How to make Alcohol with Sugar and Water

hey gangster buddy platt and today i show you how to make alcohol using sugar and water so let's go the most popular video on my channel is a video called simplest way to make booze at home it basically was just a homemade wine video we just took some grape juice add some sugar a little yeast voila about 10 days later we had wine one of the questions i get in that about that video and about the concept of journals like hey i don't have 100 choose can you use juice like drinks well if you use stuff like high c or wherever they have preservatives that's bad for the yeast then the next question i get is well can i use other juices like orange juice or grapefruit juice well those juices are too acidic for the yeast and the yeast generally won't survive those environments so then i eventually get to the question well hey how about sugar and water can i just use sugar and water the answer is yes but it won't the final result won't be what you think one thing about using grape juice apple juice something like that to make homemade alcohol is you get flavor with it you know the grape juice and parts and flavor apple juice apart from some flavor also too they both add more formidable sugars for the yeast to eat generally the more the yeast eat the more alcohol they're able to produce thus you you want the extra sugar but you can't produce alcohol with just sugar and water and that's part of the reason why i want to do this little experiment is kind of show you it can be done but it's probably not what you think it's going to come out to be one of the reasons why and i'll go over a couple real quick one of the reasons why this will be different than or the homemade wine is first and foremost the sugar that we add is for the yeast and a lot of people i what i got a lot of videos comments on the video well god grape juice is sweet enough and now you're adding sugar all the diabetes to the the sugars for the yeast and the yeast does a pretty efficient job on that and if the yeast works through all the sugar you really have no residual sweetness you end up with a dry wine that's why the extra fermentable sugars that are in the grate juice or apple juice help you know leave a little sweetness in that drink what's going to happen here most likely is that the yeast will process through nearly all the sugar regular cane sugar like we're using is pretty efficient at being fermented so there's not going to be hardly any sugar left over so we're going to have a pretty dry bland tasting liquid um and so that's that's where we're going to have part of the major difference is that you know sure cane sugar without anything else in there will make you planting alcohol but you're not going to have any flavor but like i said i thought we would just give this try uh real simple all you'll need is a one gallon container we're gonna make a one gallon batch for alcohol you're gonna need a little bit of sugar and some yeast i'm using wine yeast you can use regular bread yeast rapid rice yeast if you have access to wine or beer yeast fill free you can use pretty much any type of yeast except nutritional yeast and that's because nutritional yeast those yeast cells are dead so no function any kind of living type of yeast feel free to use it um and that's pretty much it so with that being said let's make some alcohol all right so the first thing we're going to do is heat up a little bit water we're just going to heat up the water so our sugar can uh blend in easier you don't have to bring this to a boil you can if you want to for sanitation purposes but um you don't have to we're just needing it warm enough where the sugar blends in easily i'm just going to do a quart and a half of water we'll use the other uh to get to one gallon we'll add cold water and they'll bring our liquid to the proper temperature to pitch our yeast so it works out just fine we are going to add two pounds of sugar now i can already hear something out there two pounds of sugar that's insane are you crazy you're crazy man we're going to do a hydrometer reading and what a hydraulic reading does is it lets us know the potential fermentable sugars in something or what's called our original gravity and that kind of gives us an idea of the potential alcohol we can make a pound of sugar into one pound of water brings your specific gravity to around 1.040 maybe 1.045 at the highest but somewhere around there if we were to ferment down to 1.010 that would only get us to around 3.9 alcohol the volume again the yeast is or the sugar is for the yeast it's not what you're going to end up consuming yeast is going to eat most of sugar so if we want a higher abv we're going to have to ramp it up so we're going to add an additional additional pound that will give us anywhere between 1.080 and 1.090 again shooting for that 110 mark now we're like 8 9 10 alcohol by volume now we've got something uh of substance or whatever now we're not we're leaving the session beer making something stronger so it seems like a lot of sugar but it really isn't and again we're we're adding that to a one whole gallon of water you're not most likely you're not gonna drink the whole gallon of booze but again the yeast take care of that so that being