Possum living in desert suburbia

Posted by Chuck at 10/30/2008 10:12 PM
Categories: Food
I found this e-book  about a month ago and was absolutely enchanted. Dolly Freed's 1978 book, which is worth about $99 in hard copy now, if you can believe Amazon, is entertaining and wildly informative.

The whole concept of Possum Living, subsiding and eating well for little money and with little waste and with maximum independence, has always fascinated me. Also, my mom's comment about where the wine stockpiles are in our apocalypse kit made me a little paranoid, since I hadn't really thought about providing us with the true necessities of life during a disaster.

It got me fascinated with the idea of producing our own alcohol beverages again. I had the bug up my butt to do this three years ago and made a few bottles of really bad hard cider, but Freed described it as so uncomplicated and unfussy, I decided to give her method a try.

I have some of the equipment left from my adventures in 2005, so I'm a little more equipped than Freed.

About four weeks ago, I bought five pounds of refined sugar, a bag of frozen blueberries, and some Fleischman's dry baker's yeast.

Brewing

I mixed and heated the sugar, some water, and the blueberries in a big stainless pot until the sugar dissolved and the water got some color from the berries. Then I dumped the mixture into a glass carboy and filled it with more water to get to three gallons. Then waited until the mix cooled to about 100 degrees F and added a package of Fleischman's yeast. Then plugged the neck with a stopper and an air lock.

I put it out in my garage, in the cubby that houses the furness and the water heater. I call it my fermentorium, as Dolly Freed's dad did.



This picture has my ale pail bubbling away with my new brew, not the glass carboy with the current one. The lamp is there to augment the ambient heat that the cubby has (it's enclosed with a door) due to the water heater and furness, to make sure the temp is about 80 degrees.

Anyway, next, I siphoned the brew, after two weeks of fermentation, into the pail. Then from the pail, I sent it through the spigot and a coffee filter back into the carboy (after discarding the spent berries and washing the carboy), and put the plug and airlock on for another week. It seemed to be done fermenting, with no bubbling. So I siphoned it into bottles. Three gallons of ferment yielded about two gallons of ~10% alcohol blueberry wine. I thought it would need to age a while, but the stuff I put in the fridge cleared up in a day and actually tasted pretty passable. There was no yeast taste and more importantly, no sulfur taste, which I got with the cider in 2005. I think the sulfur was missing because I skipped the addition of camphor tablets this time, which are sulphides, usually added to prevent off-fermenting microbes form working.



As you can see, I've enjoyed most of a gallon already. Now, I wouldn't call the flavor of this wine full or interesting; it's dry, clean, and tart. It tastes like slightly watered down cranberry  juice.

It ain't perfect, but it's all mine, full of antioxidants, and two gallons cost less than $3.00 to make. And I know just what's in it, water, sugar, blueberries, and yeast.

By the way, this practice is perfectly legal. Distilling, as Feed describes, is still (no pun in 10 did) illegal.






 
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