End of World - No Yeast - No store sugar -What would you do?

[igloogod]

This is a serious question... as one of the reasons I am learning to distill is in the case of a world changing event, being able to produce alcohol could be a very valuable skill.

My question is this, imagine you cannot get sugar from the store, nor any kind of yeast, and you had to relocate, so your old wash/mash is not an option for getting yeast.

What crop would be the easiest to grow and create the simplest path to creating alcohol. And how would you get it to ferment? Is it potato, corn, apples? Imagine you are in central, north Georgia area.

Say you used wild berries or you could get peaches or apples, how would you ferment it, and process it to create a fruit based vodka or grain alcohol? Would you simply cook it up and let it set and hope you got good yeast to grow from the air and wait for bubbling to start and stop... and how many distillations would it take to turn that into alcohol of at least 80 proof? What would be the easiest crop to work with in this type of situation?

I can give more details of the situation you'd be in, if my details are too vague.

I know this may seem a foolish question.. but I guarantee there are plenty of survivalist distillers who'd be interested in some mentoring on this subject.

[ipee7ABV]

based on your questions i think it would be best if you read more. all your answers can be found on here with a little time spent searching.
http://homedistiller.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=3
http://homedistiller.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=38

[HolyBear]

Thars a few posts here relative to yer post but more importantly, the general knowledge/ recipes would serve will in the situation you speak of.

[sambedded]

What would be the easiest crop to work with in this type of situation?

The easiest crop to make an alcohol is grape. You just need to harvest it at dry weather, do not wash o rinse them, make a juice and you get 99% chance to heve a descent fermentation. Then you can drink it as is or make a brandy.

[Prairiepiss]

The easiest crop is the one you have avaialability too. Just like the yeast. You won't exactly get to choose what you get to use. So it would be best to be prepared for any of them.

Theories behind the different types of stills and how they work is a good one too. Sure a pot still is simple. And can be made pretty easily. But if you are wanting to make a fuel. You will need some kind of reflux still. So you can get a high ABV alcohol. And building a reflux still isn't as easy as a pot still. And if your sitting there with a pile of parts. Trying to figure out what to build. You ate better off knowing about them all. Because you may not have the needed parts to build this one. But you could make this one. Same goes for firming the thing up. What will you have for fuel? You don't know. Because it hasn't happened yet. Wood, coal, oil, stumble upon a LP stash, or gasoline? Some are easy some not so easy.


By the way welcome aboard. If you would step over to the welcome center and give us an introduction please.

[501outlaw]

Are u wanting to make fuel or just something to drink ??? Reason for the question is for a drink learn all grain , that takes care of the sugar problem. And read on wild yeast or making your own strain and keeping it. That takes care of the yeast problem

[501outlaw]

Homemade Yeast
I have been thinking a lot about this recipe and the bread I have made from past batches.. It is refered to as a barm, which is also a yeast rich foam that has risen to the surface of home made beer. In the beer the hops are used not only for flavour, but for their preservative attributes. This slows the bacteria growth. In bread this would keep the dough from getting too much of a sour flavour. Because of this, any bread made with this starter will have an undertone flavour from the hops instead of a sour flavour from a water/flour starter.

After all that thinking - what a waste of time - Elizabeth David says it succinctly and with a nice historical florish on page 101 of English Bread and Yeast Cookery.
Hops were usually included, more as a preservative, or preventative of sourness, than as a stimulant.....Until well on into the twentieth century and even after the First World War, there were still a few bakers making their bread with barm rather than with compressed distillery yeast; people accustomed to bread leavened with barm held that its flavour was much more interesting than that produced by modern yeast. It is one of those lost tastes.

Well, perhaps it can be revived. I will post a bread recipe using this barm next week, once my barm is done.

Spontaneous Barm

Ideally I try to use organic flour, and have found the barm successful using whole wheat flour. The whole wheat barm does not allow for a bright white interior to your finished loaf – this being a very desirable quality one hundred years ago – but with our love of whole grain loaves and variety flours, the whole wheat barm works very nicely.

Ingredients
2 quarts water
3/4 cups hops, loosely packed
1/4 cup brown sugar, packed
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup bread flour
12 oz. potatoes, cooked and mashed

Preparation

Day One:
Combine hops and water and bring to a boil. Simmer for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Cool to lukewarm. Strain out hops, discard flowers. Place liquid in a 4 quart container. Stir in sugar and salt. Add some of the broth to the flour in a bowl to make a slurry. Add the slurry back into the hops broth, stirring well. Set the bowl in a warm spot, stirring occasionally, for two days.

Day Two:
Continue to stir the broth occasionally.

Day Three:
Stir in the still warm, (but not hot!), mashed potatoes. Stir well.

Day Four:
The mixture should have started to ferment. Let sit until the evening, then strain and store in bottles filled ¾ full of the yeasty coloured broth. Store in the refrigerator until needed. Bring the yeast to room temperature before using.

Barm will keep 6 to 8 weeks.
Note: I store the liquid in thoroughly washed and dried milk bottles. You can seal them using the old lids, (washed well of course), or cork, or even just plastic wrap with an elastic band to keep it secure.

[King Of Hearts]

Interesting. Cattails are supposed to have a lot of sugar or starch, grasses and many plants have starch/sugar, yeast are wild and many, no problem there, water might be a problem tho.

[Prairiepiss]

If water is a problem. Then anything using that water would be a problem also.

[Durace11]

Going to have to distill that water to clean it up, finding a good source of water may be a problem because with no water, you aren't going to get very far.

IMO wild grown fruit would be my first instinct as easiest available and easiest to work with. Stomp it in a barrel or bucket and let it wild ferment from airborne/latent yeast and do your best without ph meters/strips, without temp control, without sanitation, without, without, without...