Crabgrass Beer & Dandelion Wine | How to Brew Everything | Weed Booze

maintaining your lawn and garden is hard back-breaking work it's a constant battle of trying to raise your own plants or removing all the weeds to try and grow up with them when you're done there's nothing more refreshing than kicking back with an ice-cold beer or a glass of wine a wood if you put all these weeds to use and make yourself a nice hot beverage well that's what I'm gonna try using two of the most notorious weeds crabgrass and dandelions first up crabgrass best known today as an unattractive nuisance crabgrass it's actually brought over to the US by immigrants to be used as a source of food for early homesteaders before this it was commonly grown in Germany and Poland as edible grain you similarly as wheat to make flour or even beer I previously grown my own wheat to make both flour and beer in crabgrass was one of the annoying plants that always tried to sneak up into my crops the worst part ween was probably the wheat and the wheat is a grass and when it grows up it looks almost identical to all the other wild grasses to grow up with it so trying to weed it I feel like I kind of became an expert of the different types of grass because I have to go through I have to see was meat and what isn't and especially frustrating the beginning because as we starts out and it looks almost identical to crabgrass so I wasn't sure if I was did I pull the right stuff or this is crabgrass if left over but both plants are grasses so brewing crabgrass should be similar to wheat beer in my research I was able to find much information on the actual process of how exactly to do it so I'm gonna be going in a little blind but so far in the variety of different items I've learned how to brew wine tequila cider and wheat beer the basic formula is pretty straightforward extract the sugars from your source add yeast and let it ferment since crabgrass is most similar to wheat I'm mostly just going to be repeating the process I learned when I made wheat beer just this time without any help but first to grow my crabgrass it's simply a matter of just waiting for them to invite themselves into my garden this summer and resist that urge to pull them out the crabgrass was surprisingly productive and once it started to produce seeds midsummer I could harvest seeds every few days and get a large amount whereas with my wheat it was just one harvest after a very long growing season with the tiny size of the crabgrass and how much work it is to continuously harvest over and over again I can see why wheat is the more preferred grain for agriculture so I've all these seed from the crabgrass that I collected from my garden this summer and I tried to do the melting process of them to convert the starch in them to sugar unfortunately didn't seem to work not many of them actually germinated add one tray that started to I think there's some right combination of moisture that's different than when I did it with wheat and for the most part didn't have much success I did have one tray that kind of started too so I'm killing that in the oven [Music] toasty for the rest I'm gonna use an enzyme called amylase which I previously used with a corn syrup out of corn so it's kind of an alternative to the natural process of multi which turns the starches into sugars instead of Erskine use an enzyme and we'll end up with similar results probably a little bit less flavor to it and but it should still work first step now is to take a pot of water and heat it to around 165 degrees and then add all of the grain to soak up the starches it will then convert to sugar with the amylase [Music] add the seeds to the water and let sit for about 30 minutes it's a little bit over temperature which I think it's good I was actually recommended to me to kind of squash the seeds a little bit to add a little bit extra flavor since I wasn't able to melt them wait three minutes and have our malt next the biggest seeds is removed and wrung out then it's rinsed a second time to extract any remaining starches [Music] a little bit now I'm gonna add about a gram and a half of the amylase started off at mix that in let it react for about ten minutes alright so this point hopefully all the starch in it has converted into sugar and now I'm going to bring it to a boil and let it sit for sixty minutes [Music] then the batch is quickly chilled an ice water bath while I sanitize a fermentation vessel which it'll be poured into next [Music] now it looks a little milky now but should clear up and hopefully we have some flavor to it hello I want to add yeast oh yeah the guys at the store we're not quite sure what to recommend they gave it a look it up in there it weren't very sure just because we're using the amylase it doesn't have much flavor so I want something that would go well with it and they ended up choosing English ale yeast I don't remember why that's the actually all right guys sealed up give it a week or two and share some beer hopefully or something we'll see how it tastes well the beer ferments now to make some wine out of dandelions but first we'll need to collect some flowers [Music] pulling the petals from the flowers there then boiled an attitude vessel with a fair amount of the sugar I've made before added add some yeast and then just need to ferment for a few weeks [Music] meanwhile the beer should hopefully be done for menteng and be ready to bottle yeah