booze for a desperate high school kid

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progmac

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i was thinking about how in high school, we were all so desperate for booze. we'd go to great lengths to get anything with alcohol. taste was of no concern whatsoever. and i'm thinking, couldn't i have just taken some bread yeast and some sugar, mixed it with a couple liters of water and created myself some drunk-juice with standard stuff from the grocer?

makes me wonder why more kids aren't doing this. or step it up a notch and get some apple juice, toss in some yeast. sure it won't be good, but it would work, right?
 
Or they could make JAOM on the down low.....only takes about a month and uses normal supplies....Apfelwein is pretty easy too.
 
Taking apple juice, adding yeast and maybe some sugar, is called making apple wine or hard cider. It can taste pretty good if you drink it when it's at the dryness you like. Lots of people on here make Apfelwein (Applewine in German).

Kids don't make it because:

a) They are stupid and lazy
b) They don't have a place to hide the stuff
c) They don't care

I'm guessing most of them have no idea that it's actually cheaper and easier to make fermented juices than to try and get someone to buy retail stuff.

When I was a kid my dad would leave the jug of cider out on the porch to bubble up a bit. Tasted good.

I took that idea further by filling a tupperware glass with cider and putting down in the basement behind the canned goods. A few days later while we were watching the Baseball game there was the sound of a tupperware lid popping off the glass. Dad looked at me and I just smiled a little and said, "I guess my cider is ready..."

Strangely, I didn't run with this process and start making hard cider from juice all the time. Maybe there are some kids who would have thought, "Gee, I could make an unlimited supply of drunk-inducing hard cider if I just BUY SOME FRIGGIN JUICE AND SOME YEAST!"

Of course, I didn't have the luxury of the Internet to be able to look this stuff up. I'm sure the local library had books on beer and wine making. I probably thought there was some secret magic involved in making wine.

And I haven't seen a desperation for booze with my kids or their friends. I'm sure it's out there, because I remember certain groups of kids from my school daze. I think there are a few "bad apples", if you will, who tend to get other involved in skirting the laws. I don't understand why a few kids feel they have to see how drunk they can get. As if it's a competition.
 
I, for one, am thankful that homebrewing IS still somewhat unheard of. Sure, it is a LOT more popular than just a few years ago (based solely on the evolution of available products) but, for now, it is still mostly unregulated.

Yes, I know there are homebrewing laws.

And, while I am sure there are some conscientious store owners, there is nothing illeagal about buying malt, hops, and yeast so ther is nothing to stop some a minor.

But just wait, the first time a story about some kids making hooch dies from alcohol poisoning, and we'll will begin to see MUCH stricter regulations of the materials necessary to brew.
 
I don't really buy that kids are stupid and lazy. I remember some of the schemes we concocted to get a hold of booze when we were under 21 and tobacco when we were 18. Some of this was probably small town stuff...nothing else to do. Certainly buying grape juice and bread yeast would have been simpler. But...Homercidal reminds me of privacy issues...where would I have kept the stuff while it bubbled? That would have been the biggest issues.
 
Yes, I know there are homebrewing laws.

And, while I am sure there are some conscientious store owners, there is nothing illeagal about buying malt, hops, and yeast so ther is nothing to stop some a minor.

But just wait, the first time a story about some kids making hooch dies from alcohol poisoning, and we'll will begin to see MUCH stricter regulations of the materials necessary to brew.

Sadly that's all it takes is one dumba$$ to die from overuse of anything and it's time to ban that! The biggest problem with the world is we protect idiots from themselves instead of letting natural selection run its course and the result is a gene pool that is increasingly stupid.
 
