Ontario has a bunch of make-your-own wine companies that work like wine bricks.
1. you buy 5 gallons of grape juice for ~$20 per gallon.
2. yeast is dropped into your grape juice
3. you come to the store to decant your grape juice into wine bottles and cork them up.
Since no alcohol is bought or sold, you avoid the (very high) taxes on liquor. You end up with ~28 bottles of wine for ~$4 per bottle.
It's not the greatest wine, but it's ok for sangria and cooking, and it's a good story if you hang out with people who like to talk about tax loopholes...
DIY winemaking kits can actually make some pretty decent wines if you spend a bit of time and money getting proper equipment. Not a lot - $100 will get you a really, really good setup with two glass carboys for fermenting, siphons, thief and test jar, hydrometer, corker, etc.
I've been making my own wines for years now. Occasionally I'll do a full from-scratch wine, but more often I buy a $40 kit from Midwest Supplies [0] that has all the components - grape juice concentrate, fruit essence, yeasts, kieselsol and chitosan, potassium metabisulfite as well as full detailed instructions. All you need is four gallons of distilled water. 28 days later, ~30 bottles pretty good wine! It won't win awards or anything, but it'll make a fantastic table wine and great for everyday meals.
The only downside is that you'll spend a bit of time cleaning and sterilizing things and you'll remember all the stuff you forgot from high school chemistry class. :)
I would recommend avoiding glass carboys for fermenting. They are heavy, especially when filled, difficult to clean with their narrow mouths, and quite dangerous if they shatter when you accidentally drop them. (They're easy to drop while you're cleaning them and they're wet and slippery.) There are numerous accounts on home brewing forums of trips to the emergency room because a glass carboy broke and injured someone.
PET plastic fermenters (Better Bottle, FermZilla, Fermonster, etc.) are much nicer to work with.
A fun glass carboy story. I had just finished an hour-long boil of around 5 gallons of beer wort and then poured it into my carboy. I then needed to cool it down to a safe temperature for the yeast (~70˚) as quickly as possible to prevent infection. It was the middle of a western NY winter and so I though of the obvious solution which was to set the whole thing in a snow bank. Perhaps you can see where this is going.
As soon as I set this 5-gallon glass container of near-boiling liquid in the snow bank I realized my error because of the loud, CRACK sound. I lifted it up by the neck, but only the top half came away and I was left holding a comically large broken-bottle shiv. My roommates at the time all came out to properly laugh at me and I resolved to cool my wort before putting it in the fermentation vessel from then on. And also to stick with plastic fermentation vessels!
Plastic fermenters are MUCH safer (I am one of the many who have gotten minor cuts from shattering glass carboys) but just plain terrible for fermenting in. A little scratch in the wall and your sanitizing process will miss the wild yeast that grows in the scratch making the container essentially useless for fermenting with your chosen yeast only.
Also they make widemouth glass carboys which are very easy to clean. But they shatter all the same.
If your going to avoid glass go 304 stainless (SSBrewtechs BrewBucket etc.) plus it basically lasts forever.
Using a covered plastic or wicker basket is an easy way to transport glass carboys, and should hopefully contain much of the shrapnel if you have the bad fortune to drop them.
Cleaning any bottle with a narrow neck is extra work, but you can get it done with a pipe cleaner, and it's best not to clean at an elevation or to do so in a deep basin.
These are things that come naturally after handling significant glassware for a period of time.
My preferred solution was those Culligan watercooler-style empty 5 gallon water jugs they carry at suburban Wal-Marts. Just be careful to fit some sort of pressure release. They will expand in a scary fashion otherwise.
I've always avoided wine brewing. Lots of cider ceyser and beer. What styles/varietals are ok right out of the secondary like that?
Edit: mostly interested in Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon, vino verde, and maybe tempranillo. The kits seem pretty expensive. Trader joes has very tasty bottles in those styles (maybe not the CS) for $5.
Aging is optional; it will improve the wine, but there's nothing stopping you from drinking it immediately and it will probably taste pretty decent. Many wines are perfectly drinkable after secondary fermentation has finished (and you've added the metabisulfite to fully stop it unless you're making champagne and you want additional carbonation). The longer you age it and the more work you put into it, the better the end product, but that's true for most things. Many store-bought wines are less than a year old.
To me wines are actually less work to homebrew than beer. Especially if you're working from a kit, there's no need to cook anything - just dump everything in the fermenter and go. Beyond that the process is largely similar. Primary fermentation -> secondary fermentation -> bottling -> drinking. They're pretty forgiving too.
In general, whites take a bit more work to get a really good looking product than reds. For a white, I'll usually rack at least three times over about a week, and then filter it so I get a nice, amber-clear end product with no sediment. Note that this doesn't really impact the taste much, just the appearance. Reds I usually don't bother to rack more than once or maybe twice.
When I am done I usually sit my bottles upright in a cool, dark area for a few days before putting them in the wine rack on their sides.
This one [0] specifically is a family favorite. Has a nice light, somewhat fruit taste that's great for a warm summer evening. This one is best kept cool (I keep a few of my bottles that we're about to drink in a wine refrigerator.)
