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The other night I’ve brewed another batch of hobo wine.

What is it?  Hobo wine is …well… wine made by a hobo.  Take one milk carton, some generic bread yeast, sugar, and some frozen juice concentrate and you have  yourself the makings of some hobo wine.

This year from my winery I’ll be brewing some Welchs Berry Sunsplash, and hopefully it’ll be ready just in time for my summer Ultimate team’s year end bash.

For those of you curious to make your own batch, here’s my recipe for some cheap booze.

Ingredients and supplies:

1. Bread yeast, 8 grams worth.
2. 2 cans of frozen concentrated juice.
3. One empty 4 liter milk jug or some other large air tight container.
4. Either 1 pvc tube
5. 2 cups of sugar

Sterilize the milk jug (or whatever container) with a ton of bleach.  Make sure it’s absolutely clean and sterile, or else your batch will get ruined.

Activate the yeast by mixing in the 2 cups of sugar with yeast and some really warm water (optimal temperature is usually 39 degrees).  Make sure you don’t kill the yeast with water that’s too hot.  If the yeast doubles in size with this mixture, they’re good to go!

Pour the thawed out juice concentrate into the milk jug, add the sugar/yeast/water mixture.  Add warm water to top it off.  Make sure you leave some room for air as the little yeasties need oxygen to reproduce (like 1/8th or 1/10th of the milk jug).  Drill a small hole in the milk jug cap.  Make sure it’s about the size of the pvc tubing.  Tighten the cap, and push the tubing into the little hole.  Make sure the tube isn’t submerged in the liquid, as it’s used to vent out the carbon dioxide.

Duct tape the cap and the tube together, and make sure everything is air tight.  The other end of the tube should be duct taped to a water-filled jar.  The end of the tube should be submersed in the water.

Basically, the reason for having the tube is that the little yeasties produce a lot of carbon dioxide when they’re reproducing and guzzling the sugar.  If the carbon dioxide doesn’t have anywhere to vent, the milk jug will explode.  However, you want to let CO2 out without letting contaminated air in, as the air floating around probably has bacteria and other yeast particles that will ruin your batch.  The tubing creates and air lock, that is, CO2 gets pushed out of the tube and into the water in the glass jar, but no air gets sucked back in.

Wait around for 2 to 3 weeks (depending on how strong/dry you want your wine) and voila!  You have some hobo wine.  The best place to keep the wine is somewhere warm and out of sunlight.  Dark and warm places will allow the yeast to cultivate.  If you don’t see your brew bubbling within a day or two, it’s most likely that the yeast are dead or that they’re not getting enough warm love.

Obviously, if you see floating green mold or the wine smells really funky, it’s probably contaminated and it’s best not to drink it.

Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 7:03 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.