Will it ferment? Sports Drinks

today i asked the question sports drinks will it ferment that's next so uh today is the second video of our series will it ferment where we basically look at different beverages you can buy your local grocery stores what have you and we see if we can ferment it and turn it into alcohol uh today we're going to go with sports drinks uh you guys can see i've got my fermenter and my airlock everything sanitizing while we speak to get ready uh when i use term sports drinks i'm talking about gatorade power aid anything formulated to help either rehydrate or maintain hydration you know when you're in the gym working out a particular sports drink i picked today was the old school lemon lime gatorade that i grew up with real quick let's go over our list of ingredients that will tell us part of the story uh we have water sugar dextrose citric acid salt sodium citrate mono-potassium phosphate gum arabic glycerol ester of rosin natural flavor doesn't say what flavor is this is a natural flavor and yellow five i presume food coloring yellow number five uh real funny on the natural flavor thing on the bottom of the bottle right below the lemon lime tag it says naturally flavored with other natural flavors sure whatever whatever that that means um so real quick let's go through some of these ingredients and what what they may or may not mean to us uh first dextrose that's corn sugar real real plain simple uh dextrose actually does get used in brewing a decent bit a good example is something referred to sometimes with high gravity logger or if you want to make a malt liquor generally it's a standard ale recipe that they just add adjuncts which adjuncts any other pretty much any other sugar that's besides barley or you know barley wheat you know the vaulted grains any other sugar you add into it into brewing so referred to as an adjunct that's what dextrose is uh sodium citrate sodium citrate's a sodium salt of citric acid we already have citric acid salt in there again these are formulated for hydration and salt as the bird knows helps you retain fluid so that makes sense next mono potassium phosphate that's another salt that's used in sports drinks i think it is both in parade and gatorade so again another salt we're trying to retain fluids makes sense gum arabic aka acacia gum this is a natural food substance that's safe for human consumption that gets used as an emulsifier a binder a thickening agent they also use the term food stabilizer and that one that one kind of gives me a little pause because if we think about stabilizing food well one of the things is not letting it go bad uh even though what i've read does not refer to it as having any anti-microbial properties [Music] term food stabilizer still kind of makes me hem and haul and last but not least glycerol esters of rosin used in foods to keep oils in suspension nowhere here does it actually mention the term oil i wonder if the natural flavor or the food coloring is some kind of oil base and that's why they have to put this in to stabilize it don't know uh but so far one good thing i do see is i don't see the term preservative uh none of these ingredients were referred to as a preservative or having any antimicrobial properties which remember we're you know yeast is a microorganism we need to grow so we're wanting to avoid any preservative or anything with antimicrobial properties so so far we look like we might be clear who knows uh so let's go to the first thing we need to do and that is hydrometer reading all right so let's do a gravity reading see what we're working with see if we need to add any uh sugar or not to this uh like i said there's already some sugar and dextrose in there but we may need to give more for the yeast let's give this a try all righty we are looking at about 1.025 um we might get one or two percent out of this but we're going to give it a little help uh we said we we said last we're going to start this thing that that'd be one of the things we could add to it uh is a little bit of sugar so i'm probably gonna throw in one cup of sugar so let me do that and clean out my fermenter get everything in there we'll add a cup of sugar and then we'll see where we're at all right so i've added a cup of sugar to this so we're going to do another hydrometer reading see where we're at and if you want to any of these you can add a little additional sugar um that's always a way to bump up the abv just don't go too crazy because you don't want to make too much work for the yeast so that's why i'll always do these a little lower uh just one cup of sugar instead of one and a half or two just because it makes a little easier on the yeast so let's see what our hydrometer reading we get all right we're going to come out about 1.0400 that should get us high threes to low four on abv similar to a session style beer you know your bud light nickelo bolters kind of thing so good enough for the work we're gonna do uh what we're gonna do now is we've got everything set i'm going to add one teaspoon of yeast nutrient and then we're gonna again with all these we're just going to use a generic ale yeast we'll go ahead and pitch this we'll come back in a couple days see if we have some kind of active fermentation and then we'll come back in one week to do a final gravity check see how much alcohol we got and kind of won't necessarily try the final product just kind of see what we got as far as abv wise and see if it's fermented so it's been about 24 hours and you can see we had a real active fermentation this thing really got to bubbling actually in only a few hours after i pitched the yeast we still get a little bubbling action now on our airlock um the foam has settled down but like i said we still seem to have a pretty active fermentation so things are looking good let's come back to the end of the week to see where we're at all right so it's been a little over a week and now we're going to come back and do our final gravity reading according my notes our original gravity was 1.04 so let's see where we ended up at we are going to end up at around one point one six i'm going to say 1.006 um that's going to get us around four percent alcohol by volume and remember we did add a cup of sugar to that so if we wouldn't have done that i got a feeling we'd be probably two percent at best but we did add a little sugar we did get to around four percent alcohol by volume which is kind of your standard uh bud light miller like i'm gonna grab glass real quick uh standard bud light american life you know light water american light lager so uh we did answer the question will it ferment yes it will uh this is not quite as well as our cranberry cocktail but you can remember that had sugar added to it we had to come in and add the sugar um definitely could probably use some more sugar if we wanted to bump up the av 80d some more but uh we said well ferment so we have one more thing to do let's taste this concoction oh boy there's not much there taste wise kind of bland yeah you smell the yeast a little bit but it's not it's not a tongue on the palate um this is somewhat sour a little bit but remember it's lemon lime so we've taken out whatever sugar was and they remember they won the lot so we had to add to it um yeah this is not something i would normally want to go for but uh again in a pinch i guess it would would do but again we did answer the question will it ferment sports drinks and they do well i hope you like this video if you did please subscribe down below also please like the video because it lets youtube know we're putting out good content if you need questions comments concerns please leave them in the comments section or you can always contact me on the twitter page well until next time bottoms up

Channel: Platt R.

Views: 2,175

Keywords: Will it ferment? Sports Drinks, Sports Drinks, can you make alcohol from Sports Drinks, Gatorade, Can you make alcohol from Gatorade, How to make alcohol, fermentation, Powerade, How to make alcohol from sports drinks, homemade alcohol, how to make alcohol at home, Can you ferment Gatorade, homebrewing

Id: FlxsKcFYycM

Length: 10min 14sec (614 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 31 2020