Not wanting to be pedantic or snobbish, but it is "vinho verde", because it is a Portuguese type of wine (I am Portuguese, and that is why I care about this :)
Sorry I knew there was an h in there somewhere but I didn't take the time to look it up. Only been there for about a week and I loved it. The seafood was fantastic and I like the weather a lot. We were mostly around Lisbon. Really like Cascais.
thankfully, here, we have Trader Joe's and their "3 buck chuck". the local Kroger store (Fred Meyer) also has $3 wine, but I think of that as "emergency wine" - the 3 buck chuck is much, much better.
I have some questions though:
1. do they teach you about sanitization and airlocks, or is it simply "toss some yeast in this bottle"
2. I'm guessing no aging? it would be awesome if they allowed you to pop some in a barrel for aging
3. (not really a question) but wow, $20/gallon is still kind of spendy!
I've done it as well with my parents, who love wine. At the shops I've been to, you buy the grape concentrate up front and they handle to process of making it up until bottling. Once the juice has fermented, you go in and they walk you through cleaning and sanitizing the bottles, filling them, corking them, and usually shrink-wrapping the tops. They provide all the supplies except the bottles themselves - customers bring their own, saved from buying wine the "normal" way.
Never seen a shop do ageing, so the wine will be noticeably "young". My parents like dryer and sharper white wines anyways (Pinot Grigio, Riesling, etc.) so it doesn't bother them. Also note that due to taxes and such, the cheapest wine you'll find commercially is C$11 a bottle, so even at C$20 / gallon you're getting a great deal if you like the resulting wines.
Personally, I quite like the wines my folks get through these shops - properly chilled they make a wonderfully refreshing beverage in the summer, and we'll often drink a few bottles on the back deck together when I go to see them.
We have this in Western Canada too! Many places in BC do it. I would like to share a positive experience I've had. If you go up to $5-8 a bottle, there are some really high quality grapes you can get.
There is one grape juice supplier called Château-Vieux-du-Roi which is from a region close to where Châteauneuf-du-Pape is produced in France. We have taken Châteauneuf-du-Pape bottles and put the Château-Vieux-du-Roi wine inside. Blind taste tests from folks who have had the real Châteauneuf-du-Pape often fail to tell the difference.
We have to age the knock-off Château-Vieux-du-Roi for 2-3 years to get it to the same quality, but by golly is it ever delicious wine. If you're impatient, it's still quite tasty after only 6 months to a year of aging in the bottle.
Considering a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape goes for a minimum of $30 CAD, it's an incredible savings.
I always heard a mixture of wine and soda pop called a "wine cooler", a use that would have gone back several decades, but Wikipedia seems to think that specifically means a mix of fruit juice and wine. There is some discussion in the talk page about this discrepancy. I guess maybe the term was a regional thing.
I'm always reminded of the bit from The Incredibles:
BOB PARR: All right, listen closely. I'd like to help you, but I can't. I'd like to tell you to take a copy of your policy to Norma Wilcox on... Norma Wilcox. W-I-L-C-O-X. On the third floor. But I can't. I also do not advise you to fill out and file a WS2475 form with our legal department on the second floor. I wouldn't expect someone to get back to you quickly to resolve the matter. I'd like to help, but there's nothing I can do.
Offtopic, but The Incredibles has one of my favorite movie quotes:
You always say “Be true to yourself”, but you never say which part of yourself to be true to!
… which stuck in my head because so many Disney (and other?) movies seem to be all about being “true to yourself,” and in my experience they conspicuously fail to address the fact (in my belief system) that all humans have both good and evil, selfish and selfless within (we’re born screaming, demanding others’ attention; but even in the womb we listen to and begin to love familiar people, and in many situations we sacrifice much for our loved ones and even strangers).
> The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials "for the sake of humanity," and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.
Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true. Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world. Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it. The publisher said of somebody, "That man will get on; he believes in himself." And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my eye caught an omnibus on which was written "Hanwell." I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums."
chesterton
It's "just be yourself" all over again. What if my unmasked self is an aloof prick? It's just stupid. "Just be yourself... no not like that... wait not like that!"
> we’re born screaming, demanding others’ attention;
I wouldn't say "demanding". During the first weeks you actually have to wake up the newborn for feeding, otherwise you're running the risk of malnourishment.
They're so utterly helpless, confused and tired that they can fall asleep even when hungry.
It's an accessible entrance into things like entropy, or to think about subjects like eugenics (if we're remove genetic diversity there will be no racism) or wrongthink (if nobody has these bad ideas we would all live in harmony).
DISCLAIMER: this is not an invitation to start debating these subjects, these are just crudely picked examples.
Well.. if you post on an internet forum it kind of IS an invitation to debate. I have a crazy relative who likes to make controversial speeches and then yell "you don't have to reply!" as if it insulates him from feedback.
I'm sure most are aware but your description about eugenics is a bit off. It seems like you are putting a positive slant on it or suggesting thats the goal, whether intentional or not. Eugenics is about denying a class of humans (however you classify that class) from the ability to reproduce. This is highly unethical and given our tendency to classify on race, usually associated with racist agendas (such as the Nazis). I had to look up Wrongthink but it seems to be a term the Alt-Right is introducing... possible a play on thoughtcrime and newspeak (both Orwell) to defend their controversial opinions [0].
