A TOAST TO THE HOME BREWS OF YORE
BECAUSE wine is my drink of choice I always read news stories about the wine industry and its delightful products with interest.
I was intrigued recently by a little headline, “Rwandan entrepreneur turns beetroot into wine”. My pedantic hackles rose for a moment, because the internationally recognised definition of “wine” is “an alcoholic beverage made from the fermented juice of the grape, Vitis vinifera. The fermented juice of the beetroot may well be tasty and decidedly alcoholic but it is not wine, just as the fermented juice of apples is not wine. It is cider.
So whatever our Rwandan entrepreneur is making from his beetroots, it is not wine. Agatha Christie peppered her delightful novels with dear little old ladies who were famous in their local villages for their legendary dandelion wine, or elderberry wine, but strictly speaking that’s not wine.
Not many people seem to realise that booze is very easy – and cheap – to make. If you add yeast to sugar you will get alcohol and carbon dioxide. Grapes contain plenty of sugar and have yeast cells on their skins, so all you have to do is crush them to combine the two and the reaction begins. It may not be particularly good wine, but if all you require is to lose your inhibitions for a while and feel horrible the next morning, that’s the cheapest way to go.
Bakers use the same chemical reaction when they add yeast to flour. They remove the resultant alcohol when they bake the bread, but they use the carbon dioxide to put the bubbles into the loaves.
When I was growing up most farm families made their own ginger beer, which was basically sugar water and yeast, flavoured with a dollop of ginger. Traditionally a raisin was popped into the bottle. I’m not sure why. The bottles were corked and the corks tied down with string.
If you let the fermentation go on for too long the pressure built up until the bottles exploded.
This could be very messy, but it prevented the brew from becoming dangerously alcoholic.
At boarding school we surreptitiously brewed booze from pineapple skins, which were plentiful as we were in the Eastern Cape where pineapples are a major farm product.
I seem to remember the whole adventure was very exciting, as it was against the rules. I also remember the resulting liquor wasn’t particularly pleasant, but that’s not the point. The point was we were beating the system.
With today’s high prices of everything I’m surprised there aren’t more people brewing their own booze like Agatha Christie’s sweet little old village ladies. Anyone for another glass of Aunt Edith’s carrot liqueur? Last Laugh
It was a baking hot day and 10 people managed to squeeze into the lift going up a 10-storey building.
After a while one woman fanned her face and said: “Phew! Obviously somebody’s deodorant isn’t working.”
All the occupants looked around accusingly, then a young man said, “Well, it can’t be me. I don’t use a deodorant.”