what are you drinking?

I am wishing for spring, so I can make Erica Strauss's rhubarb syrup in quantity. Make Rhubarb 75s.
Settling for Kahlua and tequila, a so called Brave Bull. Why not Toro Bravo?

Anyway, what are you drinking, adult beverage-wise? That's what we call 'em here in this dry state of Utah,

After many years I grew out of the booze. A worn out body and a demanding job don't leave much room for it anymore. Mostly I wail the coffee, although once in a while a glass of wine or some #7 tea.

Sun Tea
This one is frugal, tasty, and hits the spot on those sunny Florida summer days.
I get gallon pickle jars from the big jobs at work. The company pays for a few things like peanuts (salt), and pickles (acid) to keep the guys working without turning into a pickle in the heat.
I put 5 tea bags in a gallon pickle jar, leave it in a sunny spot, head to work. Let it brew all day in the sun.
When I get home it's ready, but still pretty warm. I've measured 110 degrees.
Take out the tea bags (add to compost).
I add about a half a cup of sugar to sweeten it up. Honey is excellent in there, perhaps a splash of lemon juice. You have to add the sweeteners when the tea has cooled or it tends to ferment.

It's not really an Adult beverage, but I know a guy who brews some of that Backwoods Old Time Recipe #7. Comes in a ball jar.
Pour a tall glass of tea, add a splash of #7, take off your shoes because you're gonna lose them if you don't.

I have pared my alcohol budget back to the bone due to the current fiscal austerity situation in my household. That doesn't mean drinking less than I want, it means drinking cheaper tipple than I want. Lately I've been making a mixed drink from cheap rum and sweetened vanilla almond milk. My default is cheap gin and grape juice.

I did make a pint of ultra-strong, ultra-sweet blackberry liqueur this summer from two cups of wild blackberries and one cup of cane sugar soaked in just enough 100-proof vodka to cover. Strained out the fruit after two weeks and ate it, have been nursing the liqueur ever since, but it's almost gone now. Will try to make a couple of quarts next year.

Very much like Dan's but not very sweet:
one of our family's multifarious festive alcoholic beverages requires
as many strawberries as you can get, a bit of sugar, lemon zest and as much cheap vodka as you have.
Let it all stew for a couple of weeks,
strain off the now pallid and ugly (but delicious) fruit-without squeezing it or the liquor goes cloudy-
Voila...beautiful rosy strawberry liquor that goes rather nicely with the Christmas bubbly and makes you really good at petanque:D

Add the boozy fruit to something colourful like the trifle

For the past year and change I've been going through about 40 gallons of hard apple cider pressed from apples that grew on a couple neighbors' trees.

Here's a bit I put in the last farm newsletter on the Chimayo cocktail.

In the glass: Chimayo Cocktail
Long before we had dreams of ranching apples, we went to Chimayo, a town north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The town is renowned for their apple orchards, chiles and a miraculous Catholic chapel sometimes called the "Lourdes of America." Local landmark Rancho de Chimayo restaurant and hacienda will celebrate their fiftieth anniversary next year, serving up the red chile sauce they popularized along with their signature drink, the Chimayo cocktail. With fresh pressed sweet cider still in the stores this month, now is the time to try this seasonal beverage. Every version I have seen is iced, but we also like it made with hot sweet cider. Vary the proportions of juice and liquors but don't forget the lime juice. Try it with pumpkin pie this Thanksgiving!


Stray Arrow Ranch version of the Chimayo Cocktail
for each serving, stir together:
4 oz sweet apple cider (over ice or heated in the microwave)
1.5 oz tequila
.5 oz creme de cassis
1 tsp lime juice

My go to drinks are as follows:
Non Alcoholic: Ginger people Ginger beer. This has the best spiciness for a ginger beer that I have found and it doesn't have a woody taste like some other ones.

Alcoholic: I have been enjoying some really good hard cider lately my two favorites are Stella Artois Cidre and JKs Scrumpy Hard Cider.

Non alcoholic: Kombucha
Alcoholic: Mead (unfortunately non-homemade yet, http://www.lancashiremeadcompany.co.uk/mead/)

I also enjoy a sip of the "buch" every once in a while when I make it. We had a guy here making mead earlier this year it was quite good. We found two jars of it in the garage that had been forgotten about so we opened them on thanksgiving unfourtunatly they had turned to vinegar.