I recall "Wrongthink" having been in use for decades to decry ideas you dislike, whatever the cause or position on the political spectrum. It saw a remarkable uptick in usage after the 2001 movie "minority report", at least in my perception.
The incredible (heh) thing about this is that My Hero Academia answers it. In the world of MHA, nearly everyone has a superpower, or Quirk, of some sort; but superheroes are still a distinct class of professionals who have honed their quirks through training and, in general, developed courage, self-sacrifice, and inner resolve way beyond even the average superhuman. The greatest heroes distinguish themselves by exemplifying these values the most (though having powerful awesome Quirks helps). It was the perfect thing to come along at a point of maximum capeshit saturation.
Syndrome being the villain always kind of struck me as the film trying to defend social hierarchies in a sense. You have a hereditary caste of pretty volatile magical beings upon whom the defence of humanity depends and the person trying to remove that dependency in a way that's accessible to anyone regardless of what they're born as is the bad guy? We can debate capitalism until the cows come home but anyone being able to buy powers is still a step up from either being born into them or not.
He's a total arse don't get me wrong, but baseline humanity using nothing but its wits and hard work to make 'heroes' who inherited their powers obsolete is a sentiment I don't imagine is too alien to the readers of HN.
> Syndrome being the villain [is a bit of] trying to defend social hierarchies
He's a villain because he's trying to replace the hereditary caste by violence, and by consuming them. The tension is there outside of him -- and Mr. Incredible is a bit of an arse to Billy at first -- but it's his means, not his ends, that are the problem.
In Syndrome's defence, the displacement of feudalism wasn't always a peaceful affair either but it's a change we can all agree was necessary. Violence doesn't change its inherent nature just because one puts a respectable face on it, the hereditary category of 'hero' can only exist at all in an otherwise democratic society because of the implied threat of 'I'm going to use my magical powers to take down anyone who opposes my interests', which is unacceptable because they don't have a legitimate claim to the use of force stemming from democratic consent of the people in the way say the military of a modern Western country does.
We see this at the start of the film where Mr Incredible and his friend get tangled up in a rescue operation in a burning building despite having been pretty firmly rejected by baseline humans they're attempting to help, if I remember right one of them literally gets frozen alive by Mr Incredible's friend as they escape which is rather violent. We also see it when he throws his insufferable boss through several walls in a fit of anger, which is a display of his ingrained violent nature and lack of control over his superhuman powers which presents a threat to innocent bystanders. It's might-makes-right with a veneer of heroic respectability over the top, their true nature is very different from the nature they present to the public.
Either that or I'm reading way too much into a film that's mostly aimed at kids!
Marvel touched on this a bit with the recent falcon series, with a main part of the plot being that superheroes are just conceptually bad because it leads to supremacists. I think this is good, and its important to do this with a nuance beyond people just going stupid evil because they can't be stopped.
The anime Mob Psycho 100 goes into this idea heavily and its really great.
A related question, why is voting considered "good"?
Your vote is good if you vote for good people and good policies. Yes. But if a person votes for bad people and bad policies, then I don't see what's so good about it.
Voting in general however I believe is good because it makes people be part of the system, and feel they are part of it.
And so, if voting is good, maybe we should have more voting.
> Your vote is good if you vote for good people and good policies. Yes. But if a person votes for bad people and bad policies, then I don't see what's so good about it.
Democracy is a means of securing regular, peaceful power transitions. Whether the outcome is particularly good or bad is not relevant, because all power is transient.
The alternative is a civil war/revolution every now and then.
Voting as a simulated war where the armies show up, get counted, but don't actually fight makes sense to me as an analogy, but doesn't this break down when you add the notion of universal suffrage to the equation? That is, if you have large fraction of the voting population who would be worse than useless in an actual battle, doesn't the output of the simulation start to drift from reality?
Is there good or bad voting? I think democracy is about representing interests, if a number of people have an interest that is against the interest of someone else, does that make it wrong or bad? yeah I mean bad from your interest point of view, but not from a global point of view
I think the woke culture is a bit flawed, because if there is something that is objectively bad, and something that is objectively good, why even have democracy at all? Let's just put there the sun king and move on?
> But if a person votes for bad people and bad policies...
The entire point of voting is that you are allowed to vote for whoever is running. Of course, the notion of a "bad policy" is as old as voting itself, but the noblest democracies are those which don't judge people for voting as they see fit, or else what's the point of voting at all? Just appoint a righteous elite to do all the political appointments for you.
However, just as there's been no consistently wise electorate, neither has there been a consistently wise elite class. In the end, in both cases, the best you can do politically is build a bulwark against corruption because you can't avoid it, which is why the stablest governments are the ones that make the job of the highest political seats as difficult as possible to actually do anything and put the bulk of the power in the hands of committees that have to argue about things to come to a decision.
> And so, if voting is good, maybe we should have more voting.
Voting on its own is not inherently good. Plenty of dictatorships operate under the guise of voting, where either candidates opposing the ruling party are entirely absent or voting for them is punishable in various ways (which is why the political polarization in the west is particularly chilling). There are plenty of "People's republics" out there that are neither republics nor representative of the people (unless, perhaps, you narrowly define "people", as the US originally did).
