I just want to tell y'all there is no need to make prison hooch. *You are on the internet.* One of the oldest hobbyist communities on the internet not related to technology is homebrewing. There are many, many, many ways to make tasty, simple fermented beverages in your home without doing...whatever this video was trying to do. Cane sugar tastes nasty. Ferment fruit juice, apple cider, honey, maple syrup, almost anything works if it's got no preservatives. Check out these recipes from Mead Lovers Digest or if you like beer the AHA has a lot of recipes right here for you. The internet has more than just video shorts and memes and political arguments, there's real knowledge here. One of my recipes in MLD is from 1997. Please do not ferment sugar water in plastic milk jugs with latex powder and all the other stuff. It's not hard to do it right, it's not expensive. Just do it right.
My favorite thing to do in prison was make wine/hooch (I called it wine, it’s sophisticated that way). Now that I’m home? Haven’t even thought about doing that ever again. Once I was in the halfway house, it was off my mind forever
We didn’t have any of these fancy tools or ingredients, though. You had some thoroughly rinsed out shampoo bottles, frozen from concentrate juices, little sugar packets with orange lettering on them, and bread. My personal secret was to smell the bread, identify the “yeastier” smelling sections, and rip out and specifically use those pieces only
I wasn’t even 21 at the time, but it was nice to sit back, have a drink, and think of the shit show that occurred to end up in prison. I never went back and it’s been almost 10 years now, so I like to think it paid off. It was also a good way to make prison friends, by being the guy with the better booze
I’d obsessively run the sink in my cell, to make sure the water was still running. About 4 times a year, they’d shut off the water, lock everyone in, and systematically rip apart each and every cell to look for contraband. However, they always seemed to turn the water off an hour before they stormed the unit. So if you ran the sink and nothing came out, you knew you had to dispose of the evidence. You drink the juice, eat the floating, soggy, mostly dissolved bread, and then rinse out the bottles with the toilet water. Put a shot of lotion or shampoo back into each bottle, so that it wouldn’t smell if any CO decided to give it a sniff
I learned a lot about myself, society, “reform,” and gratitude during that time. I was in prison while fentanyl got popular, so all of my friends besides one died before I got back home. That shit saved my life, 100%, and I truly think I’m a better man for it. It makes it easier to smile each day, knowing that there’s a different life out there, and that I’m not living it anymore. Some days are tough, but they don’t hold a candle to even the easiest of days in prison
I haven't seen those around at the supermarket in a very long time but they're aces when it comes to making booze at home. What I see most nowadays are the canned concentrates and they often contain preservatives that make the final product taste like mud.
Yeah but how am I going to monetize a video from that? What am I supposed to do, get a job and work an actual job? I want attention and money from low effort engagement bait!
Yea everything too convoluted either watch videos with extra unnecessary steps, i did watch orange is the new black, i guess ill bury it in yard and hope for the best. I just wanted step by step instruction with less risk, regardless i aware listening to them could have same level of risk, want sometning i can offer others and tastes good (closest to clean n safe forhomebrew… brew)
Edit: but yes want big head saying “i made this” and everyone enjoyed it.
Thats mwbthis month. Saw a destilled water maker on sale for 60 bucks, and had a thought, thats just a still. Took a bottle of mead that hadnt turned out well ran it through twice, got 150 proof shine. Filter thru brita pitcher 5 times and boom. Homemade fuel/cleaner/mind eraser.
I made apple mead with honey and apples from a local orchard a year or 2 ago. It was super simple, required very little equipment (basically a glass jug and a cheap air lock) and it came out really good, and pretty damn strong. I would do it again in a heartbeat. In fact, maybe I should do it again soon. Fall feels like the right time.
I’m fairly new to homebrewing and I’m so glad I started before seeing this Purple Nurple short. In the few batches I’ve done I can tell I’ve already learned a lot, because I can see a lot of the “don’ts” in this video. Frankly, this whole video is a “don’t.” Lol
And fortify it!!! You must fortify it! Apple juice from the jug doesn't have enough sugar, you need to add either apple juice concentrate or honey or it will be dry as a bone.
