Homemade Alcohol for a Shrub.

I’ve made shrubs for years. Fill a bowl with imperfect fruit, add sugar, spices, macerate the mix, strain it, age a few days and add a little white vinegar and you have something special on your hands. You can see my recipe for shrubs here: shrub-a-dub-dub

Lately I’ve been dabbling in probiotics and making yogurt, refrigerator pickles and kimchi. I sort of left my shrub recipe alone. Then my uncle started making homemade hooch with grape juice and bakers yeast. If you are interested in making your own alcoholic beverages on the cheap I recommend looking into “Paw Paw’s” YouTube videos on the subject. His channel is “DoingItCheap”

I think my uncle was probably on Paw Paw’s site looking at small engine repair and found his wine recipe. I’m glad I have an uncle like I do. I’d bet both he and PawPaw would be a hoot to sit down and have a homemade wine tasting with!

Now, what I’m recommending is a step below needing any specialized equipment, and just slightly above PawPaw’s homemade hooch from a jug of fruit juice from the store.

Making wine at home is really easy. You need bread yeast, a bottle of 100% juice, sugar and about three to four weeks of fermenting time and you have fruit juice wine. Kinda closer to jet fuel than properly made wine, but my big improvement is mixing your homemade wine with a shrub. Using the wine instead of the vinegar in the recipe.

So what are the instructions for making homemade wine? Buy a 64 oz bottle of fruit juice. Concord Grape Juice (you can find that anywhere) is really popular. PawPaw said he thinks White Grape Peach (you can find that at Walmart.) is the best. I’d start with those two. That’s what I chose to start with, too.

Pour out 16 oz (2 cups) of juice from the container to give the wine room to expand as it processes. That’s not going back in, so drink up! (PS if you don’t like the flavor of the juice, you won’t like the wine. This isn’t a miracle process. Make sure you are going to be OK with how it starts and you’ll have a better chance enjoying the finished product.)

You will be making the wine directly in the container the juice came from, a la PawPaw’s instructions.

Buy a packet (or container) of bread yeast. You only need a half a tsp per jug of juice, so you don’t need much. Yes. You can make wine at home with bread yeast. What type of bread yeast? Fast rising? Regular yeast? Bread machine yeast? It does not matter. What brand? Does not matter. All you need is live yeast, so whatever your store has: is perfect. The type of yeast (bread yeast versus wine yeast) you use affects alcohol content, but baker’s yeast will still give you decent alcohol content before the yeast dies off (because it’s reached it’s limit for making more alcohol.) Bread yeast is at every grocery store and it’s not something you have to have special knowledge to pick out (like you do with wine yeasts.) add a 1/2 tsp to your juice jug that you removed the 16 oz from.

Then add a cup and a half of white granular sugar. Can you use other types of sugar? Yes, but do it this way first and then start exploring on your own. Can you use sugar substitute? No. Yeast eats the sugar and their waste is ethanol. If you take away the sugar: the yeast has nothing to eat. You’ll just end up with spoiled juice, instead of an alcoholic drink.

Pawpaw says he gets letters all the time about the recipe failing. But as soon as he asks if they followed his recipe exactly, they always say no. That they added or substituted things. Just make it with 100% juice, a 1/2 tsp of baker’s yeast and 1 1/2 cups of granular white sugar. Don’t deviate or decide you want to try something else. Make it as described first and try different ideas on a different batch. Then at least you’ll know why your results are different.

Now here is where I screwed up: I make hummingbird food all the time. I heat water and stir in the sugar and I never have to worry about sugar granules sitting in the bottom undissolved. Pawpaw shakes his juice container until the granules dissolve completely. This puts a lot of air into the juice in the beginning. Since I stirred my sugar into about a cup of warmed juice from my jug, let it come back to room temperature, and poured that back in: I missed the shaking and aerating. I thought to shake the second one.

Air in the beginning is good. Air further into the process is bad. The one I shook foamed up and really bubbled by the second day. The one I didn’t shake much, is definitely not as bubbly. Is it that the juices are different? Maybe. But I will shake any subsequent batches even though I will probably continue to dissolve the sugar in the same way.

After you are done shaking, clean the cap and rim and dry it. Then put your cap loosely back on the juice bottle and squeeze the bottle. You want the cap to hop up and down and let air out when you squeeze. If you don’t do that and you tighten down the cap, your juice bottle will probably explode and you’ll have young (smelly, sticky) wine everywhere!

This is why it’s important to clean the cap and top of the jug. Any stickiness can cement your lid on and stop airflow. The bottle needs to be able to breath. The cap is just there to keep gnats and floating dust and other garbage out. Lightly screw it down, and test by squeezing, to make sure that it can breathe.

