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DIY Weekend: Spiked juice for homemade hooch
Normally for our DIY Weekend feature, we talk about things like homemade rocket launchers, mobile Xboxes-in-a-case, and powerful plywood telescopes. This week, we talk about getting drunk.
I enjoy drinking alcohol. I'm also cheap, which is why I was excited at the chance to try out Spike Your Juice, a $10 DIY hooch-making kit that might just be of dubious legal standing depending on where you live.
SYJ is an all-in-one fermentation kit that lets you take off-the-shelf fruit juice from your local supermarket and turn it into a tasty alcoholic beverage in as little as 48 hours. I was doubtful at first, but after some experimentation, I can say it works as advertised.
My first try was with a white grape juice. After two days it was easily alcoholic, but the manufacturers state that the longer you let it ferment, the dryer (read: boozier) it will be. Another day and a half and it was almost like a really good cheap champagne. Sadly, there was a yeasty aftertaste that wasn't agreeable to a few of the more picky drinkers in my life. Mixing it with orange juice did the trick nicely and made for some awesome cheap mimosas.
The secret is in the individual packets. The kit comes with six, each of which contains a mixture of yeast, cane juice, and an emulsifier. Besides the fermentation packets, there's a special bottle stopper. It has a neat gas-releasing variable seal at the top that allows the gas byproducts of the fermentation process to escape with a none-too-awesome odor while keeping the environment in the bottle air-tight. It's neat in its own right.
My next experiment was with a type of three-apple juice. After just 48 hours it was plenty boozy, though it had an odd flavor. We ran some of the juice through a standard Brita water filter, which certainly helped, but it did strip out some of the apple flavor.
So I went to a friend of mine who's a chef and has a broad if esoteric knowledge of all things fermented and distilled. We made a more porous filter out of a coffee filter and a rubber band. The outcome was fantastic. The drink was smooth and crisp. But we weren't done. … Read more
