And Live Free Like Your Ancestors!

If you’re like me you’ve always wanted to make your own homemade wine.  As preppers, obviously we are all into DIY.  What better way to do it yourself than to make homemeade wine?  Some benefits of making your own wine include cost savings, a feeling of self-reliance, and most of all, you DON’T PAY TAXES.

***Rant***  In everything I do, I strive to eliminate the state.  I believe that government overreach is at an all-time high.  Too many Americans sit and wait for the government or other entity to do things for them.  And the WORST organization of all capable of doing ANYTHING is the government!  Any time we can do things to avoid paying taxes, we can starve the beast in Washington.   Trust me, politicians see us as cows, and as long as we produce for them (tax money) they’re happy.  So in our daily lives we need to do whatever we can to starve them.  When you can, barter instead of using state money.  Get your kids out of the schools.  And if you make your own brew, you don’t pay the sin tax.

I’d also recommend the book Lions of the West by Robert Morgan as a great read.  In it he describes how early settlers didn’t always have access to corn, wheat, or stills.  Apples and all they produced were commodities on the frontier, and most settlers drank some form of this Apple Jack, as I call it.

If you’ve ever thought you couldn’t make homemade wine because it’s too complicated, you’re dead wrong.  There’s nothing simpler (except maybe owning chickens).  I thought I’d need all sorts of high-end casks and airlocks, and tools to measure specific gravity. Although these things are very helpful, they are not necessary.  Here are all of the things you need to make a good, drinkable apple wine or hard apple cider.

1.   Apple juice

2.  Sugar

3.   Yeast

4.   Balloon (to use as airlock)

I’m no expert at this, but I make several gallons of this every few months.  Here’s exactly what I do.  I take the apple juice and pour out a little so it wasn’t full to the top of the bottle.  I add 1 cup of plain old table sugar per gallon of juice, put the lid on, and shake the crap out of it.  Then I activate my yeast and put it in the bottle.  I put a balloon over the lid as an airlock and wait for approximately 30 days.  That’s the short version.  Now for some specifics.

Activating the Yeast

The instructions on the yeast say ‘Mix yeast with 100-105 degree water’.  The yeast is tiny granules, almost a powder.  I figured my body temp was 98 degrees, so I ran tap water until it was slightly warm and mixed the yeast.  It made a brown-ish liquid, which I poured into my apple juice after about 2 minutes.

“Cook Time” or – time to ferment

I was advised it would take about 30 days to make hard apple cider.  I watched mine daily, and there were days it would fizz at the top and show activity.  There were days where it looked flat.  After it went 4 days with no activity, and the balloons went flat, I could only deduce that it was no longer going to ferment.  I either had a finished product on my hands or some nasty junk.

Finishing

To finish, I racked the finished product into another container that I’d already sanitized.  To rack beer or wine means to simply move it into another container.  After fermenting, there is always a little bit of yuck in the bottom.  I simply poured carefully until I got to the silt at the bottom and discarded that.  I poured mine into Arizona Tea gallon jugs that I get from my mother-in-law.  I put 1/2 cup sugar per gallon and shook it up like Hell.  I immediately put it in the fridge to ‘cold crash’ it and I had a surprisingly tasty concoction when I was done.  I’m now cooking up 3 more gallons.