Almost from the beginning of my brewing endeavors I have been wondering what people did during the prohibition years in the first part of the last century. After all, it is well known that a lot of illicit at home alcohol production did take place. At the same time, if prohibition was to come upon us ever again I would expect the home brew supply stores to get swept away along with the breweries. So then, what did people do, or even more interestingly, what could they do now to get their fix?
For starters, beer needs malt, hops, yeast, and water. Water will always be available, there is just no way to outlaw that. Yeast? You can get yeast from all sorts of places. Even better, you should be able to keep it. Meaning you keep some of the sludge that collects at the bottom of the carboy as the wort clears and you should be ready to go. Hops? No idea. Allegedly, it is growing wild near old rail tracks, seeded by hops blown off from delivery train in times past. I have to check on that. Some day.
The biggest obstacle seems to get hold of malt. And no, germinating, drying, and roasting you own barley seed is not an option, at least not for the ones of us that don't have their own farm. No it has to be something more inconspicuous, something that's already available as something else. Plain sugar? Would work as far as the alcohol is concerned but the final product certainly would not be beer. Rather, it would be the stuff moonshine is made from, hardly drinkable without distillation.
So - what then? Maybe - bread? It's mostly wheat hence similar enough to barley, it least on the outside. And maybe I could cook the bread first, to possibly mirror some of the effects of roasting, and at the same time release the starches and sugars out of the bread much like the cooking of roasted barley does? At the least, it did not sound totally outlandish. Was it actually feasible, and would it produce something even remotely recognizable as beer? Well, there is one sure way to find out ---
So from my last trip to the grocery store I returned with the following items: Three loaves of the cheapest bread I could find. I sure was not sacrificing my own bread for that type of experiment. And after all, even though that cheap store stuff is barely edible it may just prove useful for something at last. In addition: Four pounds of table sugar. I wasn't going to use it all but surely it would be OK to supplement my brew a little bit, or actually a little more because during times of prohibition, you can't put the standards too high.
Back home I first roasted the bread some in the oven, then threw it all into my brew pot, added two gallons of water, 1 1/2 pounds of sugar, then brought the mixture to a boil. That's when I remembered I needed some to simulate hops for bitterness, and after some quick hesitation went outside and cut some twigs from the next juniper tree. Juniper berries have bitterness to them and so do young pine needles. Just to make sure I ripped off and chewed a little piece: It was bitter alright and so for now, I had my hops.
I brought my mixture to a boil and when I returned to my kettle some twenty minutes later I discovered the first problem with my theory: The bread has acted much like oatmeal- so instead the water absorbing the goodness out of the bread the bread had absorbed all the water and left me with something reminiscent of a giant bucket of wallpaper glue. No good! I spent the next 1 1/2 hours to squeeze and rinse as much liquid out of that slime as I could to salvage my operation, and another 1/2 hour after that the clean my kitchen that I had totally messed up in the process. Regardless if how things would go from here, I already had figured it was not the way to go.
Having put in that much effort already I decided to press on, learn at least from what remained to be learned from that experiment. From all the squeezing and rinsing I had gotten some two gallons of thick, sweet,milky liquid which I duly transferred into my carboy. I added another gallon of fresh water to make it a total of three gallons, which was the amount I had decided beforehand to commit myself to. For yeast? Well, I had anticipated this experiment and kept the sludge from my last batch of real beer. I used about a cup of that.
The concoction started to get alive after about four hours and has been active for the last almost two days. Normal beer produces a regular bubbling, about one "blrrp" in regular intervals every ten seconds when most active, or every minute when fermentation is almost done. This mixture makes "blrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp", almost blowing the water out of my air lock. Sometimes it will hesitiate, or just make a "blrrp", only to follow this up with yet another "blrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp". Very strange.
The "wort" itself is also somewhat "unusual". It never lost its milkiness so the liquid appears a yellowish white. There is noticeable sludge buildup at the bottom of the carboy, at this point probably more from settling bread particles than from spent yeast. There is foam floating on top, white mostly but also with some green to it- I figure that would be the juniper.
Definitely fascinating, almost like with a mind of its own. Kind of scary looking, too. And of course, I am just watching right now, waiting for fermentation to come to a conclusion. After that? Second fermentation? Bottling? I think I would at least want to sample some of it before committing myself to any extra work. Or better still, find someone else to sample it for me just in case it makes people go blind. Thinking of it, I believe I know just the perfect candidate for that ---
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