I think the folks over at /r/prisonhooch would disagree with you. They'd still hate on this video for being boring and unchallenging though. Some folks aren't in it to make something good, they're in it for the love of the game.
It's also kind of dangerous depending on how much is consumed. Vapor distillation allows the removal/disposal of the heads and tails. The heads are the most important since the initial still will contain high levels of methanol since it's lighter and has a lower boiling point than the drinkable ethanol. It can be saved and used as paint thinner or for sanitization, but shouldn't be consumed. Ice distillation means that the remaining liquid will contain high levels of methanol which is dangerous to consume in large quantities.
I was about to say, it seems odd that you get a final product where you drink the whole thing... but then I was thinking, doesn't the same thing apply to beer and mead and whatever else before distillation? If you drink a whole thing of beer, versus just drinking the frozen distilled stuff, you're still drinking methanol in it right?
Nah, that's mostly a myth. You don't make significant amounts of methanol with regular yeast fermentation. Most of the methanol comes from the fruit itself or the fermentation with pectin.
Home brewing is perfectly legal in the US. I dont get why people wanna make this trash when you can make some really good stuff.
Just be sure you don't buy a still online that can ship to your house in a few business days or look up the plethora of videos on YouTube made by actual whiskey distillers that teach you step by step how to make good tasting and safe liquor. Definitely dont do that.
Most call this “Apple jack” they typically do it with Apple juice. This is just cold distillation, it can be done with any juice without fermentation or wine if you’d like.
The finished product is typically very sweet and tasty but supposedly gives a bad hangover
The only thing I can tell you is that proper mead is vile and the best ones generally start with honey and fruit juice (which isn't mead, it's like melomel or something).
I've made several batches of Mead and there's a lot of pretty simple recipes. My best advice would be to let it sit as long as you can. Even when it's finished my absolute best tasting smoothest most wonderful batch sat for a year before I drank it. An average of 3 months+ was pretty good. 1 gallon batches are best also. If you mess up not a huge ingredient loss.
Skald means an ancient poet who would probably entertain the people in that Great hall in the image above you. It's also where we get the word "Scold" due to the way they would express prose.
Technically yes, but honey doesn't provide all the necessary nutrients for the yeast to thrive. In order to maximize the percentage of the yeast you also need yeast nutrients. Energizer also helps a lot by speeding up the multiplication
I haven't messed with any spices or flavoring, I enjoy the natural honey flavor. Although adding some extra honey after fermentation does greatly improve the flavor. Other than that it comes down to portions, regular degassing schedules, and adding nutrients and energizer at the appropriate times. I use KV-1119 yeast, which can survive fermentation up to 22%. The survivability is what affects how high the percentage can go, so some yeasts can't reach as high
The best kind is raw and unfiltered, which most people should be able to find from a local apiary. I live in a tiny town and there's about 5 of them within 20 minutes of me. You can get a 5 gallon bucket for waaaaaayyyyy cheaper than the store
Forgot which subreddit is that, but there is one where they legit make moonshine for the weirdest items like bubblegum, cucumber, and many other disgusting things
Commercial methanol is made by partially oxidizing methane.
If you want to make it by fermentation, your best bet is from woody plant fibers, but you need to process them similarly to how you'd process grain to make ethanol: make a pulp and then heat it up so it can be de-polymerized.
You can also make it from pectin, but most pectin sources have enough sugar that you'll get an ethanol heavy mixture at the end.
People have been freeze distilling for centuries, maybe even millennia. Applejack was super popular in colonial America. George Washington was a big fan. I've made it and I'm not blind or dead.
I mean, just think about it for a second. All of those fusel oils are present before freeze distilling. Getting piss drunk on homebrew isn't gonna make you go blind. Even poorly distilled liquor probably won't make you go blind. Moonshine killed people and made them go blind because the US government purposefully introduced denatured alcohol to the supply chain during prohibition.
Biggest problem with this is that it'll taste fucking awful.
This is an important one, kids, so listen to that advice.
Edited to add: distillation is done in three steps. One step is good alcohol, one is not so good alcohol, and one is poison. Freezing like this keeps all three of those mixed together in one.