said let me get this sugar in um as far as any substitutes on the sugar yeah you could use yeast uh that's actually called meat if you just uh or you eat you could use honey if you want that's actually called mead and i have a video on how to make meat i'll leave a link up here i've done a variation where i've used maple syrup you can use brown sugar you can use agave nectar what have you king sugar is usually the easiest and cheapest to use so [Music] dump her dumper in stir around we'll make sure she gets fully incorporated so let me go ahead and finish doing this adding all the sugar then i'll add our water and we'll come back to do our gravity reading before we throw in the yeast to see where we're at but alex is most likely going to be in that 1.080 range and that should hopefully again get eight nine percent abv so let me get this finished and we'll come right back all right so we've got our two pounds of water incorporated to our one or two pounds of sugar incorporated to our one gallon of water now it's time for our hydrometer test and let's see if i was right about the sugar all right we are at roughly 1.082 ish i'm going to say if we get down to 1.010 on our final gravity we should be around 9.2 ish a little over 9 alcohol by volume that's probably what we should be shooting for you're not going to get a lot of these little experiments you're not going to get too much higher unless you have a specific high gravity yeast have yeast nutrients stuff like that if you start getting over 1.090 or so that's what's considered a high gravity brew you're going to need specialty yeast you're going to need yeast nutrients a little more work that won't work i'm looking for this but this is uh again toward the top in the range we will uh use our wine yeast uh i'm going to go ahead and pitch the yeast temperature wise you're going to leave this around room temperature low 70s you could get to the 80 you could get up to close to 80 you don't get much above 80 and you don't get below 60 60 80 range is about right for this we're gonna let this ferment for about two weeks uh anything over a week if you want to start checking your gravity reading and if you get you know if we'll get to around the nine percent alcohol by volume you should be done but we're going to give her two full weeks i'm going to like said use wine yeast i'm going to use probably two to three grams of yeast is what you'll need again it doesn't matter if it's bread yeast or wine use whatever roughly two to three grams for a gallon is what we're going to use so let me pitch the yeast and we'll come back in a day or two just so i'll let you let you see it bubble up or whatever but like i said this only sugar and water so uh let's see uh how it comes out all right so it's the next day and uh you can look you don't see a lot of bubbles and you don't see any foam and i'm kind of glad this is happening because i want to talk about this i get this question every once while hey it's been a day or two i don't see foam i don't see a head on it um there's something wrong well if you notice here you can see pressure building up and yep there we got a bubble so we're producing co2 the reactions happening it's just not as visual as sometimes you like especially if you're home brewing uh beer uh you generally get a nice what's called a croissant or a head of foam on top uh when using other sugars for minerals sometimes that's different and especially dealing with just straight sugar you sometimes don't get the head um home brewing beer you know especially the green barley but sometimes wheat however in the greens has special proteins that help form head and beer well you don't have that in just sugar and water or some of the other just like a straight grape juice whatever so you don't necessarily get the same foaming action when fermenting something else as you would always from like a beer so if you don't see the foam or the head but you're still getting co2 production which we are as you can see by the bubbles you're fine just make sure you're producing bubbles if you have an airlock you'll see the bubbles if you put a balloon on top you'll see it fell as long as that's happening you have fermentation so i'll come back at the end of two weeks and we'll uh see how this comes out all right gang it's been a couple weeks time to do a quick hydrometer reading i'll give her a little spin we start off with 1.082 and we're at 1.070 and i've already done the math cheating a little bit we're only at one half percent alcohol in volume something went wrong what we have here is a term you'd use as a stuck fermentation um again this is another little thing i'm kind of glad that happened because again it gives me a tap a chance to talk about that and this is something you may run into if you do this experiment um what stuck fermentation is is just we've started the fermentation process and just for whatever reason stopped uh remember we did you know we have moved from 1.082 to 1.070 so we had some kind of fermentation you saw the bubbles earlier in the video um now we got to figure out why did this happen there are few uh things we could look at first the yeast um i did use a pack of muttons yeast from an older kid i had so maybe it was too old maybe it was