Turn Juice Into Alcohol In 48 Hours
If making alcohol had been this easy during Prohibition, homemade hooch would have been everywhere. Recently, I began playing with a product called Spike Your Juice, which was advertised as a way to turn the juice into alcohol in 48 hours. It works like this: Pick a juice with at least 20g of sugar per serving, add a packet of specially designed yeast, plug the bottle with an airlock, and wait 48 hours. Just like the fermentation process used in winemaking, the juice's natural sugar is converted into ethanol, with a byproduct of carbon dioxide. The result is an alcoholic drink with a champagne-like effervescent fizz.
I bought a box of these magic bacteria and started experimenting. The instructions recommend using filtered juices that don't require refrigeration and aren't artificially sweetened. But I'm bad at following instructions, and I don't trust juice that doesn't require refrigeration. I grabbed a bottle of pink lemonade, mango, blackberry, and sweet tea from Trader Joe's. The pink lemonade worked well — after 48 hours, it was quite fizzy, though I couldn't really taste the alcohol. The sweet tea fizzed a bit, but also didn't taste "spiked" — it just tasted awful. The mango juice (which wasn't fully filtered) formed big solid clumps during fermentation. I'm not sure why, exactly, but they were gross, so I filtered them out with cheesecloth before drinking. Again, some fizz, no buzz.
The blackberry juice was the winner by far. It also developed some solids (even though it was very clear juice, to begin with), and you'd never mistake it for wine, but it was delicious. Think blackberry Lambic, but with an adjusted price of $1.75 per bottle (64 oz. of juice at $3, $1.50 per packet of yeast, 25 oz. in a wine bottle). This is something I'd make again, and certainly, something I'd serve to dinner guests or corruptible children.
The instructions state that you can allow the fermentation to continue longer than 48 hours to achieve up to 14% ABV. It also recommends using Welch's or Ocean Spray — I guess we'll have to agree to disagree there. To me, the best part of this product is that you're free to choose great starting ingredients, like a locally produced cider, or raspberry juice from plants in your backyard. But for the fun of quick, easy DIY booze, I'll raise my glass to this product!
Spike Your Juice – $9.99 (or $20 for a 2-pack on Amazon). Scott Heimendinger is the man behind one of our go-to sites for obsessive-compulsive kitchen behavior, Seattle Food Geek, where this post originally appeared.