Apocalypse Wine from Ribena or Tinned Fruit.

[GillyBee]

Most yeasts stop working if the sugar or alcohol level is too high so you either get a very slow ferment or it won't start or it stops when there is still a lot of sugar left making a very sweet wine.

If you have a "super yeast" you may be able to keep going and get a really high alcohol content which might be good for making schnapps or fake liqueurs.

My mead was running at about 3lb to the gallon not 5 and was quite sweet enough for us.

[rik_uk3]

One of these could be handy, £150 off ebay

[jansman]

One of these could be handy, £150 off ebay

I use turbo yeast to make a ‘special’ brew. The picture above shows a piece of familiar equipment

Moderator hat on now: Distilling alcohol is illegal under UK LAW without licence from HMRC. , and UK Preppers cannot condone breaking the law.

Let’s keep to legal home brewing folks.

[jennyjj01]

One of these could be handy, £150 off ebay

Yes. Post apocalypse, we will need water purifiers like that. Buy them now from your local 'water purifier' shop. My local water purifier shop also sells beer and wine kits.

Perfectly legal to distill alcohol if you have a license. That's not to say getting a license is easy.

https://www.gov.uk/search/all?keywords= ... =relevance

Chatting about these devices, my home brew shop had a customer that was stupidly and blatantly selling hooch. The customer got busted and the authorities read the shopkeeper the riot act. He still sells them.

[pseudonym]

One of these could be handy, £150 off ebay

Could our coastal members use this as a desalination plant

[GillyBee]

Carshalton lavender fields use a couple of homemade versions of this for distilling their essential oil. One is made from an old pressure cooker and the other is a much larger effort able to take almost a cubic metre of cut lavender.
You can see it if you scroll to the bottom of this link.
https://www.carshaltonlavender.org/buy-our-oil/

[rik_uk3]

Buy the still but don't use it until after the collapse of society, you won't need a licence then and they are legal to own

[jennyjj01]

Purist winemakers, please forgive me.

I present two recipes. One for Ribena wine and one for Tinned Peaches wine. Actually, so similar that I give it as a generic recipe.
If you try this, please report back, even if you didn't enjoy it.

Quick Update. Bottled the ribena wine today, 48 hours after adding 'winefine'. It kept a lot of ribena taste and I'd say it tasted medium sweet in spite of a 990 finishing SG. Refreshing patio wine.

For the Peach wine, I simply ran it through a colander and wire sieve to remove the pulp and that is now fined and clearing. More vinous than the ribena wine.

Neither wine would win prizes pre-apocalypse, but that wasn't the objective. Maybe 6.5/10 compared to my favourite bought wine.
From start to finish about 3 weeks

[jennyjj01]

Tonight I made a wine with negligible thought or research. This post will document how it works out.

Let's call it peach and mixed fruit wine.

I was using 'what I had to hand'

Ingredients:
825g Tin of Peach halves in syrup (BBE June 2022)
500g bag of Sainsburys Value Range mixed dried fruit. (BBE Oct 2022) I have a fair few bags to use up.
300g granulated sugar.
1/4 sachet Universal wine yeast
No tannin, No additives, No nutrients, No enzymes.

Method:
Chop the peaches up a bit.
Pulse the mixed dried fruit for a while in food processor, Just chopping roughly.
Into a 3L pan and bring to a simmer for ten minutes (To drive off preservatives)
Blitz with a bullet blender, but not much.
Into a 5L bottle
Dissolve the sugar in a litre or so of heated water.
Add to the bottle.
Top up to two inches from the top of the bottle.

Take specific gravity and find it to be 1.060. I might add another 100g of sugar as that#s a bit low.
Sprinkle with yeast. Add a lock and stand in a big dish, lest it bursts into yeasty life.
Remember that I should have let it cool down: DOH!

Observed that there was an oily surface, possibly from the sultanas, orange zest in the fruit. The peaches got a bit lost in the mix. Ask me if I care. If I get a rough but drinkable wine from this, I'll be satisfied.

I'll update tomorrow to tell whether the yeast survived.

[Kiwififer]

I tried to make Viking blood mead which was ready at Christmas. It tasted horrible so it’s back to the drawing board.