What is arguably good (at least in the liberal western mind) is maintaining a system of political friction (checks and balances) that ensure different parts of the government are effective limiters on each other's authority to make it as difficult as possible for a tyrant to seize control. IMO Trump was a pretty solid litmus test of the resilience of the American government against tyrannical takeover.
The downside of this, as we're seeing the recent competition between east and west, is that tyranny can be much more effective at getting stuff done than democracy can hope to be, at least in the short term. However, strong tyrants still die and eventually a weak tyrant takes their place and the country falls apart.
The (theoretical) strength of representative government is that it outlives any one or handful of strong rulers. I say theoretical because technically ancient Egypt's history spans more years than the entirety of human history after Christ (so far), but as can be seen in their history, they had plenty of royal family squabbles and foreign invasions in that time. How they retained national cohesion through it all would be an interesting study.
> The entire point of voting is that you are allowed to vote for whoever is running.
There’s the rub. In the United States we’re permitted to choose from either one or two candidates, both of whom have been sponsored by one of two national private clubs or one of their local chapters. You will not see any mention of nominations or political parties anywhere in the US Constitution, and yet that’s the system that determines who is eligible to run. In California a single club controls who is permitted to run for most local and all national offices.
It’s so obviously kayfabe that I’m baffled that there are rubes out there who think this is a real choice anymore than picking “any” card from a magician’s deck is.
It also ought to make one wonder who exactly the first person plural is in that overworked phrase “our democracy.”
> ancient Egypt's history spans more years than the entirety of human history after Christ (so far), but as can be seen in their history, they had plenty of royal family squabbles and foreign invasions in that time. How they retained national cohesion through it all would be an interesting study.
Generally attributed to Egypt's relatively high population density at the time. They grew a lot of grain. They had a lot of people.
Reminds me of when a friend ordered some San Pedro cactus over the internet "for religious sacrament." It included a note indicating that they ran out of the exact variety that he ordered, but they thought that he'd be very happy with the one they sent because it was stronger when used for religious purposes.
(San Pedro cactus contains mescaline. It's perfectly legal to grow for ornamental purposes.)
They don't contain the active ingredient that is specifically illegal, which is what I always heard made the "loophole" possible. Would be interested to know if that's true (but too lazy to alt-tab and search myself.)
IIRC mescaline or peyote (maybe they're the same? I don't know) is nowadays legally protected under religious laws, but iirc there's a lot of caveats around it (region, tribe, etc).
Peyote is the plant, a cactus, and the active chemical it contains is mescaline. Peyote is only legal for native americans religious ceremonies, afaik.
AIUI the plant is legal but consuming it, growing it for consumption, or preparing it for consumption is only legal for religious purposes. I could be misremembering, and state laws may vary anyway.
In the early 90s the NY post published a similar article about how not to smuggle in cigarettes from the Native American reservations nearby - including which roads to not take and intersections to not be wary of because there were frequently “speed traps” in place to stop vehicles that might be smuggling tobacco - just an FYI which readers should not be interested in.
In the 2000s the NY state police started searching and seizing all UPS trucks exiting the reservations because the practice of shipping cigarettes had become so common that the state was losing significant tobacco tax revenue. They argued that UPS had to be aware of what they were carrying because the shippers were tobacco stores and the parcels were exactly cigarette box sized, thus they were willing accomplices. After several days the Native American governments backed down and agreed to not ship cigarettes anymore.
> They argued that UPS had to be aware of what they were carrying because the shippers were tobacco stores and the parcels were exactly cigarette box sized, thus they were willing accomplices
Would that matter? Fully legal duty-paid cigarette boxes would presumably be the same size and shape from the same origin.
I love the warnings that they put on these things. (paraphrasing) "Under no circumstances should you follow these extremely specific steps listed below or else you might accidentally make an alcoholic beverage which would be illegal"
An old Heathkit radio set had a red wire that you put a tag on that said something like "Do not remove this wire, or this radio set could broadcast on HAM radio frequencies which would be illegal unless properly licensed!"
It was illegal to export certain classes of cryptography software. It was however never illegal to export books about that software. So what they did was publish a hardback book about the algorithm [1], which contained the entire source code of the software. This book was then freely sold all around the world. Now all you had to do was scan and OCR the relevant pages, cat together the resulting files and compile. All perfectly legal.
I remember there being distributed proof-reading groups on Usenet and IRC where you would get 1 page of OCR'd text and the corresponding scanned image and you would manually go through and verify and correct the source code.
I have a tattoo of an encryption routine, partly as a protest. Unfortunately I changed it at the last minute to make it look cooler and introduced a bug.
Here's the entire proper Perl 5 code:
undef $/;print<>$<>
The buggy version is slightly shorter but I depended on an incorrect reading of some tricky wording in the docs and didn't test thoroughly enough. I'm considering turning the tattoo into a diff.
I'd be afraid that a bug in Perl-- revealed years later-- might render my arm open to compromises. Some new fuzzing method comes around and all of a sudden my arm is unencrypted for all the world to access.
