Making alcohol as a survival technique?

[rich59]

Having spent a considerable amount of my time over the autumn making wines I have been thinking about brewing quite a lot. I came upon the often stated issue of "Small Beer" - how people in the past made a safe-to-drink low alcohol beverage they could drink all day. So I did a bit of searching and only got sketchy details. There seem to be a few beer enthusiasts who will sometimes make a weak beer - made in the same way as normal beer but with less starch/ sugar added. Boiling is an important step in beer making.

But, I want to get back to basics. Take water, some flavouring, a small amount of sugar (preferably natural), some acidity and some yeast. I could probably come up with a pleasantly flavoured cloudy drink in just a day or two with alcohol say 1-2%. But would it be safe to drink if it started out with E.Coli or even worse in it? I can think of only 2 sig things that might work on my side a) the fermentation process and b) the alcohol level.

If it was effective then it would in principle be a survival technique.

Anyone know about this?

 

[Toddy]

It is indeed

It doesn't need much alcohol in liquid to kill off most buggits.
I think we worked this out before that a standard 70cl bottle of whisky could effectively sterilise a waterbutt full of water.

Interesting isn't it ? Those old first farmers had grain for bread and beer

cheers,
Toddy

 

[rich59]

Oh excellent Toddy.

Any references to old discussions or sources?

 

[Miyagi]

a standard 70cl bottle of whisky... "snip" ...a waterbutt full of water.

Isn't it sacreligious to water whisky down that much??

Slainge,

Liam

 

[Lordyosch]

Tis an odd thing.

As a (kit only, alas) homebrewer I understand the importance of the sanitisation via boiling. But if the alcohol kills the bugs, are you only preventing the acidity of oxidised alcohols?

If boiling is essential, then the alcohol as a steriliser is almost pointless, unless it increases the duration of sterility.

Worth an exshperiment (hic) don't you think?

Jay

 

[Miyagi]

Tis an odd thing.

As a (kit only, alas) homebrewer I understand the importance of the sanitisation via boiling. But if the alcohol kills the bugs, are you only preventing the acidity of oxidised alcohols?

If boiling is essential, then the alcohol as a steriliser is almost pointless, unless it increases the duration of sterility.

Worth an exshperiment (hic) don't you think?

Jay

The boiling, as a sanitizer, IIRC kills the bugs etc., that would prevent the yeast from working.

It's years since I did homebrew, need to get that started again methinks.

Liam

 

[Toddy]

Oh excellent Toddy.

Any references to old discussions or sources?

Finally found it

http://www.bushcraftuk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=8624&highlight=whisky


cheers,
Toddy

 

[Locky]

Hi, im a homebrewer and use a homebrewing forum.
http://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk/
very knowledgeable people on that site.
unfortunately i dont think you will achieve alcohol in a couple of days as fermenting can be up to 2 weeks.
Good luck.

 

[Toddy]

I've made the small beer before and in two days it was definitely of some alcohol.
Maybe it's because they were using grain mash ? The yeast was usually the same one that got used for the breadmaking. The whole pot goes frothy within a day and fizzy within two in Spring and Summer.

cheers,
Toddy

 

[brancho]

Tribes in africa manage to make beer in a couple of days with honey mostly.

Something knocked up in a field over two days will go off quickly so needs to drank quickly but as we are talking for daily consumption that not a problem. It wont have stopped brewing will crudely filtered etc

The modern process of beer production with all its sanitisation is about quality, repeatability, transportation and storage. Strong beer can be stored longer and so transported around the world hence India pale ale which was made for export from England to India. Modern beer is pasturised (except for real ale) to give it an even longer shelf life.

This is again an area where expectations have to be changed to be realistic. I made nettle beer which was OK but a patch on the kit brews I normally produce.

 

[Carbuncle]

I'ts been a while since I home brewed, though the bruheat is still in the garage, so forgive any errors here . . .

I thought "small beer" was what you got if you took the grain you already mashed (then boiled the wurt with hops etc), and mashed it again? I remember seeing a time team where they mentioned that, though it was mashing the old fasioned way, so you couldn't see your reflection, and packing it with straw.

If you mash with a thermostat, how much starch is there left for the enzymes to work their magic on?

As for the OP's question, I have no idea, except that it would undoubtedly taste like the smegma of beelzebub. And the sugar could be put to better use in those circumstances.

 

[pango]

Rich59,
Apologies if I'm missing something others may have taken as a given, but I don't really understand your point regarding E.Coli. Why not boil?

The Mongolian "airag", (which sounds irresistibly like the Arabic "araq" [the inventors of "al kuhl", or alcohol], a name which spread to the Far East in ancient times,) is made from mare's milk. A similar bevvie, Kumis seems to have fallen from popularity in many European countries. I believe the USSR retained a milk stock of 1/4 million mares for it's production. If there's a risk of food poisoning from an alcoholic drink, that has to be top of the list!

I haven't tried it with beer, but the grayish bloom which occurs on grape skins, for example, is in fact yeast. The same can be found on rose-hips and elder berries and I have used this natural yeast to produce rose-hip wine. I imagine it could also be used to brew beer.

This natural yeast has a lower alcohol tolerance than brewer's or baker's yeast, hence will produce a lower alcohol drink. Just what %/volume I couldn't say though, but I have thought of attempting to brew a wine using something like birch sap. The down-side is that you can't collect birch sap and rose-hips at the same time of year!

I've only ever made beer once and have to say that it wasn't bad. The problems arose due to my impatience when not having the proper yeast to hand. Instead, I used Champagne yeast which has an alcohol tolerance of some 18%. On top of that, I had it in my mum's airing cupboard and never seemed to get round to bottling the stuff, so just chucked in a handful of sugar every time I walked past it. My brother said he'd been doing the same thing, so between us we managed to produce a beer exceeding the strength of the variety in Purple Tins. Not the best for an evening of intelligent conversation!