I'm drinking mead, too. Homemade (it's the absolute easiest way to start homebrewing, and I've tried making everything that I can think of- mead/melomel/metheglin, wine, beer, cider/cyser, infused liqueurs, and I may or may or not have distilled some spirits).

This is plain, still, and sweet, from January 2012. I didn't measure ABV, but it'll be around 12%, give or take two percentage points.

I am brewing(?) this: http://learningherbs.com/remedies-recipes/digestive-grapefruit-bitters/

I do have a question though. I am not really a drinker of alcohol. What is a decent brand of vodka for making such tinctures, etc.? TIA.

Elissa Teal wrote:What is a decent brand of vodka for making such tinctures, etc.?

Vodka isn't really my thing, not much molecular character. For you, that's an advantage because you want the neutral spirits. Either of the major brands starting with S are plenty fine, whatever's on sale at your liquor retailer. If you have extra, you can make some vanilla extract even easier than the bitters recipe. Do you have a Penzeys outlet nearby? They have good quality vanilla beans. If you are the holiday gift-making type, you could have next December sorted out now! It only gets better the longer you let it sit. I'd bet the bitters would be a great gift too. Please let us know how it turns out. Where are you getting the other ingredients? Artichoke leaves aren't something I would have thought to put up even if I grew them.

I went to whole foods. They didn't have artichoke leaves but they did have artichoke leaf extract, which I did buy to use.

I have my German Grandfather's brewing and vinting recipes from at least the Prohibition era (it was legal to make 400 gallons a year for your own consumption).

I love hard root beer, hard cider... have made a fruity balloon wine with several different fruits (quick to work up and tastes/smells like tropical punch koolaid) and fermented juneberries into some pretty potent stuff (that takes about 4 years) Have some mead still aging, it's about 30 years old and is best at 40 plus.

Need to start making beers and ales again. I need some equipment I don't have right now.

For non alcoholic: Fresh hot cashew milk made in my soypot (3/4 c, rinsed and soaked 24 hours, rinse 1/4 c rice and add it, then fill to the line and run as 'soaked bean'. Pour through strainer (almost no pulp)) and drink as soon as it's cool enough to. This is so good! A sort of semi-cheesy with a note of nut drink. Drawback is having to soak for a full 24 hours to get the creamy result (I soak in a covered bowl in fridge).

Being of Scottish heritage, our clan likes our Struth.

2 parts Buttershots liqueur
1 part Hazelnut liqueur
1 part light rum

Tastes like butterscotch candy. Great after dinner snifter.

Pear schnapps infused with elderflowers. and vanilla.

Because I am a muskmelon farmer, I have a lot of non-marketable muskmelons. They make a fabulous wine.

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:
Because I am a muskmelon farmer, I have a lot of non-marketable muskmelons. They make a fabulous wine.

Tell me more, please.

Last year I had a TON of watermelons (first time I've ever gotten a major watermelon crop) and ended up juicing and freezing a bunch, and feeding rinds to my fish, and composting the pulp. I thought about making watermelon wine, but am short equipment to really make many gallons right now... would it be similar to doing watermelon wine?

Deb: Sorry I missed your post. My method of making muskmelon wine is approximately the same as any other wine:

Chop or puree the fruits.
Put them in a 5 gallon bucket with yeast and a bubbler.
Let them ferment for about a week.
Separate the pulp from the juice. Usually with muskmelon I filter through a cloth.
Let ferment a while longer, racking as needed.

Muskmelon wine tastes best to me if a tablespoon of honey is added per bottle just before drinking.

I the summer I make a radler, Half beer and half lemonade. Do not use really good beer the cheap stuff is good for this. In the winter brandy is my drink. My father and I have a tradition of drinking stingers on the first snow fall of the year. A stinger is brandy and peppermint schnapps mixed together. It can be half and half or if you are like me stronger on the brandy and less schnapps. Experimenting with the ratio is the fun part!

T Blankinship wrote:I the summer I make a radler, Half beer and half lemonade. Do not use really good beer the cheap stuff is good for this. In the winter brandy is my drink. My father and I have a tradition of drinking stingers on the first snow fall of the year. A stinger is brandy and peppermint schnapps mixed together. It can be half and half or if you are like me stronger on the brandy and less schnapps. Experimenting with the ratio is the fun part!