> the note would continue with a warning instructing you not to leave that jug in the cool cupboard for 21 days, or it would turn into wine
I read (cannot find the source now though) that's similar to today's homemade alcohol/beer in Japan, where there's a limit of what % of alcohol you can make at home. So all the official instructions include a last step: "mix in water until the alcohol percentage is below the legal limit". Of course people just ignore this to have stronger alcohol.
> The grape of choice for home winemakers quickly became Alicante Bouschet. Thick, tough skins helped the grape survive the cross–country journey, and it grew in large quantities
> By the end of Prohibition in 1933, other grape varietals and fruits had been ripped up and 40,000 acres of Alicante had been planted.
> “Grape bricks had a disastrous effect on the early American wine industry,” Suttner wrote in an email. Grape bricks’ place in Prohibition history is largely glossed over, but Suttner was able to learn about them through period newspaper articles and Eric Burn’s book The Spirits of America. “By encouraging the production of cheap, fast–growing grapes like Alicante Bouschet at the expense of other, slower varieties, American wineries limited themselves severely.”
If it helped the wineries and vineyards survive, I guess its the lesser of the two evils. Given that the other wine-drinking regions probably didn't want to import new world grapes to make wine with.
When someone suggests a clever loophole, the response is usually “that would never work, the police and the judge will know exactly what you’re doing”. But somehow, a whole industry developed around the “do not do … detailed prohibited thing”.
I guess, because it somehow worked that one time, it became memorable as an exception, while in most cases it wouldn’t fly in court.
The thing you must realize is that despite prohibition public attitude soured on it very quickly and many judges and politicians were themselves partaking in prohibited alcohol. And the situation cannot be compared with marijuana; it was on a whole different magnitude.
The fact is, making home alcohol is super easy. Yeast is omnipresent, and are happy to eat basically any sugar. Wild yeast won't get you alcohol concentrations in the 15-20% like commercial yeasts will, but can easily go up to 8-12%. Apples, grape juice, honey + raisins will all easily make you hard cider, wine, and mead, respectively. If you have a freezer, you can even use freeze distillation to increase the ABV. Banning all ingredients that could be made into alcohol is completely impractical.
I've heard that can be pretty harsh, though I'd be curious to know how it might fair with a little bit of aging, say 6-12 months. It requires a bit more handholding of the batch as well, but there are turbo yeasts that will get to ~14% in 24-48 hours.
I've also come across "triple distilled" turbo yeast that's supposed to be less harsh but not as high ABV.
The whole gun industry revolves around this. Can't have automatic weapons (unless you buy a preban for $10,000-100,000), fine we'll make a trigger that resets after every shot and your finger will be primed for the next one. Barrel is under 16"? There is this thing called an arm brace (legal for now... sigh). Barrel is under 16" and you want a suppressor? Well if you weld the suppressor on, pay the tax stamp, technically it's over 16" so you're good.
Prohibition never had widespread support. People were able to stock up prior to enactment, there were allowances for religious and medicinal use. People made their own alcohol before prohibition and did so after enactment. Enforcement was mostly the “big busts” but it petered out pretty quickly.
So not surprisingly something being illegal or not isn’t the critical factor, it’s the willingness to enforce the law (e.g. marijuana was essentially legal in SF well before the law was changed - you could smoke on the street and the cops wouldn’t do anything).
Yeah that makes sense to me. Wouldn't be surprised if the officials were themselves buying those wine bricks by the box.
So this could work in general in cases where at a high level (federal) the legislation satisfies some puritanical ideological goals, but individually, or at the local/state level, nobody really buys into it so its enforcement is so so.
One of these cream whippers came into my hands recently. It came with a box of 10 chargers, where 1 was missing. I speculate the owner used their new cream whipper once and decided it was too much work to clean. After ~20 years they gave it to the non-profit's yard sale, where I found it.
One charger cartridge is good for maybe a pint of whipped cream. You'd need 4+ chargers for a gallon of whipped cream. A restaurant could easily go through 50 chargers a week.
For everyone thinking of legitimate reasons to purchase this. Keep in mind that you would mostly buy this stuff at a smoke shop. You're not going to a smoke shop for baking supplies...
It’s kind of like a little speeding on the highway. In many places, a lot of people are OK with it and the risk of being ticketed is very low. Yet in other places, it is not OK.
Something being on paper is basically meaningless. It’s all the “soft” cues that we use and you pick up those cues through experience.
Like the compressed grape bricks, grape juice was perfectly legal. And making your own wine for family consumption was also legal.
So in San Francisco, many homes had basement wine cellars, and you could arrange a delivery from the grape juice truck down a chute into your wine barrel.
If you preferred fresh grapes, you could go to the Drumm Street station to pick up boxes of Napa County grapes straight off the train. Then go next door to the barrel maker and take it all home.
The calculus book my university used was a loose-leaf "custom edition" which came in shrink wrap. My cal IV prof told the class first day: "I cannot advise you to go down to the copy shop and run off copies of the relevant chapters for your friends. That would be theft and is illegal. Again, I cannot recommend that you go down to the copy shop next to Pizza Hut on Jackson Avenue and run off copies of the relevant chapters for your friends. That is illegal."
