Non-alcoholic to alcoholic

This just made my day

Reading this made me think of my stay at Eskan Village. Odoul’s was served at the rec center. A few gallon containers of Welches grape and apple juice, bread yeast, sugar, and a pack of condoms… turned our closet into a class 6… those were the days!

Ajski said:

Reading this made me think of my stay at Eskan Village. Odoul’s was served at the rec center. A few gallon containers of Welches grape and apple juice, bread yeast, sugar, and a pack of condoms… turned our closet into a class 6… those were the days!

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Nov '06 - May '07

Just signed up to this website to try and share a bit of knowledge to those who need it most. I am a keen brewer from home kits back in my home country of New Zealand but am now living in a country that has strict alcohol laws. I have noticed a few posts from people in similar regions asking how to turn non alcoholic beer into alcoholic beer. This is a practice which i have participated in on several occasions and the good news is it is relatively simple to do so. I am going to share a recipe at the end here as i feel it is everyones right to drink alcohol and if you are really determined nothing is going to stop you anyway. Make your own decisions in life and don't follow stupid rules because a government tells you that you must. Its your body and your life only, treat it with respect and don't be an idiot. Id prefer you do it right than risk poisoning yourself or something stupid like that. Anyway, i have noticed a lot of haters on these threads with some really quite obtuse and rude statements being thrown at people trying to find answers regarding this topic. I can understand being hesitant to provide such information to potential children but these kids are going to be doing stupid **** regardless of what information you give them. I know i did. In fact, having more clarity and information regarding such topics probably would of prevented me from indulging in some of the things im less than proud of, in my youth. I realize this is probably the wrong thread to post this under but this is the second hit when searching for this topic so it will have to do ( the first one being a closed thread). Believe it or not there are parts of the world were people live and aren't so fortunate to have widely available alcohol as well as many other freedoms that im sure most people take for granted. Im a firm believer of making up your own mind when it comes to what you are putting inside YOUR body, nobody else's but yours. So with that little rant out of the way, be careful and know your limits. For those searching for this info i hope you manage to make it to my post and that it is of use to you. Treat people with respect and you will get respected back. Don't just assume people have the worst of intentions and try to be helpful and educational instead of berating and negative. So here goes...

Recipe as follows ( you can work out the adjusted measurements as required)

Ingredients:

4X 24 can cases of non alcoholic beer
4 kilos of sugar
4 litres of water
1 level teaspoon of active yeast mixed with 1/2 teaspoon of sugar and 1/4 inch of just below boiling water

Equipment:

1 plastic dustbin (or similar large container to hold all contents such as a gott)
38 empty bottles ( preferably glass with good seals, 750ml wine (or "sparkling grape juice") bottles work a treat
1 two meter plastic tubing about 1/4 inch thick

Mix the yeast, sugar and 1/4 inch water in a cup and cover with a small plate, leave to stand

Heat the water on a moderate heat in a large saucepan, mixing in the sugar when warm, untill all sugar is dissolved

While the sugar is dissolving start pouring all the cans of beer into the sterilised dustbin, with the exception of two cans

Once the sugar is dissolved add this entire mix into the dustbin with the beer

By now the yeast mix should have worked itself into a frothy substance, add this to the dustbin, rinsing it all out of the cup with the 2 remaining beer cans

Stir the entire mix with a long stick or something until you are confident everything is thoroughly mixed together. Stand the dustbin on a high work surface to make for easier syphoning later. Leave for eight days or so until the mix seems to of calmed down ( it will be fizzing and bubbling over this period) In my experience 8 days is usually adequate but depending on the temperature of your environment this might take longer.

After the 8 days you are ready to bottle. Run your hose from the dustbin and begin filling the liquid into sterilised bottles. Add a teaspoon of sugar to each bottle and seal. (Note: if when adding the sugar your product begins to froth and overflow from the bottle, it is not ready. Pour contents back into the dustbin and wait a few more days. Avoid bottling all the beer before adding the teaspoon of sugar; do one bottle, add the sugar and see if it is ready before proceeding with the entire brew.)

once all the bottles are full and sealed place them in a cool and dark place and leave for 10 or so days, until the bottles are clear and all sediment is firmly stuck on the bottom of the bottle

Congratulations! Now your beer is almost ready to drink.

Each of these bottles sits at around 15% alcoholic contents, thus each bottle should be cut with two cans of non-alcoholic beer.

Enjoy and drink responsibly!

It lives!

You've got to be kidding... Gross!
Let me get this straight: Oxidize the beer, kill most of the yeast with almost-boiling water, add enough plain sugar to jack the abv up to 15%, let it go through what is essentially an 8 day secondary fermentation, then bottle immediately. Sorry, but that sounds less than appetizing.

