A couple months ago my Dad got me a copy of "The Art of Fermentation" by Sandor Ellix Katz, and it's turned me into quite a freakish fermenter. I make lots of stuff from the book now, but one of the most no-brainer skills I've learned is fermenting sugars into alcohol.
The first day I started reading through the book was on a day that I had thrown away a bag of peaches that had gone moldy on the counter. After reading through the chapter on making mead, though, I pulled them back out of the trash! I was able to salvage a few bits of each peach and cut them up into large-ish sections, then dropped them into a mix of water and honey (4:1 ratio) in an old jar. I fashioned a "weight" for the peaches out of an old yogurt lid, including some wings that folded up and pushed against the sides of the jar to keep the chunks down. After about a week of fermenting, this ended up being the best mead I've yet made. All it really cost me was a bit of honey.
My second mead was made with some strawberries that were just starting to go bad and a banana that was overripe; I figured it's a good flavor combo in processed foods and I didn't have much to lose. This time, the fruit pieces ended up going moldy a few days into the ferment, so I just removed them and let the fermentation continue. Luckily the mead turned out fine, and still got a great strawberry-banana flavor. This one closely rivals my peach mead for best ever.
Since the seasons have changed, my current experimentations are with mixtures that at least approximate hard ciders. Since I don't have access to a press I'm using store-bought pasteurized apple juices and (re)introducing wild yeasts from cut-up apples to them. The apple juice versions have turned out okay, but I don't think there's enough of a flavor complexity to them. My latest iteration has come from fermenting a bottle of sparkling cider, which I think has led to slightly improved results. Each time I start a new batch, I pour in a bit of the previous one to jump-start the yeasts. I've been carbonating each batch but haven't tried the carbonated versions yet; they're sitting in the fridge waiting for a party this weekend.
The point of all this is there's little reason to regularly spend money on beer and wine when it's so easy to make sugary, mildly alcoholic beverages. Making alcohol only becomes more complex if you want to age it, distill it, or make it from grains. I don't claim these drinks are direct substitutes for wines and beers. It's more like switching from an expensive hobby to a cheaper one, and still finding the same amount of enjoyment overall even though the activity is quite different.
Is there anyone else out there doing this? Any good ideas for things to try, especially as fresh fruit becomes more scarce over the winter?