Warning: After dissolving the brick in a gallon of water, do not place the liquid in a jug away in the cupboard for twenty days because then it would turn into wine.
Don't do this. I learned the hard way because I ended up pushing earwax into the canal, eventually forming a blockage. I couldn't hear out of my ear and had to go to an ENT, where he use vacuum suction to take some of it out (the deepest he could go without risking damage to the ear drum), and then I had to do two weeks of hyrogen peroxide drops (Debrox) to help liquify the earwax. Not being able to hear out of one ear is miserable, even if temporary.
Your ears are self-cleaning. They automatically push earwax (slowly) to the outside. A Q-tip is only meant for the outer rim of your ear. There's a saying ENTs use I found while researching my problem: "nothing smaller than your elbow should enter your ear". My ENT told me to stop using the Q-tips. If you find your ears produce a lot of wax, you can just use a tissue on the outside. Or if you're willing to heed the warnings, carefully use a Q-tip, but don't insert it into your ear canal.
(Throwaway because I don't like mixing personal medical info with my regular account)
How did they make the concentrate without destroying all the subtle things I hear that wine is supposed to contain (and the yeast)? Did they boil it? Reverse osmosis? Vacuum?
There's almost certainly wild yeast on the grapes themselves; and in any case yeast is more or less omnipresent, so you'll have wild yeast all over your own kitchen at home. The usual problem is preventing things from fermenting, not causing them to ferment.
Even cheap alcohol is much much better than it used to be. Mulled wine was so popular back in the day because wine was barely drinkable. Cocktails exist for the same reason (and that’s why classic recipes are so sweet). It’s a similar thing with classic “ethnic” dishes—they are so rich and flavorful because they needed to cover the taste of marginal meat.
In germany beer homebrewing is limited at 200L/year (approx 50gallons, which is a respectable but not huge amount if you have friends). Anything above you have to pay taxes on. Those taxes however are pretty minor for a typical 20L batch, and customs are only allowed to investigate a case if they suspect a big enough discrepancy (I think 10€). So there's a group of petty homebrewers who don't make use of their free 200L, but instead opt to report every single batch, only paying 0.01€. The intention is to waste time and annoy as many customs employees as possible to create friction and lobby against restrictions on homebrewing.
If it's just homebrewing / for personal, family / friends consumption, how would they even find out? A lot of laws are only there to enforce if they actually uncover a big operation.
Like, during the 'rona lockdowns you weren't allowed to have more than X visitors, but no policeman would want to go door to door to see if people were having visitors.
(actually don't quote me on it, the visitors thing may have been advisory)
> If it's just homebrewing / for personal, family / friends consumption, how would they even find out? A lot of laws are only there to enforce if they actually uncover a big operation.
True and that's kind of the joke. They aren't even allowed to do visitations without evidence of malpractice. But the laws surrounding it are even stranger: The beer produced should only be consumed at home, any outside consumption would require taxation, therefore homebrew competitions ask you to tax your submissions. They've actually went to homebrew competitions and busted people on the grounds of 10€ pP at most (But remember if I self report/pay it would only be a few ct - so even less). Homebrew meetups have never had problems before.
The background of the law (at least in folk telling) is that the big guys were worried about malt-extract making homebrewing so easy as to make commercial brewing superfluous.
> The background of the law (at least in folk telling) is that the big guys were worried about malt-extract making homebrewing so easy as to make commercial brewing superfluous.
which is funny, since it takes a lot of work to make good beer! most of that goes into sanitization, since with extract you aren't doing a mash, but it could lead to some very bland beers.
Yeah, beer prices in Germany are absurdly low. Unfortunately that also means that it's quite hard for smaller breweries to compete. The Franken region (densest brewery region) is seeing the slow death of the family brewery because the clientele is not up for even small price hikes. Even the deposit on the crates is an actual consideration for these brewers as people won't buy their beer at full price 10€ (they will get the money back on return of the crate) instead they usually require just a 3€ deposit. This means that the brewery is staking out 6-7€ per crate sold in hopes it returns functional.
If you're ever in Bavaria again, you should make a visit to Bamberg. It has an incredibly rich culture around beer. They are famous for smoked beer, though its just two breweries of about 20 making it. The others all have absurdly high quality beer at fair prices all with a certain amount of personality.
> I wonder why there isn't anyone selling them anymore
Google "wine kit" instead; they have plastic packages of grape juice rather than solidified wine bricks. I've never tried one, because there's so many interesting things you can make without pre-packaged ingredients. So far I've made ginger wine, elderflower wine, cranberry wine, and chocolate mead. It's been a really fun hobby.
Fermenting alcohol that tastes good is not easy enough to justify a mass market product. Furthermore, why buy this when you can just buy cheap boxed wine that probably tastes much better than whatever you would get from fermenting reconstituted dry grape concentrate?
I've often made one gallon batches of mead; it's pretty simple, and wine (if you don't get too fancy) is a similar level of difficulty.
IME, one gallon batches about two hours of work from start to a clean kitchen. Five gallon batches take much longer to cool after boiling, so are a much bigger headache.
