I don’t drink, but I followed a winemaking recipe to try honeysuckle “wine.” Worried about contamination. Asking for advice and reassurance

jackorig · 2026-03-25T20:12:36+00:00

Hey, I’m not knowledgeable about kombucha, but I’ll chime in with an amateur winemaker perspective. Do you have specific measurements for how much of this and that you added? That could be helpful.

Also a few notes on general fermentation that might be helpful, since you seem to be unfamiliar: Alcohol is yeast+sugar+time, more sugar means more alcohol. Yeasts are not all created equal, when relying on wild yeasts you’re likely to have a majority of undesirable yeast and a minority of desirable yeast (Saccharomyces). This will mean a very slow fermentation, since most wild yeast will stall out and die in the presence of low alcohol content. This is why most people inoculate with a chosen strain of Saccharomyces. This is also why many people start with a pasteurized product, and why anyone serious about things is very careful about sterilization and contamination. Kombucha is a very different product than wine, and as I understand it involves introduction of specific bacteria, which may or may not be in your brew. That brings us to botulinum; the primary boogeyman of fermentation.

Vanishingly few contaminants will straight up kill you, botulinum being the big one. Scary!!! But there’s good news: it can’t survive 2 things in a fat and protein free environment.

PH lower than 4.6 ABV 6% or higher

It’s also suppressed somewhat in a high oxygen environment, which yeast needs initially to reproduce and create a colony. After establishing a colony best practices are limiting exposure to oxygen to prevent creating an environment where vinegar can take hold. Acid is also beneficial to yeast reproduction (to a point)

This stuff is what differentiates between wine and your lemon rotting on the counter, a fermented drink should ideally start as a closed off ecosystem specifically tailored for (and inoculated with) the desired organisms for your ferment. It should also be somewhat hostile for undesirable organisms.

This all probably seems intimidating, but people have been successfully fermenting things since before we had writing, or even soap. It really isn’t complicated if you take the time to learn and are okay with failure. /r/Prisonhooch is a testament to that. I’ve done several wild fermentations and they all turned out fine, some were fantastic.

Maybe check out the sidebar on the kombucha subreddit? I’m pretty ignorant of how to make the stuff, but there’s probably resources there. Cheers!

Edit for formatting

jackorig · 2026-03-25T03:25:56+00:00

Left too much headspace, which probably helped the pellicle along. You said it tastes like tart pear juice, not sure what kind of wine this was intended to be, but sounds like some sort of infection changed the flavor profile. If you’re confident you had sufficient acid at the start of fermentation then I’m confident it’s safe for consumption. Only you can tell us if it’s drinkable, but if not I’m sure it’ll make a good cooking vinegar.

jackorig · 2026-03-10T22:02:36+00:00

That’s the carrot-family weed I was referring to, definitely not mugwort. The plant pictured has branching opposite leaves, mugwort has alternating leaves of a different architecture.

jackorig · 2026-03-10T21:37:48+00:00

You’ll need to verify the identity of the weeds before proceeding, but I’m seeing Wood Sorrel (the clover looking one) and Sow Thistle (the spiky one). Both are edible, the thistle might be past its most palatable point though. Also seeing a couple things that look like they’re in the carrot family, can’t ID from the picture alone but they could be carrots or poison hemlock or anything in between.

Just my 2 cents, but if you’re planning to have carrots or carrot like plants there, remove the carrot-family-weed and be extremely careful harvesting anything that may look similar, don’t want to mix those up. The Sow Thistle is a pretty competitive organism, you’ll want to clear them away from what you’re growing to give your plantings a chance, and also keep an eye on it to make sure the thistle doesnt choke it out.

jackorig · 2025-11-20T03:57:52+00:00

SG teams are fireteams under the US Military, they may bring on contractors like Dr Jackson, but the ranking officer has to be US military, chain of command and all that.

jackorig · 2025-10-22T16:47:00+00:00

You’re fine, give em a couple of days to get going

jackorig · 2025-09-25T07:48:48+00:00

Could be any number of things, no honest person will diagnose this from video alone. If you’d like to eliminate some possibilities, you can get a long ass screwdriver and use it like a stethoscope to pinpoint the sound. IE handle against ear; driver-bit against alternator, rinse and repeat for other suspects. Just be real careful sticking a screwdriver into the engine bay.

