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 |   Tales from real life |
| Well, if they're not true, they oughta be! |
I sometimes wonder about the mental processes that led our ancestors to brew beer. Brewing may not be rocket science, but it is somewhat complicated. Beer production starts with soaking barley and allowing it to germinate to become malt. Then the malt is mashed and steeped to release starches and sugars and create the wort. Hops and spices are added to enhance the flavor and then the wort is boiled. Then yeast is added, and the actual fermentation begins. The full process takes three weeks or more depending on the type of beer. Then the resulting brew must be filtered, bottled and aged for a month or so to smooth the taste of the final product. Today’s craft beers are easy to drink, but it's difficult to imagine the centuries of trial and error that culminated in modern brewing. Wine, on the other hand, is almost inevitable. Yes, making fine wine involves both science and art, but the basic process is rediscovered on a regular basis. Once you've squeezed out a glass of fruit juice, it only takes a couple of weeks of lazy inattention to achieve fermentation. There are millions of tiny yeast microbes living all around us. They send out spores that float through the air and land in our open containers. Some of them spoil our milk and some turn a mundane fruit juice into marvelous wine. Unlike the complex recipe for beer, the serendipitous discovery of wine is easy to understand. And apple cider is a perfect example of this natural process. I bought a gallon jug of pure apple cider last fall and stored it outside on the deck because the fridge was full. Our deck is on the shady north side of the house, so the temperature there is mostly cool. I enjoyed a glass of fresh apple cider every day for a week or so. Then the appeal faded and I forgot about the jug for a while. There was still about a quart of cider left when I finally got back to it, and I heard a little pop like a champagne cork when I removed the cap. The whoosh of released pressure carried an unmistakable aroma of ethanol, so I knew very well what had happened. A wiser man might have poured it down the drain, but curiosity prevailed. I had to try a sip of the now hard cider. It wasn't half bad, slightly fizzy, tangy on the tongue, and definitely alcoholic. So, I drank a full glass and enjoyed it more than when it was fresh. The cider incident reminded me of making balloon wine when I was in high school. I don't remember where I came across the idea. Maybe I got it from Popular Mechanics magazine, maybe Reader's Digest, but probably not from Julia Child. The recipe seemed so simple that I had to give it a try. It called for a couple of cans of frozen grape juice concentrate, water, sugar, yeast, a gallon-size glass jar with a narrow neck, and a latex balloon. And all of those things were readily available in my mother's kitchen. The grape juice can be red, white, or even rosé if you use one can of each. Mix the grape juice per the instructions on the can and the resulting liquid will almost fill the gallon jar. A pinch of yeast is required to get things started and putting the balloon on the jar seals the deal. You can add an extra cup of sugar to the mix to ensure that the little yeasties are well fed and motivated to create alcohol. Using less sugar results in a 'dry' wine and more sugar gives a sweeter taste. More sugar also ensures a maximum amount of alcohol, so that’s what I did. Be sure to keep your makeshift wine vat out of the sun. Putting it in the back of the closet where your mom won't find it is a good choice. The basic process of fermentation is that the yeast eats sugar as it grows and excretes alcohol as a byproduct. But when the alcohol concentration rises to a certain point, the yeast will die off. Which goes to show that you shouldn't shit where you sleep. The steadily growing yeast also produces CO2 gas that partially inflates the balloon. You'll see the balloon expand as the yeast does its work and then deflate slightly to signal that the ordinary grape juice has miraculously become wine. It takes about three weeks for the yeast to overpopulate the jar and die off. I didn't know any better, so I used a packet of baker's yeast from my mom's spice rack. The wine might taste better with real brewer's yeast, but it becomes alcoholic either way. And yes, there is a bit of alcohol produced along with the CO2 that makes bread dough rise, but it evaporates away in the oven as the bread bakes. When you finally remove the balloon from the jar you'll find a surprising amount of sediment on the bottom. This yeast poop is another byproduct of fermentation, and it is not tasty at all, so the wine and the sediment need to be separated. My family still had a milk cow in 1974, so I used one of the large paper filters for straining milk and folded it inside a funnel to carefully decant my wine into another clean jar. Screw on the cap and you’re ready to smuggle it out of the house for a party! A winery will age their new wine for months or even years to mellow the flavor and smooth the rough edges, but a teenager doesn't have that kind of time. The whole point is to have alcohol for tonight, so we drank it raw. And that's the way I remember it going down. My friends and I did our best to stomach that balloon wine, but it really wasn't very good. We finally settled on starting the party with some better stuff first. Homemade wine goes down a lot easier if you’re already buzzed. And this fact has also been rediscovered many times over the years. There's even a reference to serving the good wine first in the biblical story of the wedding at Cana. The steward didn’t know that Jesus had changed water into wine. He thought the miracle was serving good wine even though the buzzed wedding guests were ready for the cheap stuff. Author's note: ▼ |
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