Yeah, my late grandpa after he retired used to grow some grapes and make wine out of that on his small hobbyist gardening parcel[0]. And at least by the time I grew old enough to be allowed to drink it, he had become good enough at it that it was quite enjoyable and vastly better than cheap boxed or bottled wines in my humble opinion.
His output was like 30 bottles of red and another 30 of white, so in gallons that would be a little more than 21 liters each or 5 gallons each.
He gave away most of it to family and his friends - we had a lot of his bottles on regular barbecues he hosted - and even had my cousin help him design and print funny bottle labels.
[0] A "Schrebergarten" with a small almost-a-shed house.
You can still buy something like this in Sweden. They sell it at my local food store (food stores cannot sell alcohol above 3.5% in Sweden). I, uh I mean a friend, might have tried it when in high school and it tasted not great, but not so bad you couldn't drink it. And honestly, I've had worse 'real' wine in my life.
There used to be a retail store that let you use their facilities to make your own wine from concentrate packaged in plastic bags. We tried it once. The result was surprisingly good. Unfortunately the place only lasted a year or two before it went under.
We have something like this in Sweden (where we have an state-run alcohol monopoly that makes getting alcohol annoying and expensive). It's just a bag of juice with some additives. Never tried it myself but I heard it's not great.
One cool thing about the pandemic is that many countries took the opportunity to run large-scale social experiments under the guise of Covid Restrictions. I expect social scientists will be digging into this data for years to come.
One experiment in South Africa was banning the sale, or transportation, of alcohol. (Production and consumption was still allowed, just not sale or transportation.) This resulted in a marked decrease in hospital admissions, traffic accidents and domestic crimes. [1]
The ban would morph during the first year of Covid, alternately covering things like trading hours, availability in restaurants and so on. Some restrictions were more effective than others, and overall effectiveness decreased as the population got smarter about stocking up with sufficient quantities to bypass any restrictions.
Even the hint of restrictions now (such as was rumored to happen, but did not happen, when Omicron was first recognized) resulted in huge surges of sales.
Generally speaking though more restrictions resulted in fewer hospital admissions.
Clearly prohibition taught us that a blanket ban on alcohol just incentivizes organized crime. So it's not like a long-term ban is useful. But the effects of lowering alcohol consumption are also clear. Balancing these two very conflicting points of view is going to be a challenge for society as we move forward. [2]
[1] Clearly not all decreases are solely because of this, less traffic means fewer accidents for example, but it's considered to be a high contributing factor.
That's down to US road design I suspect: Wide multi lane roads with clear sight lines encourage drivers to think it's safe to go very fast. If these roads are normally congested with traffic then you don't see this downside, but when traffic dropped during the pandemic & it became possible to drive far too fast on these roads that's exactly what happened, with the inevitable consequences.
The miles really melt away when your doing 160, love those open roads and wide curves in the southwest. Yeh Eisenhower! :)
The biggest problem I run into is two lane highways where the semi trucks constantly block the left lane going just at the speed limit while trying to pass other semis in the right lane going just under the speed limit - literally a 1mph difference between the two. The speed limit for cars is 10mph above the truck limit but your lucky to do the truck limit consistently. California was particularly bad in that regard.
People from Oaklahoma are also a constant scourge on the road, they can not tolerate someone going faster then them, so if you try to pass on the left they will pull in front of you and bumble along at the speed limit or one mile over (def a culture thing, cops in OK have a zero tolerance policy for speeding, no margin, regardless of conditions, passing, etc.). On an open road you can just pass them on the right but in any moderate traffic they cause a lot of problems. Check the plates the next time someone does that, pattern isn’t hard to see.
Roads in West Virginia are basically paved over goat trails, I watched some douche in a pickup take a blind 5 mph turn at about 85mph trying to blow past a small sedan he obviously thought was going to slow and wedged himself in a stream about forty feet beyond the road. Luckily nobody was coming the other way around he turn or it could have been really tragic.
I noticed a bigger increase in www.reddit.com/r/IdiotsInCars submissions in the last year or so. People are really driving like idiots in traffic, let alone what they do on empty roads in the middle of nowhere.
Looks to me like there's a general societal breakdown, also looking at the proliferation of videos of people walking out of stores with stuff they didn't pay for.
But your article also says that SA has major issues with the regulation of alcohol consumption, issues that do not exist in a country like the US (according to the article).
The thing about human psychology is that if you tell someone not to do something, especially something that is not outright harmful to themselves or others, they will yearn to do it.
The answer to alcoholism is to de-glamorize it. Young impressionable minds are susceptible to such glamorization.
If governments around the world are seriously committed to reduce alcohol consumption, better shun it, rather than putting in laws to prohibit or restrict it.
Ultimately, if the people reject it, it will come down. And that is the only way it works.
I wonder if they simply banned alcohol advertising what the effect would be. That was a big thing for tobacco in the 90s. I still remember “joe cool” the camel on the back of my parents magazines.
More seriously,because it would simply be impossible to run these social experiments in normal circumstances.
There are other examples; New Zealand and Australia tested a "closed border" approach, Sweden adopted a "personal responsibility" approach. Some places had curfews. The shere variety and scale of the last two years have generated enormous amounts of data, and matching data to long-term consequences will keep anthropologists busy for years.