A recent idiocy that's been in the news lately in SoCal (got enough attention for Colbert to pick it up) is kids getting drunk on hand sanitizer and being hospitalized. Apparently a few geniuses at some L.A. high school realized that Purell contains a rather high level of alcohol and decided to start swigging it. A few of them were hospitalized for alcohol poisoning because teenagers are idiots and the local news has been trying to make it sound like an epidemic. You've got news anchors warning parents to "keep hand sanitizer out of the reach of your teenagers" and warning about how readily available this product is. Take that and extrapolate a scenario where one group of teenagers is caught fermenting their own wine. After the news makes it sound like an epidemic parent groups will get involved and you'll have to put your name on a national registry to buy a packet of brewers yeast like you do to buy sudafed.
 
i tried to make vodka in high school. not IN high school, in my friend's kitchen when i was 16. this was before the internet. we ground up raw potatoes and pitched bread yeast. gave it a few days, put it in a flask and tried to distill it with a small laboratory self-contained glass distillation unit. at 2am with his mother asleep upstairs. the flask was not heat tolerant and the bottom cracked off. ~10 liters of filthy putrid rotten potato muck now free to succumb to the whims of gravity. a violent stench. what a cleanup that was. we didn't try this out of desperation to get booze, we could get cheap booze, but seeking the same 'self-made' satisfaction we get as homebrewers! in hindsight i'm happy i didn't have to drink fusel/methanol rotgut
 
Take that and extrapolate a scenario where one group of teenagers is caught fermenting their own wine. After the news makes it sound like an epidemic parent groups will get involved and you'll have to put your name on a national registry to buy a packet of brewers yeast like you do to buy sudafed.

Yep.

MoonFlower has been made illeagal to grow in Oklahoma because it self seeds, almost noxiously, and some kids learned that you can get a Hallucinogenic buzz off the seeds by eating them.

Some kids died.
 
i tried to make vodka in high school. not IN high school, in my friend's kitchen when i was 16. this was before the internet. we ground up raw potatoes and pitched bread yeast. gave it a few days, put it in a flask and tried to distill it with a small laboratory self-contained glass distillation unit. at 2am with his mother asleep upstairs. the flask was not heat tolerant and the bottom cracked off. ~10 liters of filthy putrid rotten potato muck now free to succumb to the whims of gravity. a violent stench. what a cleanup that was. we didn't try this out of desperation to get booze, we could get cheap booze, but seeking the same 'self-made' satisfaction we get as homebrewers! in hindsight i'm happy i didn't have to drink fusel/methanol rotgut
this is hilarious! great story :)
 
i wasn't...:confused:
my wife never touched alcohol until she was 21 and still has never had a cigarette. me: 'why did you wait so long to drink?' her: 'uh, it's the law.'

the longer answer, i think, is that she played sports, had a busy life and she and her friends did interesting things other than drinking.
 
Sadly that's all it takes is one dumba$$ to die from overuse of anything and it's time to ban that! The biggest problem with the world is we protect idiots from themselves instead of letting natural selection run its course and the result is a gene pool that is increasingly stupid.

That and the fact that primarilly educated people take advantage of health insurance and contraception.

Poor idiots are replicating unchecked while the educated are self neutered.

Idiocracy is a pretty funny and silly take on it, but a little scary nonetheless.
 
A recent idiocy that's been in the news lately in SoCal (got enough attention for Colbert to pick it up) is kids getting drunk on hand sanitizer and being hospitalized. Apparently a few geniuses at some L.A. high school realized that Purell contains a rather high level of alcohol and decided to start swigging it. A few of them were hospitalized for alcohol poisoning because teenagers are idiots and the local news has been trying to make it sound like an epidemic. You've got news anchors warning parents to "keep hand sanitizer out of the reach of your teenagers" and warning about how readily available this product is. Take that and extrapolate a scenario where one group of teenagers is caught fermenting their own wine. After the news makes it sound like an epidemic parent groups will get involved and you'll have to put your name on a national registry to buy a packet of brewers yeast like you do to buy sudafed.

Teenagers have been known to drink/eat/sniff any and all chemicals and products to get a buzz.
 
We made some grape juice "wine" in high school. It was not good, and thus we never made it again. Of course we didn't know what the hell we were doing, only understood the process of fermentation and you could catch a buzz off is. I would rather have chipped in my $5 for the case of Natural Light than have to drink the garage wine again.
 
