to my knowledge. Though your mead will be a very low percent alcohol, baking yeast can only ferment up to about 5%.

>>125442
>megaupload
I hope those are already downloaded and can be re-upped elsewhere because those links are no good now.

>>125754
>>125754
Yeah, could some kind anon please upload them to Mediafire or something?

>>125750
Incorrect, it can brew up to 19% depending on the brand. Fleischmann's Dry Active bread can do this, but normally only reaches 18%. It's much like Lalvin EC-1118 and can substitute it in many recipes.

Bread yeast is a very vigorous fermenter as it is meant to raise bread. It can cause blow outs much easier and can ferment dry far easier.

>>125756
>>125756
Ah ok, I was just remembering the only times I've used it has been Edmond's Baking Yeast and it didn't get very high.

>>125754
>>125755
Megaupload.com appears to be offline according to this,

http://downorisitjustme.com/res.php?url=www.megaupload.com

The links worked when I posted them and have been up for at least 1 year or more I think. Wait until megaupload is back up and running I guess.

>>125759
Hundreds of factors affect the performance of the yeast. It can be the recipe, environment, ect.

>>125762
It's probably never coming back up.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2012/01/file-sharing-megaupload-shut-down-for-
piracy-by-feds.html

>>125756
Can you sell that shit without a license?

>>125769
If the government doesn't find out, sure.

>>125770
Can one sue the government for losing important and legal data which only was available at megaupload?

>>125775
Yes, but you're unlikely to get a settlement. You can probably through paper work and legal action get them to give you the info. You'll have to talk to a lawyer, I reckon.

>>125770
>After receiving indictments from a grand jury in Virginia for racketeering conspiracy, conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and other charges on Jan. 5, federal authorities on Thursday arrested four people and executed more than 20 search warrants in the U.S. and eight foreign countries, seizing 18 domain names and an estimated $50 million in assets, including servers run in Virginia and Washington, D.C.

Welp. I hope none of you uploaded anything incriminating.

I'll see about uploading a newer updated version later on.

>>125769
Not legally where I live. I plan to get a license eventually so I can sell legally.

>>125775
You can sue anyone for anything, whether or not the suit will be dropped is another matter.

>>125780
You fags should try to start pulling this sort of shit, your government seems like going further and further in restriction to access to information and media. If you fags don't start doing something against it now, like a pro-piracy, pro-information movement, you will have to take up your ass whatever the government and the lobbyists decide.

>>125787
this is a /pol/ problem not /DIY/

>>125775
>Can one sue the government
You can attempt anything. Only in very narrow circumstances are you allowed to sue the government. They're immune in most circumstances, so long as whatever they're doing was done in the course of their duties.

Someone at my bank made illegal loans without us knowing and state agents asked for my tax returns and a bunch of documents. I gave it to them. When I asked for it back, they told me to eat a dick. This is when my lawyer gave me the "can't sue the government" bit.

You can sue for civil rights violations, but not much else.

LISTEN HERE!!!

Regardless of methods you use and whatever you make, the most important thing in making alcohol is sanitization.

If you don't sanitize your equipment that is in contact with your drink you have a pretty much guaranteed chance of bacterial infection. It won't make you sick, but most likely it will make whatever you made undrinkable ie disgusting tasting.

StarSan is the best shit ever since it doesnt need to be rinsed, but pure bleach (not perfume shit) will work, iodiphor will work.

http://www.howtobrew.com/
http://ck.booru.org/index.php?page=post&s=list

>>127339
This, one million times this. I literally just mist the whole kitchen with a Starsan solution, as well as wash the shit out of everything.

Also, stop using bread yeast, you can buy wonderful brewing/wine yeasts off the internet for a few bucks and won't end up with fruity hooch that smells like bad Wonderbread. Really, apple juice with some added sugar and decent champagne yeast will give you something awesome, for a just a couple bucks more. Stop being white trash fucktards.

Also, if you're using normal granulated grocery store sugar an easy way to get a better product (I think) is to use cane and not beet sugar. How can you tell for sure if sugar is made from beets if it does not say on the bag? Smell the bag, it will smell slightly like sweaty feet, mustiness. Cane sugar does not have this odor.

>>127388
If it's cane sugar, it will say that on the bag.

Google DIY hard cider. The instructions are far more complex than mixing things in a jug and waiting. Ive seen OPs pic before and got me interested but I knew better and checked other sources first. Its a troll recipe, fairly sure.

>>127424
Troll recipe? It's not trying to troll anyone. It's just a really poorly explained way to do it.

>>127384
> stop using bread yeast, you can buy wonderful brewing/wine yeasts off the internet for a few bucks and won't end up with fruity hooch that smells like bad Wonderbread. Really, apple juice with some added sugar and decent champagne yeast will give you something awesome, for a just a couple bucks more. Stop being white trash fucktards.

THIS, ffs