just bad yeast well the problem is we did start some kind of fermentation we did have fermentation going so the yeast cells were viable to some point next issue could be temperature even though i have full ac in this household there's just points of the days where you know out here in vegas we face toward the west the the sun comes in it's just this house gets up into the 80s that's higher than normal range but just slightly it's not you know extreme if the house got up to 100 then maybe that would you know that could be a problem but it's probably not that um another issue that we run into especially with this sugar solution that we're doing is once i dump the sugar in there the sugar's naturally going to absorb the water and become absorbed by the water and thus it's already you know has so much water activity in it is already consuming the water in a certain sense well the yeast also need to be hydrated they also need x amount of water and they kind of if you put too much sugar in these that it becomes a battle for that resource of water and sometimes the yeast loses out to the sugar because you put the sugar in first that could be the issue but it's probably not because it's not that high if we put five pounds of sugar in here instead of two then you know our gravity reading would have been real high and it you know probably would have been too much for these to handle we're at one we were like we started 1.082 that's high for a beer but low for some wines or it's it's higher but it's not too high so that's again probably not it each one of these things could have had some effect but in themselves most likely they weren't it where we may have gone wrong here is sugar regular table sugar you use is basically sucrose sucrose is made up of two simpler sugars glucose and fructose yeast love simple sugars and but the more complex sugars are a little tougher for them to consume so probably what could have happened was this yeast got in there and started fighting for resources started fighting for water and grabbed onto those simple sugars at first but once it took once it was time to take the next step up it probably was just too much for it so that's kind of my hypothesis on what could have happened that's why i also always suggest these go with the fruit juice because it's those fruit juices especially grape juice has no sucrose in it and and this is apple this is grape juice specific has no sucrose in it and it's full of fructose that's just such easy lifting for the yeast to do they love that environment we're here making them do a little work so now that we got that out of the way how can we fix this what's what's the solution and this is not just for this experiment if you have a stuck fermentation you know either home brewing a beer or wine or whatever this uh this hopefully is handy information we can attack it a couple different ways if you think it's water activity like well i just have too much sugar in there then you could dilute and cut down now that'll cut your ebd down but it will make life easier for the yeast if you don't want to do that um there's a couple other ways if you think that it's too much sugar but you don't want to cut back you can switch yeast to a higher gravity yeast if you think that's just the problem that's too much sugar it's not um i don't think that's the issue here though because again we used a i believe a champagne or a wine yeast or both again can handle this amount of gravity in here so i don't think that's the issue um what we can do from here though you know some people will say well he just dumped it we ruined it no no we're not quitters around here what we're going to do and probably the easiest solution on any of these things is always to re-pitch these just add more yeast back on top we we till by the hydrometer reading we haven't come even close to using up all the sugars in there for the fermentables in there for the yeast to have so there's plenty of food in there for the yeast um they just got to be able to digest it we got to help them with that and that's one of the things we're going to do we're going to take some yeast nutrients we didn't use it before but we're going to use some yeast nutrient just give it a hand in helping it work up the chain of sugars to the more complex sugars also what we're going to do is we're going to hydrate the yeast before we pitch at the start we just pitch dried yeast in there but again if it's got to compete with the sugar for some water or whatever let's give it a hand let's do it beforehand and so we're just going to take a little room temperature water and sprinkle our yeast in there give it about 10-15 minutes to fully hydrate so it doesn't have to compete with the sugar for hydration and then we put it in also i'm going to switch yeast a little bit [Music] i'm going to go with ale yeast ale yeast generally ferments at higher temperatures than your regular wine yeast or especially water yeast again even though i got the ac going just a little warmer in this room so we're going to pitch some ale yeast so it can hopefully thrive better at the elevated temperatures so that's going to be our plan of attack we're going to like someone pitch in i think it's a half a teaspoon per gallon something like that have