I don't really buy that kids are stupid and lazy.

Well, I meant to say Ignorant. But then again I've listened to some things the kids around school say and I still stand by my previous statement that some of them are terribly dumb. Not able to process out a full line of reasoning.

Some of them are actually very good students, academically.
 
Well, I meant to say Ignorant. But then again I've listened to some things the kids around school say and I still stand by my previous statement that some of them are terribly dumb. Not able to process out a full line of reasoning.

Some of them are actually very good students, academically.

Compared to kids 100 years ago, kids today are absolutely both stupid & lazy. Blame it on technology or parenting or the government but the fact remains. Kids don't have to think for themselves anymore...they have iPhone apps and the interwebs and if they are hungry they can simply make a 30 second call and food magically shows up with a knock on the door. They look to TV reality shows as a guide for how they are supposed to behave in society. It's a downward spiral.

I'm only 33 but I remember the days before the internet. If I wanted to learn something for school I had to go to the public library and look it up in books! Oh the humanity!
 
I was never really into drinking until after I was older and had a couple kids.:eek: Maybe because teens aren't known to seek out great tasting booze. In high school, smoking was my thing.
 
my wife never touched alcohol until she was 21 and still has never had a cigarette. me: 'why did you wait so long to drink?' her: 'uh, it's the law.'

the longer answer, i think, is that she played sports, had a busy life and she and her friends did interesting things other than drinking.

Actually, it is not. Most states allow underage drinking as long as a parent is present and gives the alcohol to the minor. I imagine allowing them to get drunk could have other legal ramifications but drinking by itself underage is not necessarily illegal.
 
Actually, it is not. Most states allow underage drinking as long as a parent is present and gives the alcohol to the minor. I imagine allowing them to get drunk could have other legal ramifications but drinking by itself underage is not necessarily illegal.

I think you are correct. Having a BAC as a minor is not illegal unless you are driving a motor vehicle or displaying signs of drunkeness in public. Although, possessing alcohol under the legal age is illegal in every state as far as I know.
 
Compared to kids 100 years ago, kids today are absolutely both stupid & lazy.

While I can't necessarily take umbrage with your latter claim, there's a term for the observation that the former is absolutely untrue: the Flynn effect. IQ tests have to be made slightly harder every few years to keep the mean score at 100.
 
I started brewing when I was 19 for just those reasons. It was beer, but only by a loose definition. Rocket fuel, more like. 4 day fermentation, 2 days in bottles, then it was GONE.
 
I had a roommate who, before he was 21, made strong apple wine with sugar, bread yeast, and apple juice. He fermented it with a blow-off tube under our sink. Stuff was super dry and potent.

I didn't drink until I was 20, and then I knew a place that didn't card me. I guess it could of been me being 6'6 and covered in facial hair.
 
When I was in college there were people fermenting apple juice and sugar with bread yeast in a used water cooler carboy. It was as gross as it sounds. Sanitization procedures were not what you'd call rigorous, either. In the end they discovered that it was easier to just buy cheap beer.

Also, just had to comment on this:
Compared to kids 100 years ago, kids today are absolutely both stupid & lazy.

Literally every generation has said that the next generation of kids is inferior to theirs. Plato recorded Socrates complaining about the kids these days with their "written language" not being able to just memorize everything and never respecting their elders, etc.
 
I think you are correct. Having a BAC as a minor is not illegal unless you are driving a motor vehicle or displaying signs of drunkeness in public. Although, possessing alcohol under the legal age is illegal in every state as far as I know.

Every state is different. There's no federal "drinking age" as a law, it's technically decided by each state, but the 21 limit is set across the board because of a federal transportation funding regulation (states lose federal funding if they don't set a legal age of 21). A good number of states allow exceptions to that age, and more than half of the states allow possession and consumption by someone underage as long as it's provided by the parent, the parent is present, and it's on private property. A very small number of states actually ban it outright.

