LAST-RESORT LIBATIONS
When preparedness enthusiasts start talking about SHTF barter items, the list almost always includes alcoholic beverages. Diversified preppers often stock up on liquor and wine, since they age well, and some even dabble in storing beer (which needs to be rotated, aka consumed, before it gets “skunked”). Since all good things come to an end, at some point your stocks would run out. In the event of a drawn-out economic crisis or grid-down scenario, the value and importance of alcohol would likely increase.
But what’s your resupply strategy? Have you ever thought about making your own wine or beer? It’s not as hard as you might think, and you don’t even need much in the way of supplies. I’ve been home-brewing beer, wine, mead, and hard cider for years, and even running an annual class on the subject here in Virginia. I can’t make any promises about the taste of your first batch, but I’ve been blessed with some very good home-brew batches over the years. With a little luck and diligence to the details, you’ll brew some good batches too!
Fermentation Basics
Before we launch into the nuts and bolts of creating your own alcoholic beverages, it’s important to understand the unsung hero of it all — yeast! This is a fungal organism, acting a bit like a plant and a bit like an animal. There are about 1,500 known species of yeast, with countless strains of each species. Our little friend Saccharomyces cerevisiae is the most important one for our purposes; since it eats simple sugars, burps out carbon dioxide, and excretes alcohol (when held in a sugary liquid in a favorable temperature range and low oxygen levels).
When the right yeast is added to water filled with grain malt sugar, it proliferates and consumes the maltose. The result is beer. When the right strain of yeast goes into fruit sugar water, you get wine. Beer is made with less “sugar” per gallon, and wine is generally made with double the “sugar.” This is why most beers are about 5-percent alcohol by volume (ABV) and wines are around 10-percent ABV.
It takes roughly a month to initially
