Home brewing, making wine and/or distilling.

So anyone making their own alcohol.

I make wine currently about 4 times a year. I started with apple wine from the orchard. Two apple trees that produce mostly inedible apples. And to even remotely remember what i did i was bamboozeled in to just ordering apples/juice on off season. Even if you get it half right you get drinkable bitter alcoholic juice. I forgot what i did last year so i fixed that problem by doing it every 3 months.

Any other experiences in the field?

I inherited a functioning distillery set from my father that i never ran. I don't really care about legality, just never had a pressing need to make moonshine. Also when it comes to fatherly advice i know how to separate ethanol from methanol. Color of the flame.

I used to Brew my own Cerveza back in the day with some friends. I started back in Law School and it went on for about 15 years or so. It started as an excuse to get together and drink beers together. At first we totally sucked at it, and the Brews were barely drinkable. They didn't have self contained kits with pre-measured recipes back then , like they do now. It's much easier to get started nowadays. But, through trial and error, we got better and better. We even made our own yeast cultures. Eventually, we could duplicate the taste of popular beers and come pretty close. We would make 5 gallon batches and usually made 2 different varietal batches each time. We would do our own bottling, and everything was super clean and sanitized. We sanitized everything from the hoses, vats, bottles, spoons and hygrometer. And everything was preservative free. We made lagers, stouts, and ales. IPAs weren't a thing back then, so we never got to do that.

One time we were making a couple of batches. And, we got pretty hammered. And we mixed ingredients between the 2 batches. Specifically, we were trying to make a copy of Samuel Smith's Oatmeal Stout. But, somehow Oak chips that were supposed to go in the other batch we made that day, made it into the fermenting bin. We realized this when we looked for them for the other batch. At that point, we said "fuck it, it's done." So approximately 10 days later we primed and bottled it and set it aside for 6 weeks. We opened one up and tried it. It was very good, but not quite ready yet. 2 weeks later we opened up another. Holy shit, it was fucking amazing. I took one down to my favorite watering hole and gave it to the owner to try. He never liked any of my prior brews, saying they were just ok or outright sucked. He poured it into a glass and took a sip. His face changed as he said Holy shit this is actually really good. He then poured some for a regular there to try. He liked it as well. The owner said he wanted 2 cases of it, but while legal in Florida to make, it is illegal to sell. So, let's just say we worked out a trade for a small amount.

We keep talking about brewing again, but alas, life gets in the way. I've thought about making wine a few times, mostly after visiting wineries in California and Oregon. But, nah. Never tried to distill alcohol. If you don't know what you're doing you can really hurt or kill someone. With Beer, the worst thing that happens is it tastes bad.

I made beer once but the fucking wort boiled over on the stove and much a huge mess.

Haven’t done it since.

Making wine is actually much easier than beer. Less moving parts and if you really fuck it up you can dilute it to cider/cooler region.

I wouldn't recommend distilling to anyone. If you fuck it up, you can lose your sight/life. There's basically no chance of that happening with beer/wine.

Wine is a casual way of turning whatever fruits/berries that grow in your area to something useful. If for some odd reason you drink wine, you can just order 8 pounds of apples, 12 pounds of sugar and a "wine" kit. That's really all that's needed to get you started.

Readymade wine kits generally have everything that's needed to turn whatever organic material you have to wine. Enzymes to break it down, wine yeast, somethng to stop it running and clearing the end result. Without it you're mostly just making fancy pruno.