Back to the question at hand, never occurred to me to try my own juice wine/pruno/whatever. I just either raided my dad's booze, or got someone to procure it for me.
 
one of my buddy's actually read up on this stuff and was hell bent on doing it... at my house... so he explained it to me, all we do is take some juice add yeast and let it sit. it does "something chemical" and you get alcohol, but it can explode is you leave it capped up...

my answer.. are you nuts im not letting juice rot in my room and it can EXPLODE!!!! (im thinking fireball here). i just figured it was easier to get my bro to buy it for me so i told him no way... knowing what i do now, i realize he was really on to something lol
 
Literally every generation has said that the next generation of kids is inferior to theirs. Plato recorded Socrates complaining about the kids these days with their "written language" not being able to just memorize everything and never respecting their elders, etc.

IQ's aside there is no contest that kids today are lazy compared to a few generations ago. In the early part of the 20th century kids were working on farms or for their family's business at grade school age after school. If a kid wanted to "have fun" he/she would go outside and play with the other kids, ride a bike, fly a kite, etc. Today they play video games or watch TV after school.
 
IQ's aside there is no contest that kids today are lazy compared to a few generations ago. In the early part of the 20th century kids were working on farms or for their family's business at grade school age after school. If a kid wanted to "have fun" he/she would go outside and play with the other kids, ride a bike, fly a kite, etc. Today they play video games or watch TV after school.

The reason they are inside is because their parents have put the fear of the outside world into because it is "such a bad place". Don't talk to strangers or you will be kidnapped( BTW less then 1% of kidnappings are people the kid didn't know) don't be out after dark or you will be mugged or murdered, zombie apocalypse, don't fall you might break a bone or crack your head on the concrete, ect.
I see plenty of kids in highschool come through my shop trying to get a job, unfortunately we are full and it is not common in the company to take on someone who is young unless they are proven in another job. They are not necessarily lazy ( some are but every generation has those) but after trying to get a job and being turned down as often as they are they give up... kinda like people in their mid 20s getting out of college. There are no farms for kids to go to these days, they are too mechanical, a lot of places don't want you till your an adult at 18. Basically there are not a lot of opportunities for teenager these days in this economy.
The biggest problem I see from kids coming into my shop asking for a job is how they carry themselves. Ratty Jeans a T shirt and a hat with their skanky girlfriend in tow is not how to come in looking for a job. Funny thing is the first time I applied there I did the same thing( 3 months before being accepted because I didn't give up). With some growing up or being taught by their parents they would know better.
 
The reason they are inside is because their parents have put the fear of the outside world into because it is "such a bad place". Don't talk to strangers or you will be kidnapped( BTW less then 1% of kidnappings are people the kid didn't know) don't be out after dark or you will be mugged or murdered, zombie apocalypse, don't fall you might break a bone or crack your head on the concrete, ect.

Truth. I may be in the minority on this one but I am excited for a zombie apocalypse...I think if mankind's extinction is inevitable then that's the way it should go down...and there is no sense in wasting my stockpiles of ammo! :D
 
We took apple juice and bread yeast and hid it in the woods behind my house for a few weeks with the lid on kinda loose. This only worked in the winter. We tried it in the summer and found it full of ants. In the summer we picked up homeless people and paid them to get us cheap liquor in the store.

And the zombie Apocalypse has already started.
 
this is a great thread .my first was not for drinking. I was using a 20 oz coke bottle with aquarium tubeing poked thru a hole in the lid to make a Co2 generator for a planted fish aquarium.As it turns out the crushed frosted mini wheat cerial and sugar after fermenting produced a smell that had to be tasted! it smelled better than it tasted but hey it was my first homebrew so to speak.
 
It's not that uncommon for kids, at least in Sweden, to buy turbo yeast and a few kilos of suger. Ferment it to hell and flavor it with something. They sell everything in the state's army surplus stores (which, over the years has evolved into a cheap super market chain) and it's not really illegal to buy it. And even if it was, kids under 15 can't be prosecuted.