and we'll pitch in some yeast nutrient then we'll hydrate um an l yeast and then we'll pitch that in and hopefully we can kick uh fermentation back off so let me do that and we'll come back to see if we uh start her back up all right gang so it's been about a week and i have some good news we were able to successfully uh restart our fermentation we had a stud fermentation uh but we went back added additional yeast yeast nutrients and we were able to kick back off just did a hydrometer reading we came in at 1.020 our original gravity was 1.060 i believe so that gets us to around 5.2 percent alcohol by volume we could probably let this go a little bit longer maybe get an extra percent or two uh adv out of it but we're kind of successful where we were shooting for again we're just wanting to see you know can we produce alcohol with just sugar and water you know how that process would look so we did that and we also recovered stuck fermentation so we're doing pretty good where do we go from here well conceptually you start drinking this stuff now and i've poured just a little shot on the side i'll give her a try that there's still some sweetness left over not a lot it's not as again you think as much sugars would put in there they would just be all sweetness but not really just tastes like pretty bland flat simple syrup for a lack of a better term uh also too i would not suggest drinking it for another reason uh if you could put your ear to the hole the fermenter just there's there's a lot of co2 in there's a lot of bubbling going on and it's similar to wine that hasn't been degassed if we were to just consume this we'd get a lot of that co2 uh in our gut along with there's still an active fermentation going on even though it's slowed down a lot still an active fermentation between those two that could give you a case of bubble gut and you definitely want to avoid that so what we're going to do is again we've got the 5.2 alcohol the volume that's good enough for us i'm going to add some potassium sorbate to this and throat in the fridge if you don't have potassium sorbate that's fine just you could throw this in the fridge at this point give it a day or so to as the bird knows where i'm going with this to cool down and uh it will stop the yeast activity the cold temperatures will stop the yeast activity and all that yeast will start to fall out so we'll get a clear product along with stopping fermentation so we'll do that and we'll come back in a couple of days to talk about how we're going to add flavor to it i'll also talk about you know if you want to bottle it or not uh you definitely don't want to boil it now uh with all that co2 in it especially if you're thinking oh well i'll bottle like beer and add a little sugar you know to carbonate it you don't want to do that when it already has so much co2 in it so let me get this in the fridge and we'll come back in a couple days to wrap up real quick little dendum i want to add to the middle of this video um i've said a couple times throughout the video that our final gravity our final alcohol percentage is 5.12 i am wrong i've forgotten the original gravity i misstated it one 1.060 is 1.082 which means our final abv is 8.1 so if you hear me say that throughout the video i apologize i didn't realize it to post production so i'm throwing this in the middle of the video just to let you know uh so we actually came out a lot more alcohol than we thought which is a good thing but anyway that's the correction eight point one percent alcohol not five point two percent all right gang so it's been a couple days now and uh we finally let our final product settle i went ahead and racked it to another container just to get it off that yeast and we ended up with roughly let slightly less than one gallon of our finished product which came out at roughly 5.25 alcohol by volume quickly let's recap what we did the original concept and purpose of this video was to see if we could just ferment sugar and water and get a an acceptable alcoholic product the answer is we did but it was a little harder than we thought the emptiness behind this video is my most popular video simplest way to make booze at home is about basically just making homemade wine and a lot of people ask well i don't have access to grape juice can i use this other juice or can i use this or that and a lot of times i get what i just how about just sugar and water can i do just sugar water and the answer from this is yes but what i also get a lot of those same questions is was this faster because in the making of homemade wine we shoot for around seven to ten days before you have a final fully drapeable product where the fermentation for the most part is finished out uh this ended up taking us probably three weeks a little over three weeks to complete uh mostly due to the fact that we had ended up having what's called a stuck fermentation now that was not planned in this video but i'm kind of glad it came around because it allowed us to kind of work through that process and how that happens what we did what you would normally do in a stuck fermentation the easiest solution a lot of times is just to re-pitch more yeast in there in this case we need to add yeast nutrient because as we've learned in