Being 21 is great. Brewing your own booze is great, too. There’s a gallon and a half of raw unfiltered hard cider in my possession right now. It’s like apple juice with a little bite and some alcohol.
Anyway, hard cider is surprisingly easy to make. It’s kind of difficult to get started. You need raw apple cider, which has naturally occurring yeasts that will immediately get to work converting sugar into alcohol, so long as there’s no oxygen around. Once you have your raw cider, you can ferment it. Then once it’s fermented, you can add some of it to any apple juice or cider you want and it will turn it into hard cider so long as there’s no oxygen. Don’t blame me if you get apple cider vinegar.
What did all that cider cost me? It’s all organic, unfiltered apple juice or apple cider – which are essentially the same thing – that costs about $5 a gallon. Considering that it gets up to 7-10 percent ABV, that’s a lot of booze for not a lot of money.
You need a few things: gallon jugs, preferably glass, with tight fitting caps. You’ll also need cider (duh). A gas exchanger (which lets out excess carbon dioxide without letting in extra oxygen) is optional but highly recommended. I don’t have one, but I wish I did.
If you like, you can also distill your own cider to make apple brandy. I don’t know where you would get a still, but if moonshiners in the boonies can do it, I bet you can too.
Of course, there’s plenty of other things you can brew: Kombucha (an effervescent tea drink that is delicious and very healthy), kvass (a Russian bread beer that can also be made non-alcoholically) and obviously all the other spirits. Even kefir (a milk drink like yogurt) is a fermentation product.
Some of you are probably wondering if I’m afraid of going blind one day from my own brew. Maybe I am a little bit, but not really. The funny thing about cider is that back in the old days they let it ferment in wooden casks until they were ready to drink it – how’s that for sanitation? Wild fermentation processes (which means using wild strains of yeast or bacteria, depending on what you’re making) are very robust – they usually kill off any pathogens quite quickly. With hand sanitizers every fifty feet, I think people get the wrong idea about the microscopic world. The vast majority of protozoans aren’t pathogenic. You are as likely to be poisoned by spoiled pasteurized milk as spoiled raw milk, and given that some raw milk will spontaneously culture to kefir, you’re probably more likely to be poisoned by pasteurized milk.
Ultimately, there are bigger factors underlying whether pathogenic bacteria will colonize something you are brewing. If there’s not an airtight seal, if you used non-wild yeasts (which are bred for fermenting, not competing with other protozoa), if you don’t use enough innoculate, or most of all if you have bad abiotic conditions like physiological pH, temperature, too much light, and so on. If something is skunked, you can usually tell.
There may be a brew club starting up soon. And you won’t have to be 21; our college’s anti-discrimination policy would not allow that kind of exclusion. It’s strange that our government would.
Last, a piece of advice from our distinguished former professor of chemistry, David Cullen. Anti-freeze is metabolized to a toxic compound in mammals. The best cure is to prevent the formation of the toxic metabolite by introducing something to compete for the enzyme that does the conversion. And that something is alcohol. So if you or your dog or your friends make the mistake of drinking anti-freeze, get them as drunk as possible as quickly as possible. Seriously.
So go out and brew your own alcohol. It’s rewarding, it’s fun and it’s cheap.
