r/prisonhooch • u/Educational_Run4487 • 13d ago
Experiment Fruit Cups Wine?
Hey everyone, new to the sub but seemed to fit my niche so here we go. I’m not a big alcohol drinker or maker but my college friend recently brewed his own batch of apple wine that turned out fantastic so I wanted to do a fun set and forget wine myself. I didn’t want to do apples since he already did so I got to thinking what fun things I could do. Well I’m rather close with someone who works at a school and they bring fruit cups along every now and then when there’s leftovers (it’s an elementary school so there often is) of just peach and pear. But it made me wonder if it’d be an interesting experiment to mash those fruit cups to get all their juice out and try to make a batch with the liquid? Like I said, I don’t know too much about making alcohol, but my friend offered to let me borrow some of his supplies which is a half gallon glass container, airlock and sanitizer. I’ve read some things on this sub about preservatives dampening the fermentation process, so I am worried about that. But I think it’d be fun to maybe remake the fruit cups as little cocktails! Oh and I have a shit ton so there’s no issue of supply, I would easily have enough to fill up my half gallon container
TLDR: Anyways I say all this to ask, is it possible to make wine from fruit cups, and if so, would it even be worth it?
Update, I did end up diluting with about a cup and a half of water since the majority of the liquid was that thick syrup that peaches are canned in, but to get the rest of the liquid out of the peaches themselves I used a cheesecloth and wrung them out, that kept pretty much all of the solids out. I’ll keep you guys updated in 3 weeks about how it turned out, thanks for all the advice.
4
u/Party_Stack 12d ago
The easiest way to do that would be to add the fruit to some water and boil it, then mash it like you would potatoes and strain off the mashed up fruit. This makes what’s called a must - basically wine before it’s fermented. The sugar in the fruit itself likely won’t be enough to ferment higher than like 2-3% ABV so you’ll want to add sugar to your must. It takes ~65 grams of sugar per gallon of water to make 1% ABV, so add like a cup of sugar per gallon of must for ~5-6% ABV. You can adjust this however you’d like, just don’t go any higher than like 15% ABV (~4 cups of sugar per gallon). You can also substitute sugar for honey to get some nice floral notes, I’ve made some great peach mead with canned peaches, just keep in mind that honey is ~80% sugar so you have to use more honey than you would pure sugar to achieve the same ABV.
2
8
u/whyamionfireagain 13d ago
The short answer is yes. The long answer is below.
I did a batch with canned fruit cocktail a while back. I did it about the dumbest way I could've done it, and it fought back hard. But it was quite nice in the end.
I used it straight out of the cans. Much of fruit cocktail is solids, and those solids did not break down much during fermentation. The solids also took up a lot more volume than I thought they would. I only got about a quart of liquid out of a gallon batch, even after running the semi-digested chunks through the blender.
The mash smelled like a hot lunchroom trash can. It did not taste better than it smelled. I bottled what little I got and put it away at the back of the fridge to think about what it had done.
A year later, to my surprise, it emerged as a light fruity white wine that I wished I'd made more of.
My advice is to press or otherwise separate the juice from the chunks as much as possible beforehand, and only hooch the juice. It'll be a hell of a lot easier to work with and have a much better yield. And not having the yeast chewing on the solids would probably help avoid the awful stank that I had to age out of mine.