Looking for some serious brewing knowledge and wisdom

[BrewingWisdom]

Hi everyone
I belong to a country where alcohol was first distilled and brewed thousands of years ago and have a very strong alcohol culture and social presence.
As a world's second oldest civilization brewing and distillation of alcohol was among many other things which originated from this particular region.
But few decades ago a legislation was passed to please some right wing religious people and alcohol was banned. Before that alcohol was served in restaurants, military messes and even in our national airlines .
We still have three breweries and distilleries operating here with the complete government support for providing alcohol to so called minorities here or exporting but all of their customers are that majority banned group of people.Hypocricy ??
Still you can easily get alcohol in this country but since its illegal the costs to obtain it are very high with the risk of getting caught by the police and all the bribes which follow later. Delegalizing alcohol gave birth to bootlegging mafia in this country.
So I decided to make my own beer ,wine or possibly a distilled spirit with a loud and clear message that a rebel inside me is unstoppable lol. Last year I gained some fermentation experience by just fermenting in a water plastic bottle using a bakers yeast easily available here. I managed to make some alcohol which gave me intoxication.
This year I intend to start homebrewing with proper homebrew equipment ,materials and advice from the experienced people here.
This year my whole focus will be on to learn the beer craft and next year if all goes well I will proceed to making wine.
I hope experienced folks here will support my rebellion
Cheers

 

[madscientist451]

Welcome to HBT!
Making wine is easier than brewing beer. Getting proper wine grapes/juice would probably be the hard part. If you can get apple juice, I would suggest making cider first, and THEN get started brewing beer. Regular store bought (industrial) apple juice makes a pretty boring cider, but its better than nothing. You can enhance it by boiling it down before fermenting to increase sugar/alcohol level, adding frozen apple juice concentrate, or adding honey or sugar. Adding refined sugar will produce a very strong alcohol flavor, so a little goes a long way, experiment with it and decide what works for you. If you can mail order some wine yeast, that would help, I would suggest 71-B yeast, and save the yeast from the bottom of your fermenter, you can re-use it several times. Good luck!

 

[BrewingWisdom]

Welcome to HBT!
Making wine is easier than brewing beer. Getting proper wine grapes/juice would probably be the hard part. If you can get apple juice, I would suggest making cider first, and THEN get started brewing beer. Regular store bought (industrial) apple juice makes a pretty boring cider, but its better than nothing. You can enhance it by boiling it down before fermenting to increase sugar/alcohol level, adding frozen apple juice concentrate, or adding honey or sugar. Adding refined sugar will produce a very strong alcohol flavor, so a little goes a long way, experiment with it and decide what works for you. If you can mail order some wine yeast, that would help, I would suggest 71-B yeast, and save the yeast from the bottom of your fermenter, you can re-use it several times. Good luck!

Thanks for your reply Sir!
I can source wine yeast from online chinese suppliers . Though for chinese brewing yeasts there is little record online available on how good they are in making a wine.
Ok let's start with the apple cider. That suits my situation as we grow some of the best export quality apples in our northern regions ,they are cheap and available through out the year.
How about I extract the apple juice from the juicer machine and ferment it ? Actually I want to avoid store bought juices and sugars which are unnatural and my previous experience with them isn't good.
Are the sugars in the extracted apple juice will be enough to give me a good or decent ABV?

 

[madscientist451]

Yes, that will work.