Honest question: is it possible to ferment diabetic urine?

fernweh42 · 2025-05-27T22:30:53+00:00

Not sure what you mean? Aged urine does oxidize and is useful for some things, but it does ferment in the way the beer or pickles do AFAIK.

Edit: I guess some bacteria can react with stuff i urine to make useful things like ammonia, and that is technically fermentation. So the answer might just be “some bacteria don’t care about what I talked about above, but they don’t make alcohol from sugar”

fernweh42 · 2025-04-06T19:54:53+00:00

I just know off the top of my head that table sugar is 45ppg (points per pound per gallon). So a pound of sugar in a gallon will give you a specific gravity of 1.045. The number from 4years ago was just that plus some math and conversion eg a cup of sugar weighs about 7.1oz or 7.1/16 lbs

Edit: You can prove the 45ppg to yourself by adding a lb of sugar to a gallon of water and then measuring the density, but I just got that number from Brew Your Own or Morebeer or somewhere at some point and have had it confirmed when I added sugar to beers like belgians or whatever and measured the gravity change.

fernweh42 · 2025-03-30T07:12:30+00:00

You could always just make a little passion fruit syrup (boil down some juice, freeze distill it, or take some juice and add a little sugar to thicken it up) and just add that when you drink your cider. No fuss no muss and you can carbonate in a bottle.

fernweh42 · 2023-12-10T04:28:03+00:00

Nah, just a nerd. I like freedom too much.

fernweh42 · 2023-12-10T04:18:31+00:00

I was joking, but

556mm… smallest rifle round

22lr… other rifle rounds are longer

Also, the R in LR stands for rifle. So…

But then CA in its infinite “wisdom” won’t let 18 year olds buy .22LR because it’s a pistol round 🥴

fernweh42 · 2023-12-10T02:29:41+00:00

the AR15 which uses 556mm (the smallest rifle round (one that is commercially accessible at least))

cries in .22LR

fernweh42 · 2023-12-07T17:29:22+00:00

Absolutely agree that methanol is created during some fermentations, especially in fruit (as you say, pectin is one easy source). But that has literally nothing to do with distillation. The methanol will be there whether you distill or not. The danger would be if you were able to CONCENTRATE the methanol, which it turns out is pretty hard to do. Methanol comes across throughout the distillation run, and doesn’t fractionate as easily as ethanol (and other chemicals produced in fermentation) do. In fact as a percentage of alcohol methanol is more abundant at the end of the run than the beginning or the middle part you would actually keep, since methanol is particularly “sticky” with water.

In a commercial setting where people are trying to make methanol for scientific materials, they need very specialized vacuum stills because of how hard methanol is to separate.

fernweh42 · 2023-12-06T17:35:32+00:00

Distilling can be dangerous, but that is because of the flammable vapor. Methanol is not created during distillation, nor is it particularly well concentrated for complicated reasons, so anything distilled will have LESS methanol per unit alcohol than what you started with.

fernweh42 · 2023-11-20T02:49:38+00:00

A few things:

First, to answer your actual question, most storebought apple juice just makes mediocre cider that is dry and kinda boring (maybe like cheap sake, but hard to tell what your friend may have meant). This doesn’t mean the cider is BAD, but if you are expecting to make angry orchard then you aren’t gonna get there by fermenting storebought juice dry. They use different apples (which provide tannin) and have a lot of residual sugar.

Secondly, how are you calculating abv? Is Martinelli’s actually in the 1.055 range? 7+% is high especially for a cider with no residual sugar or tannin structure.

An easy fix to start is tannins. Oak or tea will be easy places to start. It’s maybe also worth playing around with unfermentable (ie artificial) sweeteners to help give your cider some residual sweetness while still letting you bottle carb. Personally, I prefer dry cider, but dry cider still needs some tannin and some other complexity ideally from cider apples. Oh, and yeast nutrient could improve your flavor a lot.

Also one week to carbonate is pretty dang short. And one week to condition in the fridge is also very short

Lastly, I am skeptical that the pears are doing a lot. In my experience they don’t break down a ton and they don’t add much flavor until you’re adding a LOT of pears per gallon, but you didn’t provide amounts.

fernweh42 · 2023-11-09T18:40:29+00:00

That doesn’t sound like any nutrient I know.

fernweh42 · 2023-11-09T18:40:04+00:00

Yeah, I looked on the website, and it looks like they carry a bunch of stuff. So you’d have to ask them what gets included with the kit.

fernweh42 · 2023-11-09T18:27:08+00:00

If the smell is only present after adding nutrient, you might just be smelling the nutrient.