I think we have all been humbled by lesmur's excellent post. Who knew that one might come on to the internet seeking instructions on alcohol and be so brutally savaged. My eyes are now wide open. I, for one, plan on making this delicious sounding beverage for which he has so generously provided recipe and instruction.

I hope I do not go blind!
Please pray for me!!!

Ok guys, let's set some things straight, one of the reasons you're meeting with so much derision is simple, you're not turning non-alcoholc beer alcoholic. You can't do that because, Non-alcoholic beer is already fermented. And you can ferment it, because there's no fermentables left to ferment.

From The Science of Non-Alcoholic Beer,

How Non-Alcoholic Beer Is Made

Non-alcoholic beer (or NA beer, as it's sometimes called) starts its life as a normal beer. In fact it goes through almost the full process, from making a mash, boiling the wort, adding hops, and even fermenting. Here's the fork in the road, though. While regular beer will then be bottled (or canned or kegged) and aged, non-alcoholic beer has to have its alcohol removed.

The most common way that alcohol is removed from beer is through heating. As we've discussed in several previous articles, alcohol has a much lower boiling point than water. At sea level, it's roughly 173 degrees F. The fermented beer is heated up to that point and kept there until the solution is only 0.5 percent ABV. However, heating changes the flavor of the beer significantly, because you're cooking all of the ingredients again. To minimize this, some operations practice vacuum distilling. Depending on the power of the vacuum, the alcohol's boiling point may be lowered as far as 120 degrees, which is much less disruptive to the flavors. (With a much more powerful vacuum the alcohol could be made to simply evaporate at temperatures lower than 50 degrees F, however these sorts of vacuums are not used for large scale vacuum distilling.)

Another technique that's sometimes employed is reverse-osmosis. As Chow.com explains it, "...beer is passed through a filter with pores so small that only alcohol and water (and a few volatile acids) can pass through. The alcohol is distilled out of the alcohol-water mix using conventional distillation methods, and the water and remaining acids are added back into the syrupy mixture of sugars and flavor compounds left on the other side of the filter. Bingo—a nonalcoholic (or dealcoholized, as winemakers call it) brew." Because the main ingredients aren't heated, this technique causes less flavor degradation, so it gives generally preferable results, though it's more labor intensive and requires more equipment.

Even after the alcohol is removed, we're not done yet. We've got some liquid that tastes reasonably like beer, but it's flat. Most respectable beer carbonates itself as it finishes out the fermentation process inside its bottle. As yeast is metabolizing sugar into alcohol, one of the byproducts is CO2, which gives you bubbles. However, our now non-alcoholic brew has no more yeast and it isn't fermenting. Most producers of non-alcoholic beer simply inject the brew with CO2 during the bottling (or kegging or canning) process. So it's really sort of a beer-flavored soda. Others will toss in a little bit of starter yeast with a little more sugar and let it ferment in the bottles, but this is a trickier process, since you are liable to reintroduce a small amount of alcohol. Also, your bottles may explode if you do it wrong.

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You're NOT fermenting N/A beer and turning it into real beer. What you are doing is making a nasty alcoholic "sugar wash" which is pretty much raw alcoholic rocket fuel and "flavoring" it with N/a beer which you've boiled the heck out of it and like someone else said early and "oxidyzed" it.

You're not making beer, you're making fake beer flavored hooch. And those of us who brew with the hope of making a quality product have little patience for folks who make "hooch" or "pruno" or whatever.

I understand how you guys feel you're in a deprived zone and trying to do something....But there are other ways to go about it. If you're looking purely to get high, then yeah we tend to have little patience for that. If you're out to make something of quality, then do a little digging on here you'll find plenty of info on making good quality fermented beverages, fro stuff readily available...make wines, make ciders, make meads...If you're in Muslim countries, you're in the cradle of civilization where wines/meads and ciders were made in abundance from the plethora of fruits and honeys available to them.

If you want to make beer, yeah it's a little tricky, but not impossible You should look at the threads on the Gluten free section of the forum to see how beer is made without barley and other gluten based products.

There's also threads on here about malting your own grains yourself. Like this one on malting your own corn...

And if you can find it, even in muslim countries in middle east, barley malt syrup and barley malt extract can be found, it's used in baking.....if you have that, and something to bitter it and preserve it, you can make something close to beer.

We'd be glad to help you, you may THINK it's impossible but more than likely you don't know enough to be able to find the RIGHT stuff that you need, and you're resorting to the same things that underaged kids try to get trashed on....but what you're attempting is not making anything that we on here easily accept.

Since our rules clearly state that you must be of age in the country in which you reside, this thread will be closed now. While I don't approve of non-alcohol countries, we aren't here to help people circumvent the laws. We've got a whole lot going in in this thread- insults, trolling, etc, so it's time to close this thread.