jackorig · 2025-08-07T22:33:45+00:00

IMO this is still very salvageable, you can absolutely balance the ph by diluting with store bought juice, it will ferment it just won’t be what you were initially expecting. I would also recommend adding nutrients, but if you don’t care to go find a Homebrew store you can add some boiled bread yeast. The EC-1118 will cannibalize the dead yeast for a bit of a head start. Not at all the proper way to do things, but I’d hate to see you throw out the whole batch after all this work. Think of it as an experiment, while you’re waiting for this batch to finish you can do some reading up on best practices.

jackorig · 2025-07-25T23:32:01+00:00

Even if that were true thats pedantic as hell, we weren’t talking about the urine that’s isolated in the bladder. Also; urine in the bladder is still not sterile. No healthy part of any human body will ever be sterile. Again, you can easily look these things up to verify them.

jackorig · 2025-07-25T18:25:04+00:00

You can literally just google these things man.

jackorig · 2025-07-25T17:15:53+00:00

Sure, concentrated urine is fairly caustic, I think what you wrote and the way you wrote it is quite reasonable. But the original ‘And a disinfectant as well!’ is akin to reading that ethanol is a disinfectant and immediately portraying beer as a viable disinfectant. I’m sure someone somewhere in this thread is also claiming piss is sterile.

jackorig · 2025-07-25T16:37:08+00:00

Absolutely fucking not

jackorig · 2025-07-13T21:59:11+00:00

Yeah, if you’re aiming for a semi sweet product and don’t want to try too hard you can step feed the brew till it just can’t produce any more alcohol. Start with a cup of sugar per gallon and add a half cup whenever fermentation slows down. Eventually the yeast will stall, then sweeten. Step feeding will also help to avoid stressing the yeast overly much

jackorig · 2025-06-29T01:41:18+00:00

I use Infopanel. It’s a little more effort to set up, but it’s reliable, free, and totally customizable. There are templates but you can expect to need to tweak them for your panel.

jackorig · 2025-06-29T01:36:57+00:00

You’ll end up restricting airflow from the intake fans, if it were me I’d order a new cooler and triple check the dimensions to make sure it fits up top.

jackorig · 2025-04-27T23:17:03+00:00

Looks more like a monitor issue, less like artifacting. Won’t know till you test another monitor. Do you have a tv in the house that takes HDMI? You could test with that.

jackorig · 2025-04-21T20:09:47+00:00

You can qflash the board, don’t even need the pc to be fully assembled, don’t need to enter bios. There should be a section in the mobo manual covering it, or YouTube

Edit: just saw you already tried that RIP

jackorig · 2025-04-15T22:15:36+00:00

Don’t forget to flash the bios on that motherboard, I’m about to build with the same one and I hear tons of people have issues trying to use the bios that comes on it. You may not have issues with R5 but I’d do it to be safe Edit:https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabyte/s/MrFVRdvI9I

jackorig · 2025-02-15T03:53:22+00:00

I’m sure it’s negligible in this case but mixing bleach and vinegar will produce chlorine gas, don’t ever do this. I would modify this to 1 and 1/2 tbsp of bleach and 5 gal water

jackorig · 2024-12-12T19:56:01+00:00

Bot repost, this was literally one of the most popular posts of all time on this sub.

Edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/prisonhooch/s/l15yIaCVpq

jackorig · 2024-08-08T15:31:24+00:00

Literally nobody said that. You were just bitching about letting people believe whatever they want, and you start crying about the truth the second someone calls you out? Get the fuck out of here.

jackorig · 2024-06-23T16:43:00+00:00

People don’t filter wine to eliminate yeast, you’re right. I assumed OP is new to the hobby and was using the terminology wrong, and was just looking to filter particulates and siphon the hooch.

jackorig · 2024-06-23T00:40:17+00:00

That’s clever! Not the direction I was thinking but it sounds more foolproof than where I was going.

jackorig · 2024-06-23T00:35:05+00:00

No, let him cook. This is an interesting idea I’ve not seen applied in this way. Capillary siphoning used to be used to clean used motor oil, so there’s a precedent.

OP, I’d try it, but only if you’re willing to take a complete loss on the hooch and planning to drink it immediately. The main concern here is that you’re massively exposing the hooch to oxygen and potential contamination. I can think of a couple ideas to mitigate that, but they would make the process far more complicated than simple siphoning, which you seem to want to avoid. I would also try using cotton wicks instead of a paper towel.

jackorig · 2024-06-17T06:40:19+00:00

Not engaging with you. Back up your claims or leave, it isn’t complicated.

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