this process regular table sugar is actually more complex then like simple fructose which makes up a a large chunk of the sugars in grape juice that's why it was so much easier faster to again use something like drape or apple juice than just straight sugars because the sugars are simpler in those uh liquids than what we had here so we ended up getting that stuck fermentation because that sugar was just a little more than the yeast could handle without the nutrients we had a bad nutrients that gave the yeast enough umph to kind of fight through and we finally finished out our fermentation but it's not as easy and as fast as you may have thought and that's one of the points i wanted to get through on this uh now however here's um some of the positives with this we basically now have one gallon of kind of a neutral fermented liquid not too far off like a neutral grain spirit where you can just have it as that you could throw it back through the steel and add some juniper berries whatever now you got chin well if you throw it in a barrel now you have whiskey you know um you could add certain flavorings to it now you have a flavored vodka you know it kind of gives you a wide open palette to play with and so does this so i want to talk about that mix all right where do we go from here as far as flavoring wise to me the simplest route to go about this is i'm going to use some kool-aid flavoring if you think about it when you make kool-aid you start off with sugar and water and then add whatever flavor packet well we just took sugar water and fermented so now all we gotta do is add flavor to it um there are some other options to this too actually this is not too far off if you enjoy malted beverages or the new thing now is these hard sodas this is not too far off what they do now by law they can't use just regular table sugar and again it's a little more complex sugar anyway they use a malt real light mulch extract like you would find for beer what they have to their advantage being large distilleries wires they have all kinds of filtering equipment whatever that could take out whatever color if you've ever brewed a light beer at home you know there's still some color you know in your in your beer even though you use the lightest malt extract you can't they're fortunate enough they can filter out all that color and they get back again to kind of a neutral base which then they can add all the flavor extracts they created and these companies have you know labs and units uh that create these flavor extracts or there's even separate companies that produce all kinds of flavor extracts that they then sell to either distilleries for flavored vodkas or again something like like what we're talking about here [Music] and they can add the flavor and then they can add in the carbonation they don't have to worry about bottling it or bottle conditioning like we would home brewing if you want a carbonated beverage you don't have to have a carbonated beverage but anyway that's kind of how the process gets done in the big brewery so we're kind of replicating something close here so again if you want to go that path i want some kind of exotic erotic flavors again how many different flavors of kool-aid are there out there but then take it in a step further think about the little uh snow cone machines they sell for kids and they have uh you know raspberry limeade and they have you know bubble gum in this and the other well you can use those syrups and extracts in this if you find some root beer extract now you can make your own hard root beer if you have a soda stream machine now you could take those soda extracts add to this and with that sodastream machine you could force carbonate so now you can make a hard cola you know i know the the soda stream they sell their own variations on like dr pepper or mountain dew or lemon lime sodas whatever you use this now as the base and creates your own hard soda so there's really a lot a lot of places you can go with this and that's the the neat part about this i'm gonna go ahead let's uh give this a try i've used a little bit of this so i'm just gonna dump the rest of this in here [Music] all right we'll give her a quick a little stir all right let's give this a try crepelicious that's not bad that's that's what this was great just let you overall not bad a couple days ago when i tried just the neutral base you've still got a little bit of yeast taste but that's now pretty much gone from this you can drink this stuff straight pretty easy well i hope you like this video and if you did please subscribe down below also please like the video because it lets you to know we're putting out good content if you have any questions comments concerns please leave in the comment section or you can always contact me on twitter page till next time bottoms up

Channel: Platt R.

Views: 95,043

Keywords: How to make alcohol with sugar and water, How to make alcohol, homemade alcohol, homemade alcohol recipe, Alcohol made easy, alcohol, ethanol, homebrew, moonshine, ferment, beer, wine, Easy to make alcohol, alcohol tutorial, alcohol made simple, Simple method to make alcohol, stuck fermentation

Id: K8B51FGxmNE

Length: 30min 22sec (1822 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020