Hypothetical Homebrewing question

JBrady · 02-14-2010, 12:15 PM

Ok if the world as we knew it ended tomorrow and we were all back to having no electricity, cars, etc. etc, how would you make your beer? I would think it would be easy to come up with our own fermentable sugar, but where would you get your yeast from? How would you make a fire hot enough to acheive a 10 gallon boil? How would you cool 10 gallons of beer in the middle of a florida summer? Dumb questions yes, but I am interested in hearing what kind of techniques you guys would use if we all were back living in huts, where you can't just buy everything from brewmasterswarehouse.com, lol. Hopefully this will make for a interesting discussion.

Daddymem · 02-14-2010, 12:45 PM

Well, I grow Amaranth so I could use that for my grains. Saps from birch, maple, and pine could be used to supplement the sugars. Plenty of cranberries, apples, rosehips, blueberries, crabapples, blackberries, huckleberries, and strawberries I could use as fermentable adjuncts. I grow my own vegetables and save seed so plenty of squashes also.

I've got a lot of beer bottled with different yeasts, some washed yeast and a bunch of dry yeasts. I could keep that stable going for quite a while. I could do some small batches of open fermentation and capture some wild yeasts, hopefully some acceptable tasting ones then wash them.

I've got lots of pine around here so I could use the needles from them to bitter. I have lots of oak around here so I could use the acorns from them to bitter.

I'd boil with the steinbeir method. Get some granite cobbles from the beach to use.

Netflyer · 02-14-2010, 12:49 PM

What is left? Are there seeds for Barley or do we have to use wild vegetation and is it radiated? Or, did a comet or something hit that didn't radiate stuff?

I'd probably grow barley and hops right next to my herbs an spices

And, of course you could get honey - if there were any bees left and make you some mead.

They should have a reality 'Man in the Wild' show where the goal is to make an alcoholic beverage out of the wild.

As for Yeast, there are wild yeast you can breed. In the old days they didn't know about yeast and each brewer had a 'brew stick' they would use that would just make the beer work. It was passed down from generation to generation. It obviously contained yeast.

One of the amazing things you would find out is that all this talk about sanitation while important is over stressed as you would turn out 'wild brews' that probably would be made in hollowed out tree trunks covered with large palm fronds or whatever. I'm sure the brew would turn out. I bet if you were stuck on a beach you could ferment seaweed and make beer using sea turtle shells

(Obviously don't put me on that reality show)

Willie3 · 02-14-2010, 01:43 PM

Any fruit you find has natural yeasties on it. Even in your house. Just pick up a grape look at the connection to the stem and you will see (or may not) a white powder. That is yeast. Juniper berries were notorious for containing it and other than bittering were used to jump start free form fermentation.

I think most of us would find a way to make a Sugar fermented goodness.

brewmonk · 02-14-2010, 01:53 PM

you would have to focus first on boiling enough water to drink and cook with FIRST.
(I'm gonna go have a beer.)

**david_42** · 02-14-2010, 02:20 PM

This is an easy one for me, as my neighbor's grandfather grew both barley and hops, plus it is possible to hand-dig wells around here. Yeast is everywhere. Plenty of wood for the chopping, although it's been decades since I took one down with an ax.

I keg and most of my beers of choice are fine with low carbonation levels.

JBrady · 02-14-2010, 02:46 PM

thanks for the great responses so far guys, it would be fun to do a brew like this one day, with a open flame fire and fermentable sugars aquired somewhere other than the grocery store or brewshop.

**Revvy** · 02-14-2010, 02:53 PM

We have an entire thread devoted to alternative beer making methods for when the zombipocolypse comes and we declare ourselves kings of the sacred barley water.

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/gap-grocery-produce-beer-experiment-69313/?highlight=Grocery+Produce

But pretty much in terms of cooling and things like that...we wont be..we'll be doing it like they did in Colonial times...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAU4bhjCB08

Or we'll be doing "no-chill" brewing and seal stuff into aquatainer cubes til it cools enough to pitch the yeast.

**masonsjax** · 02-14-2010, 03:01 PM

The hardest part of brewing is hitting mash temps. That's with a digital thermometer. Im not sure how we would figure out how to hit and hold precise temps just guessing.

Jumbo82 · 02-14-2010, 03:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by masonsjax

The hardest part of brewing is hitting mash temps. That's with a digital thermometer. Im not sure how we would figure out how to hit and hold precise temps just guessing.

I think I would go about this by taking 2 parts boiling water and mixing it with one part water at room temp, or some other similar ratio to get me to a respectable strike temp. It wouldn't be precise, but long as I mashed within 10 degrees or so of 150 it'll make beer. As for holding the temp, any pot packed on all sides by wood chips would probably do the trick.