Cheers.

 

[gregorach]

Tis an odd thing.

As a (kit only, alas) homebrewer I understand the importance of the sanitisation via boiling. But if the alcohol kills the bugs, are you only preventing the acidity of oxidised alcohols?

If boiling is essential, then the alcohol as a steriliser is almost pointless, unless it increases the duration of sterility.

Worth an exshperiment (hic) don't you think?

Jay

There are various bugs that will spoil beer, but they won't kill you. I don't know whether I fancy drinking vinegar... There's a big difference between producing a decent beer and just producing something that has alcohol in it.

I thought "small beer" was what you got if you took the grain you already mashed (then boiled the wurt with hops etc), and mashed it again? I remember seeing a time team where they mentioned that, though it was mashing the old fasioned way, so you couldn't see your reflection, and packing it with straw.

If you mash with a thermostat, how much starch is there left for the enzymes to work their magic on?

What you're referring to is partigyle brewing, which arose from the fact that they could make much larger mash tuns than kettles. They were also using what we would regard as absurdly large grain bills, but usually with much lower conversion efficiency because the malts weren't as well-modified as modern malts. Plus there's the fact that for a long time tax was raised on the malt, rather than on the alcohol content of the finished beer - very strong beers aren't tax-efficient under the modern duty system.

 

[rich59]

Rich59,
Apologies if I'm missing something others may have taken as a given, but I don't really understand your point regarding E.Coli. Why not boil?

I was looking at making more options available. If fire wasn't available or you don't have a heat proof water container then could you make your water safe with the things you find?

Also I am thinking of finding new beverages!!!

 

[rich59]

Struggling with http://www.dalbeattie.com/domesticcivildefence/foodlist.html at the moment to authenticate the 2% claim.

 

[Toddy]

So a Bushcraft Brewing Brethern ? How fast and how well can you make something worth drinking when out and about ?
We do have recipes for heather ale, meadowsweet and gale. There's the birch wine and in late Summer the plum stuff that goes off like a rocket (from personal experience the wasps are a pain though when it starts going warm and sweet and alcoholy).

I played around a bit with concentrating fruit juice from pears and apples to make a thick syrup. It's astonishingly sweet. I think that would make a wine without any need for added sugars.

cheers,
Toddy

 

[gregorach]

"Worth drinking" is highly subjective... I have, in the past, drunk many things I would no longer regard as worth drinking. You're certainly not going to produce a worthwhile ale or beer in the field, unless you're carting around some rather large vessels and a sack of malt. And even if you are, it's going to take at least a couple of weeks. Plus your chances of getting a tolerable beer from wild yeasts are minimal at best.

 

[Carbuncle]

What you're referring to is partigyle brewing, which arose from the fact that they could make much larger mash tuns than kettles. They were also using what we would regard as absurdly large grain bills, but usually with much lower conversion efficiency because the malts weren't as well-modified as modern malts. Plus there's the fact that for a long time tax was raised on the malt, rather than on the alcohol content of the finished beer - very strong beers aren't tax-efficient under the modern duty system.

Cheers, very interesting. That link also explained what the "triple" beers you get in Belgium are, one of those things I'd always wondered, but never at the precise moment I had google to hand;-)

 

[Toddy]

"Worth drinking" is highly subjective... I have, in the past, drunk many things I would no longer regard as worth drinking. You're certainly not going to produce a worthwhile ale or beer in the field, unless you're carting around some rather large vessels and a sack of malt. And even if you are, it's going to take at least a couple of weeks. Plus your chances of getting a tolerable beer from wild yeasts are minimal at best.

Look on it as a challenge

Seriously, we used to knock up fizzy stuff in a couple of days. Elderflower, meadowsweet, primroses, quick crushed rasps and pears........they all make a very potable drink in a couple of days and warm nights.

cheers,
M

 

[gregorach]

Seriously, we used to knock up fizzy stuff in a couple of days. Elderflower, meadowsweet, primroses, quick crushed rasps and pears........they all make a very potable drink in a couple of days and warm nights.

cheers,
M

Sure, if you've got something that's got plenty of fermentable sugars available, it's no big problem - but beer (or ale) is a different matter. If it's not made primarily from malted barely, it's not really beer. (Technically, if it's not got hops in, it's not really beer either.) Because maltose / maltotriose are less fermentable than glucose / fructose, it inevitably takes longer to ferment. Then there's the fact that you probably don't want to be drinking it while it's still got lots of active yeast in suspension (and wild yeasts are very reluctant to drop out, if they will at all) so it needs some conditioning time (at least a week, with a highly flocculent brewing yeast and secondary finings.) Plus you really need to boil it as there are other beasties that will get going in your wort long before your yeast will (unless you're using a proper-sized yeast culture, which requires proper yeast propagation techniques and plenty more time) which will render the beer eye-wateringly, vomit-inducingly foul, so you must logically be able to render water safe in a much quicker, more direct and reliable fashion anyway

Even a mild wild yeast infection will inevitably result in me ditching the entire batch. I don't much want a beer that tastes of mouldy cardboard and is likely to give me explosive diarrhoea, thanks. Even in a "survival situation"...

No matter what you're doing though, if you can't sanitise your equipment and keep the fermentation clean, you're going to end up with vinegar, not alcohol. If you've got a vessel you can ferment in, you've got a vessel you can boil in. Boiling (or even just heating over 65 deg) gives you potable water in under 15 minutes. Fermentation may give you something vaguely potable in a few days, if you're careful (and lucky).

I really don't see fermentation as a viable technique for rendering water safe in the field.