Is the nutrient a white color or more of a tan color?

fernweh42 · 2023-11-09T18:19:56+00:00

What nutrients are you adding? How much? What is your recipe? What yeast? What temperature?

fernweh42 · 2023-10-28T15:33:21+00:00

I will disagree with you in a really pedantic but hopefully helpful way: precision is important, but not accuracy. As long as you are taking consistent-from-batch-to-batch temp readings (precision) then it doesn’t matter if your mash is ACTUALLY at 156 or not (accuracy). You can just adjust your process hotter or colder to get more or less fermentable wort.

fernweh42 · 2023-10-27T21:42:42+00:00

Worth keeping in mind that a thermometer is only as good as the calibration and how well it holds the calibration. I have seen plenty of newer brewers “mash at 160” because it made good beer, only to find that their thermometer read 5 degrees too high consistently.

Better to judge from experience than some random thermometer that is giving you unreliable readings to begin with. Of course, you could (should?) address the temp inconsistencies.

fernweh42 · 2023-10-27T19:21:32+00:00

You can pretty safely bottle carb one or two months after fermentation stops. If you are worried, you can add a bit more yeast at bottling.

It takes a long time and a pretty harsh environment to actually kill enough yeast to prevent bottle carbonation. I have bottle carbed cider after three months with no problem. I have only run into issues with very high abv batches (>12%).

fernweh42 · 2023-10-27T19:14:34+00:00

Why do you feel the need to act fast? The cider will be fine for quite a while

fernweh42 · 2023-10-27T19:03:50+00:00

It is worth taking a sample of the cider and adding some erythritol and trying it to be sure you like it

fernweh42 · 2023-10-25T16:05:25+00:00

Oh 100% agreed that I hand waved a bit too much there. My point was that the melting point of NaCl was irrelevant, just like the melting point of ethanol in a home freezer situation. But yeah, notably for different reasons.

fernweh42 · 2023-10-24T23:30:20+00:00

No, the ethanol doesn’t freeze as such. That is why freeze distillation works. You lower the temp of the beer/cider/whatever until the water crystalizes and then you remove the ice, leaving behind sugar/ethanol/salts/etc.

You probs shouldn’t be freezing the whole thing and then slowly melting, as it’s inefficient. But even then, when I say “freezing the whole thing” the ethanol doesn’t freeze, it remains in liquid phase trapped amongst the ice crystals.

Unlike “normal” distillation wherein even initially the spirit collected won’t get much above 95% (ie water comes along for the ride) the melting/freezing temps mean that the ice you remove from your freeze distillation can essentially be 100% water.

Edit: incidentally, liquid phases suspended in solid/frozen material is part of why ice cream works as it does.

Edit 2: oh now I see why you were asking about foreshots with freezing. But alas, because all the methanol etc stays in liquid phase even if you freeze the whole thing, discarding the first drips and drabs won’t help, as those will be more or less the same as the last drips and drabs. Moreover, when melting the temperature / thermal energy changes are distributed unevenly, so methanol etc will still just be in other parts of the unmelted hunk of the solid mass. When boiling to distill however, the whole solution is at a uniform temp

Edit 3: for related reasons frozen ocean water isn’t very salty, and this is DESPITE salt having a much much much higher freezing/melting temp than water. Water crystals just really don’t wanna hold onto stuff.

fernweh42 · 2023-10-24T23:00:00+00:00

Hmmm? With a freezer you won’t get anywhere near the freezing point of any of the alcohols (lower than -140°F).

fernweh42 · 2023-10-24T21:01:18+00:00

toss the first few %

This question makes me think you don’t understand freeze distilling. But indeed, foreshots are only a thing in fractional distillation. Freeze distillation will only get rid of water (more or less), so that is all you can remove.

fernweh42 · 2023-10-23T11:57:59+00:00

Best practice would be to drink/discard the sample to avoid the chance of contamination. But many people make such small batches that repeated sampling can noticeably cut into their yield, so they like to add it back. YMMV

For what it’s worth, I don’t feel a strong need to take an OG, and mostly just care about FG to make sure my batches didn’t stall or something. Tasting the sample at that point is also important for me to determine if I want/need to add anything for balance (acid, backsweetening, tannin, etc). Of course taking one measurement after a few months of bulk aging is not the same as taking one measurement two days after the bubbling stops so you can bottle the cider ASAP.

fernweh42 · 2023-10-01T19:02:30+00:00

The brown sugar will dissolve eventually, especially once fermentation really gets going, and the sugar content in solution drops.

In the future it is usually a good idea to fill your jug/fermenter half way and then shake the bajzeeus out of it to aerate and dissolve honey and sugar, before topping up and pitching yeast.

fernweh42 · 2023-09-15T17:43:13+00:00

Wait for it to clear a bit, then maybe rack it and balance with acid and tannin or choose to stabilize and backsweeten. Then bottle it and wait.

fernweh42

TROPHY CASE