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Old 07-10-2019, 10:41 AM   #41
Black Leviathan
 
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Default Re: Post apocalypse alcohol

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Originally Posted by Terebrant View Post
It made me wonder about honey tainted with grayanotoxins. I looked online a bit but couldn't find any information on that general class, however, it seems some alkaloids have been studied in more details and that they remain in quantifiable concentrations in meads.

Mead being amongst other things a dilution might be a good idea to make honey consumable in a post-apoc setting where nature becomes a lot more hostile.
You can make honey toxic but it's much easier to make grains deadly. Honey itself is medicinal. If nothing else bees have reasonable resistance to radiation and they cover themselves in pollen. If you harvested honey made during fallout from a nuclear event it would be .. dangerous?

The bigger issue in my mind for Mead is sugar. After the end Sugar Cane and Sugar beats still grow, Corn would be plentiful but the tools to turn those crops into sugar or sweetener would be difficult to preserve. Sugar wouldn't be coming from anywhere any time soon. So anyone who wants a little glaze on their cake or something to sweeten their tea would reach for honey. I imagine the demand would be pretty high.
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Old 07-10-2019, 05:46 PM   #42
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Default Re: Post apocalypse alcohol

Maple syrup. With North America cooling off sugar maple will spread south.
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Old 07-10-2019, 10:41 PM   #43
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Default Re: Post apocalypse alcohol

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Maple syrup. With North America cooling off sugar maple will spread south.
It‘s a pity maple syrup mead would be prohibitively expensive to make.
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Old 07-10-2019, 10:52 PM   #44
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Default Re: Post apocalypse alcohol

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It‘s a pity maple syrup mead would be prohibitively expensive to make.
I've drunk some very expensive wine and whisky.
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Old 07-11-2019, 02:41 AM   #45
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Default Re: Post apocalypse alcohol

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Originally Posted by Agemegos View Post
Maple syrup. With North America cooling off sugar maple will spread south.
Maple, Birch, and a couple others are readily tapped for consumable saps. I personally don't care for Birch syrup... boiling it down smells like a locker room after players have just left for home... and it's flavor isn't as vanillin laden as Maple. But it goes OK on the pancakes.

Either can be fermented easily enough by not boiling down completely to syrup.

A quick search finds this...
https://www.americanforests.org/maga...-food-forests/

Maple, Birch, Walnut, Butternut, and Sycamore all supposedly can make decent syrups. If you can make syrup, you can thin syrup, and add yeast to ferment it.

I have tasted a maple & honey mead before. Tasty, as the maple brings vanillin and other flavors. Maple syrup makes a decent second sugar for meads.

Likewise, a bunch of different leaves can be crushed and boiled or crushed and soaked to extract the sugars and tannins... we generally call this tea...
Basically, adding hot water allows extracting the flavors and sugars... longer it's warm and wet, the more that's leached out. (Think Sun Tea... naturally sweeter than hot brewed... but it takes hours instead of minutes.)

Berries are easily crushed for juices, and grapes are a berry... not all are edible, but the inedible ones can be harvested for fuel-alcohols.

There are a number of fungi which are able to break down starches for yeast to consume; the best known is Koji (which works on rice), and sake is essentially fermented twice - once for the koji, then yeast is added to turn the released sugars to alcohols and CO2.
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Old 07-11-2019, 10:10 AM   #46
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Default Re: Post apocalypse alcohol

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Originally Posted by Black Leviathan View Post
You can make honey toxic but it's much easier to make grains deadly. Honey itself is medicinal. If nothing else bees have reasonable resistance to radiation and they cover themselves in pollen. If you harvested honey made during fallout from a nuclear event it would be .. dangerous?

The bigger issue in my mind for Mead is sugar. After the end Sugar Cane and Sugar beats still grow, Corn would be plentiful but the tools to turn those crops into sugar or sweetener would be difficult to preserve.
Well the corn maybe, but cane syrup is not difficult to extract. If you want white crystals and not molasses it's a bit harder, but there's plenty of sweetening (and fermentation) capability in molasses. Sweet potatoes are probably another somewhat reasonable source (and also the major source of beta amylase outside of barley - if you don't have any sprouted barley or aspergillus fungus, I bet you could get mashed sweet potatoes to work).
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Old 07-11-2019, 10:27 AM   #47
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Default Re: Post apocalypse alcohol

Getting sugar from cane or beets is a trivially simple process, although in the case of cane you'll want a mill of some sort with a better power source than your own muscle. An ox is traditional, but there's no reason a water or wind mill couldn't be built to do the job. Getting white sugar is anothet matter, but raw sugar is a fine sweetener on its own and cane syrup can be rapidly made into rum.
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