smells like yeast after carefully sanitizing everything I boiled a mix of honey and water and poured a little into each bottle then I use a siphon to fill in the bottles with a beer and then cap them the extra honey I added will feed the remaining yeast caused us a little bit of fermentation we'll carbonate the beers inside their bottles so I boiled some of my beer and let it carbonate for a few days how to try at all I have some of the wine and the beer there's the original fermenting vessels the wine actually cleared up pretty good I used some of the bentonite clay we collected in Utah we saw in the winery and solving to use the same clay to clarify it so try to using it on this one it did a pretty good job and its looks really nice it's like a golden dandelion color I think that's gonna turn out good the beer over is I need to clear it up a little bit but it's still pretty murky last I checked it smells pretty horrible supposedly after you bottle it and it starts to carbonate that should dissipate some but I'm pretty skeptical I don't know how well it's gonna turn out it also doesn't really look like beer it looks like lemonade I don't know what that means first off I'm gonna give the dandelion wine that I made with the petals Andy and I collected it smells like wine passes that you know smell test so it's just like wine that's pretty good it's like a sweet very sweet white wine I'd say has a very earthy taste I don't know tasting terms so I can't really give an accurate assessment but it's good it's kind of reminiscent of the tequila that we had in Mexico it has a lot of the same notes that the tequila had I don't know it sounds like honey there wasn't any honey added to it but pretty smooth like honey I honey at all but maybe it you know has something to do with the pollination with the bees definitely taste like a white wine it's got smoothness yeah that taste like the park across the street from my house wow that's probably what our tasting is some soccer games yeah I would buy this wine yeah I mean for something that was supposed to be sitting in my closet for two weeks and ended up being in there for six months it tasted pretty good I thought it would be rotten or spoiled and you know without even trying hard this is probably the best wine I've made I didn't use traditional yeast in this I used bakers ease just you know from the grocery store so I like it I think it turned out really good let's try the beer pretty skeptical about this looks like cloudy piss that makes me feel confident you can hear a little bit of a pop that means there's at least some carbonation whoa smells like mothballs Oh God this one's very whoo that is not not a pleasant smell oh my god it's like burnt rubber and mothballs like if you could combine those two well it's kind of like old people or a retirement home I'm gonna try it reluctantly it's in the taste - mm-hmm it's not horrible though it it smells worse than it tastes but it also doesn't taste good that's not staying inside me I don't want that inside me I'm gonna plug my nose and try it oh that's better oh my god it tastes like a gym sock just it's kind of taste like death smells like death you know or something that's about to go it's very light it doesn't really taste like a beer though it just doesn't have much of a flavor at all it's very flat I'd say in flavor tones maybe it just need a little more time maybe the amylase extraction robbed it of its flavors but you know I'd say you know check this out in a few more weeks and see if it change I don't think I would recommend this if I bought this at a store I would demand my money back I think I haven't tried piss but it might be better the dandelion wine yes I did good and II lost but you know and II put a lot more time we just skipped her out in the park for mine but this is really nice a beginning of the year I did a little collaboration what makes something where you help me make the frames for my glasses I was tempting to do and now at the end of the year now how do we close it out and send them some of my beverage it's kind of a thank you so I'm gonna save him from this disgusting stuff and just send him some of the wine so hopefully enjoys it [Music] Cheers it's good thanks Andy Thanks how to make everything be sure to check out his channel make something and does a lot of woodworking he made a wine rack for the bottle of wine I sent him is a whole variety of other woodworking projects so be sure to check his channel out if you enjoyed this video be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics also if you enjoyed these series consider supporting us on patreon we are largely a fan funded channel and depend on the support of our viewers in order to keep our series going thanks for watching

Channel: How To Make Everything

Views: 324,642

Keywords: HTME, DIY, Fun, Smart, Learn, Teach, Maker, History, Science, Innovator, Education, Educational, School, Invention, Agriculture, Textiles, Industry, Technology, brewing, wine, fermenting, beer, crabgrass, grass, wheat, grain, malt, brew, weeds, dandelion, yeast, homebrew, garden, weed, booze, weedbrew, brow tidy ox, weird beer ingredients, diy beer, homemade beer, diy wine, make my own wine, how to make beer, how to make wine, how to make everything, home craft beer, craft wine, weird wines, weird beer, strange beer

Id: j4eTXP1tfOE

Length: 12min 2sec (722 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 28 2017