Now, that's interesting! I'll have to share this with my partner, who loves beer and also gets a hankering for brandy.

Me, I've found that home-brewed kombucha, allowed to get tart and fizzy on a secondary ferment, really reduces my desire for alcohol. I usually start drinking something in the late afternoon and keep going until bedtime, so alcoholic drinks are not very good for that. I'm guessing my booch has a bit higher alcohol content than normal kombucha, at least 1%, although I have not tested it. Once you have what you need to make it (I use half-gallon jars for the first scoby ferment, then bottle into 16 oz. flip-top bottles for the second), I've calculated the cost to be around 11 cents a bottle. I can drink two or three of those a day and still stay in the range of "one drink for a woman per day." The only problem with this is staying on top of making it, so I'm strongly considering going with a continuous-brew setup soon.

I picked up The Big Book of Kombucha, which has lots of ideas for flavoring the secondary, including with savory herbs. I've experimented so far with ginger (great), blueberry (okay), apple juice (great), and coffee (BLECCH). (The coffee batch was so undrinkable, I had to pour it on the garden. I'm sure the garden loved it.) If I don't flavor my booch at all during the secondary, it's okay but not my favorite; then I like it with a little bit of vanilla extract.

What I want to do once I start getting fruit from my garden is start making vodka infusions as described above to tipple in very sparingly into the kombucha.

Homemade beer is considerably cheaper -- about half the price -- than store-bought. I have hops (mostly cascade, willamette and mount hood) growing on trellises around my porch and over all my sun-facing windows, so that saves money on one of the more expensive ingredients. Brewer's yeast doesn't add much to the cost because you can recycle it from the yeast rings through a few brewings before you buy more. So the main cost is malt, which generally costs me anywhere from $25-35 for a five gallon batch.

Diane, I have a setup very similar to yours. I often run continuous brew but at the moment my consumption is not enough for continuous, so I'm down to a gallon jar. The last batch was ginger-mango, amazing. Got dry almost like champagne in secondary. I also use it as a booze stand-in, and this last one seemed like it got close to beer content. (I'm also a brewer, and the last batch of homebrew seemed comparable).
If you have not tried lavender lemon, i suggest you hop to it. A few lavender flower heads and a bit of lemon juice, maybe a sweetener if you want it to acquire some booze during secondary. It is one of my favorite (also good: sweet fruit like mango, cherries, berries plus basil)

I haven't had a drink in 8 months, 1 more month to go!

I like whiskey sours, any kind of wine and Blue Moon. We also have margaritas every single Friday night with pizza. My husbands margarita mix is so delicious and potent I made him write it down in his "in case I die" spreadsheet.


We are making our very first Mead right now. It's not ready to consume yet but it's been fascinating.

Also hoping to get into making our own beer. Lots of talk and prep on that but haven't done it yet.

Tereza Okava wrote:Diane, I have a setup very similar to yours. I often run continuous brew but at the moment my consumption is not enough for continuous, so I'm down to a gallon jar. The last batch was ginger-mango, amazing. Got dry almost like champagne in secondary. I also use it as a booze stand-in, and this last one seemed like it got close to beer content. (I'm also a brewer, and the last batch of homebrew seemed comparable).
If you have not tried lavender lemon, i suggest you hop to it. A few lavender flower heads and a bit of lemon juice, maybe a sweetener if you want it to acquire some booze during secondary. It is one of my favorite (also good: sweet fruit like mango, cherries, berries plus basil)

That lavender lemon kombucha...do you think I could make that by flavoring the secondary with lavender, then tippling in a bit of lemon-infused vodka? Would that work?

sounds like a heck of a cocktail!
I think I`ve also done it with oranges, tangerines, limes and our local "orange lemons". any citrus would probably do just fine. Lavender makes an amazing kombucha.
I tend to add some kind of fruit, just because I like to have that be the sugar source in secondary fermentation, but I suppose how you do secondary depends on how you prefer your final product.

out in the woods not long ago i came across a couple moonshiners running their still, they offered me a big mason jar full, i turnrd it down and explained to them i don't drink and I didn't care what they did and i got nobody to tell nothing to and if they see ginseng thieves please run em off. Went home and made a hot cup of tea and honey cuz it was afternoon. had it been morning it would have been columbian supremo. Yeah I'm a pickle, will never be a cucumber ever again.