Since shaking is good at the beginning, should I shake it after the first day? No. You add too much oxygen when the juice is actively fermenting and you’ll make vinegar. We’re aiming for alcohol instead. It’s recommended you leave the jugs alone. Don’t move them, don’t shake them don’t remove the cap to smell how it’s going. It also needs a warm area out of the light. You can put yours on top of your refrigerator. Mine is in a corner of my kitchen behind my instapot that I’m constantly making L Reuteri “yogurt” in. Nobody messes with the juice jugs and so they are happy.

So what is this going to taste like? Do you know what Boones farm wines are? or Ripple? Or Maddog 20/20? (To be fair, the last two were “fortified” wines with grain alcohol added) Yeah, this isn’t a fine merlot. It’s rough, it’s super sweet, but it also has a high alcohol content. If you end up not liking the flavor of your juice, it’s possible to do this fermentation with water instead of fruit juice. Same recipe just swap water for juice and add the same amount of yeast and sugar. If you make water wine (it’s also called Kilju and its popular, although illegal, among college kids in Finland. Americans sometimes call it an alcohol wash.) you can add it to any fresh fruit shrub you like and you bypass fermenting the flavor of the fruit or juice into something wine-y. With kilju in a shrub your fruit is fresh AND it has homemade wine in it. That is my preference.

I don’t like sweet wines, in fact I usually make a face on my first sip of a dessert wine, no matter the quality. So to me: the drier the better. In champagne: I drink Brut Nature (the absolute driest champagne). We get a bottle for the New Year, every year. If all I’m tasting is bubbles, I’m happy. I am also, just not a drinker. I outgrew all that a long time ago. I actually have had really good wines, but I’ve also had Boones: so my experience runs the gamut. This is definitely not a quality way of making wine.

However, sometimes the situation calls for a little alcohol and it’s fun to make your own. As long as you know before you start: you won’t be able to pass this off as something from Schrader Cellars to actual wine snobs or… For that matter: anyone who’s ever had decent wine. But you do get to say you made it yourself!

These wines can be double the alcohol of a wine from the liquor store. So, be careful when you mix it and are enjoying your shrub, because it will have some kick!

You can either find my article on shrubs here or follow the directions below:

Homemade Alcohol Infused Shrub:

Start with 2 cups washed fruit (1 cup tart: I used blackberries and 1 cup sweet: I used figs. Cut up larger, or thick skinned, fruit. I quartered the figs.)

1 1/2 cups sugar, or skip the sugar and sweeten it with sugar substitute, as you are serving it.

One sprig rosemary

2 tsp freshly cracked black peppercorns

1 1/2 cups homemade wine

Mix the sugar in with the fruit until the fruit is coated. Add the fresh cracked pepper. Remove the stem and add the fresh rosemary leaves. Mash the fruit mixture. (I used the pestle, from a mortar and pestle set, in a bowl but you can just use a food processor or even a fork.) Cover the fruit mixture with plastic wrap (remember to burp the concoction because plastic wrap will contain all of the gases formed in fermentation) or a towel (to keep anything from getting into it) and leave it on the counter for 48 hours. I do all of this in wide mouth mason jars. After the first 24 hours: stir and crush the fruit again, then let it sit again until the 48 hours has expired.

Strain the juice through a sieve into a large mason jar. Put the mixture back in the fridge. Adding this to your homemade wine may make the mixture start making alcohol again, so it is preferable to add the two liquids together as you are serving it, instead of mixing both full batches and putting that back in the fridge. More fermentation will mean more gasses. Play it safe and keep them separate until you want to drink it, or combine everything and burp the jar daily until you’ve finished drinking it.

The two choices here will end up tasting different. You can always try both ways and see if you like everything fermented or just the wine with fresh fruit juice.

Shrubs taste better after sitting and melding flavors for about 48 hours. At the end of your two days: add some carbonated water to a drinking glass (I like to use a lime flavored club soda.) Fill the glass 2/3 of the way with the carbonated water: slowly add the shrub, and your homemade wine, until you are happy with the flavor.

That’s it! Shrubs take about 24 hours. Wine takes about three weeks (there should be zero bubbles) to make and another week for the dead yeast and other particulates to sink to the bottom.

You can rack your wine if you want to be all hoity-toity or you can just carefully pour it so the stuff that’s settled to the bottom doesn’t stir up into your wine. I own wine making equipment, so I have a quick start automatic siphon, but I wouldn’t bother racking with this quality of wine. Of course, once you get a few of these under your belt you may want to step up and buy a complete wine making kit like this one. Or you can just keep making the recipe above, right in the jug of juice. I have copious amounts of fresh fruit from my trees, so a wine kit was essential if I wanted to use all that I grow.

But maybe you don’t have an orchard. If that’s the case then I’d just stick with PawPaw’s wine recipe and my shrub recipe. If you are interested in going further into homemade wine I recommend this channel for more information.

Meet you out in the garden, where we’ll enjoy our boozy shrubs. We can be goofy, make stupid jokes and laugh all evening!

Crazy Green Thumbs