But I bought or stole my whisky as a kid, for some reason.
 
this is a great thread .my first was not for drinking. I was using a 20 oz coke bottle with aquarium tubeing poked thru a hole in the lid to make a Co2 generator for a planted fish aquarium.As it turns out the crushed frosted mini wheat cerial and sugar after fermenting produced a smell that had to be tasted! it smelled better than it tasted but hey it was my first homebrew so to speak.

this is awesome. as an aside, what is the point of generating co2 for aqua plants? don't they need o2?
 
Grew up in Brooklyn and was like most kids in the early 50's a street urchin. Good home great parents but after breakfast we were out of the house till we got hungry, making sure to be home and washed up for dinner. Alcohol and tobacco was no mystery to us since it was always present at every turn. I remember many a time coming home from a Dodgers game and smelling like one of the 35,000 cigars that were being puffed during the game.

My grandfather and most neighbors made either homebrew or wine in their basements and the guy that delivered seltzer each week dropped off a case of Pabst 32 ouncers along with the seltzer.

My grandparents on my mother's side were immigrants from Siberia and Poland. They ran a boarding house for others just recently from their homelands. They made liquor from potatoes and fruits which was distilled in the old floating bowl method in the bathroom.

I made my first beer, with my other grandfather's help, at 16. We had no need as kids to sneak booze as it was a part of every day life although we weren't allowed to partake in the same fashion as the adults..LOL.. A small glass or sip was the norm. At every larger gathering including funerals there was the ever present keg of beer and each week when it was time for us to come out of the water at the beach we were given a shot of something to help take the blue out of our lips from the cold ocean water.

At 13--15 I spent a few weeks each summer at a dairy farm in upstate New York and when the day was done ( about 8PM ) it was time for relaxing in front of the 2 channels on TV with a quart of beer for each of the men, including me, before bed.

As near adults when social drinking with our friends became more important to us there was always a store or even bar that had no qualms about selling us a bottle or glass of beer.

College was the time for regular weekend bar drinking and keggers as is still the case today and was the time for formal education in our scholastic and recreational ventures.
(hangovers and homework).

We had different freedoms then and I think it was in a world and time that will never again return.

Times change and I am glad to have grown up when I did.

OMO

bosco
 
The simple fact is, there were a lot of bad things going on in the past. We are more enlightened and happier today. As we find problems in life we can litigate and legislate those problems away.

I can't believe how people back in my day could survive with all of that freedom we had! It was a crazy time. ;)
 
The simple fact is, there were a lot of bad things going on in the past. We are more enlightened and happier today. As we find problems in life we can litigate and legislate those problems away.

I can't believe how people back in my day could survive with all of that freedom we had! It was a crazy time. ;)

Is the first part of that supposed to be sarcastic? Do you really think people are happier today than in previous generations? Sure we aren't being drafted into wars but the stress level and number of hours worked of the average person these days is much higher than it was in the 1950's. Legislating problems away makes me laugh. The government finds problems that don't exist so they can act to provide a solution which results in nothing but restricting our freedoms. . .

Good reading: http://www.stress.org/americas.htm
 
Having recently graduated from college I still know quite a few people are not 21 yet. One of my friends found out that I was into brewing beer and he was telling me how at home he fermented grape juice and hid the 5gal buckets behind his desk. So I guess the high school kids are too dumb to figure out how to ferment stuff, but once you get into college thats when you start getting the good ideas.
And yes, he said he started doing this because it was a pain in the ass to get people to buy him booze.
 
Back to the question at hand, never occurred to me to try my own juice wine/pruno/whatever. I just either raided my dad's booze, or got someone to procure it for me.

I think this is more the case than stupid and lazy. I don't really think the majority of high school kids actually know how fermentation works. I know I didn't then, and if you think about some of the questions we get as home brewers do adults, some with a college education even really know how fermentation works?

As far as stupid, I'm sure that IQ keeps rising, but I think most people are referring to old fashioned common sense here. I've actually had 19 and 20 year old undergraduates ask me how people did research before the internet. As someone before mentioned, "Oh, the humanity!"
 
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