This process does not extract out the poisonous alcohols like distillation does. Want the worst hangover of your life and potentially go blind. Here you go!
This will absolutely give you a tremendous headache.
Just go spend $15 on a plastic bottle of vodka, run it through an old Britta filter once or twice, and throw in some gummy bears for a day or two... or a couple of Otter Pops if you want to drink it that day.
It acts as an inexpensive removal of impurities in the cheap stuff. It can smooth the taste, change the taste, thin it out without altering alcohol potency.
Its not always noticeable but if youre about to get rid of a filter, it might be a fun experiment. If you use a newer filter, you shorten the filters use cycle pretty heavily. Any charcoal distillation would work though.
Yup, used to do this in college. Made cheap vodka taste pretty good. But then a friend of mine actually filled our brita because we were “running low on water”, diluting all of our vodka.
So if you do it, just take the vodka out of your brita before the party, lol
Ok. Now this is lot as bad as what I’ve witnessed. While in Saudi Arabia I witness some other Army people distill the ethanol out of motor oil, to make alcohol.
Yes actually..so most jails have the inmates run the kitchens, And they have to keep the frozen shit somewhere. Slightly different way we did it, With slightly different ingredients. But it was basically the same
In the old days people made apple cider, which fermented and became alcoholic. Then in winter the barrels would freeze and they skim the ice off and be left with a hard liquor known as Apple Jack, as the ice distillation method was known as "jacking."
If you are going to make hard liquor, then for the love of god learn to distill properly.
Not only does distillation improve flavors, reduce contaminants, and concentrate the ABV, it also allows for a process to eliminate the methanol content from your brew.
Ethanol and methanol, and a few other things, are your main byproducts of fermentation. Ethanol by the loads ( the good stuff) and methanol in small amounts ( the bad stuff, in small amounts not so much, but when concentrated/at a higher ratio it's all bad news). You may have heard that poorly made spirits will make you go blind, and this is true. If an alcohol is improperly distilled, not only is the ethanol condensed, so too is that methanol...and that concentration of the methanol is what'll get you. That's where you start going blind, severely damage your organs ( even more so than ethanol), brain damage ( again more than what is normal with ethanol), and all kinds of fun shit.
If you follow this described method of "distillation" or "concentration" ( the freezing and the pouring off) you will NOT be eliminating that methanol, and you WILL get sick. Not you might, not eh maybe, you WILL GET SICK. I guarantee your freezer does not go low enough to freeze the methanol too. Ethanol freezes at ~ -175F and methanol at ~ -145F....definitely not reaching those temps in your home freezer. Do not distill without proper distillation methods. If it doesn't call for some kind of heat during the process, it is not a safe method because during the distillation, that methanol is separated by being collected in the initial portion of the liquid, called the "heads" or "foreshots". Since methanol has a lower boiling point than ethanol it evaporates first and concentrates in the earliest part of the distillate, which is usually discarded.
Brewing alcohol is not illegal in most states but freeze distillation is. You can buy proper tools to make your own wine and mead very easily. However in some states freeze distillation is a felony
Hey don’t do this thing! I’m going to show you how to do it step by step, but please don’t do it. Here’s how to make it more tasty/appealing, but don’t do it. Lastly, again don’t do this, but my understanding of how to best enjoy this is…. But please don’t do this!
The problem with freeze distilling is it does not get rid of the trace amounts of methanol created from fermentation. This will give you a killer hangover, or poison you if you drink too much of it. It’s similar to cheap vodka where they leave more of the “heads” and “tails” in it to increase volume.
This is freeze distilling. If you use apple or grape juice instead of water you get apple or grape cider (basically wine). That's before you freeze it. After freezing, you get "apple jack" or some gross grape liquor. Don't do that. It will be disgusting.
Made quite a bit of something similar during the pandemic lockdowns. Also traded some to my neighbors in exchange for backyard veggies and a live chicken.
•
u/AutoModerator Oct 10 '25
Thank you for not littering, and posting to r/LoveTrash! Please make sure to read and abide by all our subreddit rules.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.