Hooch: Simplified Brewing, Winemaking, and Infusing at Home

Hooch: Simplified Brewing, Winemaking, and Infusing at Home

Scott Meyer

Language: English

Pages: 208

ISBN: 076244603X

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


For anyone who has considered brewing a batch of beer or mead at home, or making a custom barrel of wine with local fruit, this thorough guide will clear a path to the bottle. It demystifies the process: from planting hops and fruits to pruning, harvesting, fermenting, flavoring, and bottling one-of-a-kind drinks from your own backyard. It serves as a starting point not only for wines and beers, but also hard ciders, meads, and infusions, and even touches on at-home distilling

Perfect for the city-dweller, urban gardener, or anyone with limited space and a desire to make custom concoctions, Hooch offers projects to suit any lifestyle. With recipes for brews made from grapes, hops, and herbs, DIY boozers will find everything they need to begin a brewing journey.

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fermentation has peaked. To figure out whether a yeast has finished, you need to know the original gravity (OG) of your must or wort, which you measure with a hydrometer before you pitch the yeast. When the bubbling of fermentation has slowed or almost stopped, take a sample of your drink and measure it again with the hydrometer to determine the final gravity (FG). With those numbers and this formula, you can calculate the attenuation percentage: [(OG – FG)/(OG – 1)] × 100 = % ATTENUATION You can

fruits—you will be picking your first figs in two to three years. Each of these types of fruit trees can produce about 20 pounds of fruit or more each season, more than enough for a batch of wine. Except in the northernmost states and Canada, early fall is the best time to plant fruit trees. Early spring (after the average last frost date) is the ideal planting time in colder climates and is the next best season to plant everywhere else. Soak the trees’ roots in a bucket of room-temperature water

often afflicts apple trees in humid regions. It shows up on flowers and leaves as light gray spots, which darken as they age. Affected fruit will have corky, scablike lesions on their skin. The disease survives from season to season on fallen leaves, so be sure to rake up the leaves in fall when they have been infected. Air circulation is especially helpful for preventing scab, so prune as needed to open the interior branches to a breeze. When the tree is infected with scab, you can use a sulfur

cool, dark place to give their skins a chance to toughen up a bit and their flesh time to dry out a bit. For making vodka, however, you can and should use fresh potatoes as soon as possible. Start by cleaning the potatoes well, then cutting them into chunks. As you do this, you will discover what makes homegrown potatoes better than store-bought: Your fresh potatoes 166 xxx HOOCH xxx hooch design1_Layout 1 3/15/13 10:53 AM Page 167 are very juicy, and for that reason, they’re well suited to

fluid is alkaline. It is, however, a rather broad measure of the acidity. You get a more specific reading using metallic precision strips or an electronic pH meter, both of which are also more expensive than the simple strips. The more precise reading helps you to know exactly how close you are to the intolerance range for your yeast and can guide you in bringing the fluid into the acceptable range. You can find yeast that can handle the acidic environment or you can raise the pH by adding to the

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