And just might inform better choices when the next one happens.
The closed border approach had fascinating consequences.
Little impact on many factors that had previously been put down to population growth.
It decisively proved that overcrowded infrastructure and inflated house prices were definitively supply side problems, rather than demand side problems.
Not sure that was proved at all - at least where I live, demand was almost certainly propped up by significant numbers of cashed up people in the prime of their working life selling up overseas and buying property when moving home. borders would need to be closed for longer to allow that affect to work out before you could truly see how it would be without immigration.
>many countries took the opportunity to run large-scale social experiments under the guise of Covid Restrictions
Regardless of how you define tyranny, how can you be so blithely supportive of rule-by-decree in supposed democracies? Especially for the purpose of running "social experiments?"
Covid Restrictions gained the grudging mandate of the masses, and in many places only by a hair, due to legitimate public-health concerns. Even in that context the subversion of legislative processes should be concerning. Running "experiments" on a non-consenting populace is at least the definition of dictatorship or oligarchy, if the word tyranny doesn't work for you.
> how can you be so blithely supportive of rule-by-decree in supposed democracies
Because that is the reason we life in a democracy with checks and balances implemented. In Germany some decrees were canceled by our (up to the highest) courts, others were declared to be in line with the constitution.
We elect officials (setting the policy) every four years to rule us in our name. So we hand them the right and the power to "rule-by-decree" as long as they do not leave the grounds of the constitution (and we have courts to check against that).
> for the purpose of running "social experiments?"
I actually think (and believe) that most politicians in most countries tried to safe people. As much people as possible while also taking other factors like the economy and the health sector and stuff into account. And yes: They overshot sometimes. Yes, they made massive mistakes. Yes, they sometimes filled their own (or buddies') pockets. Yes, the more this pandemic progresses the less I think our politicians really know what they are doing.
But I never felt, that policies were implemented for the purpose of running an experiment. But the different implementations now offer the possibility to learn from them for the future. Like scientists looking at different implementations of daylight savings time and learning from that. Or different implementations of regulations regarding wearing helmets while driving motorcycles, regarding seat belt usage or even regarding the ability for contraception and abortion.
The fact that we are allowed to disagree and publicly argue against restrictions, to challenge them in court imho shows that we are living in a democracy.
But yeah - keep going on arguing about a straw man (that nobody but you put in place) like:
> Running "experiments" on a non-consenting populace is at least the definition of dictatorship or oligarchy, if the word tyranny doesn't work for you.
No, I was specifically responding to the person who said that it was "cool" that governments used covid resstrictions as a pretext for running "social experiments." I am specifically quoting an individual, not creating a strawman. Read the comment thread I was taking part in carefully for evidence.
For what it's worth, I think many of the covid restrictions were at the time believed to be necessary measures, but that's actually not the debate that's taking place here.
They were "experiments" in the sense that the actual outcomes were predicted (or not) but in normal times would be difficult to achieve at scale.
I'm not suggesting that they were unrelated to the issue at hand - and I'm not implying they were unethical.
I believe most govts acted in good faith, with limited information, and (quite literally) no experience to draw on. Even today we don't really know what the "best approach" was, what we can say though is that a future pandemic will have better data to work with.
Had all countries had the exact same response we would not really know if what we did was best or not. Lockdown, travel restrictions, alcohol bans, closure of businesses, closure of sport, limited social mobility, police enforcement, no enforcement - all these and more were tried in one place or another.
They were experiments with forseen, and unforseen consequences.
Sure there was over-reach here and there, but for the most part it was a best effort response from no known experience.
Not to minimise your experience, but in most countries the actions were not politicised as they were in the US, and were applied to a very much consenting populace.
It was understood this was a temporary health emergency, and the primary goal was to save lives. In most places, most people, saw this as a fair trade-off - and least in the immediate term.
One interesting analysis in years to come will be the effect of politisizing a health emergency as a party-political event, as distinct from there being broad political consensus to the action taken.
Tell that to the families that had loved ones in the Unit 731 experiments?
I'm just saying that by prefacing something with "well since we're in a state of tyranny it would be neat to [do a thing]"... it doesn't always fly and not all data is necessary to have when it comes at a cost of human lives.
I feel maybe too much is being read into the word "experiment". I meant it in a hypothesis-action-result sense.
Every action taken by every govt was in effect an experiment since nothing of this sort had occurred in living memory, and past instances occurred in a very different world.
In SA there was a hypothesis that reducing the burden on the health sector was a priority, and that a significant contributing factor to hospital load was alcohol, hence limiting alcohol consumption (via limiting sales) was worth testing.
The experiment upheld the hypothesis, but at the same time highlighted negative impacts on the alcohol sector as a whole. To determine the best hospital outcome, while balancing industry requirements, a number of approaches short of an outright ban were tested. These outcomes will likely influence policy moving forward and equally provide important data for the next time hospitals need to be protected in this way.
New Zealand experimented with a sealed border, and eradication approach (successful), Australia did the same with somewhat less success. Again the impacts of those policies can be studied for sometime to come.
The opposite of these experiments was to experiment by doing nothing (Sweden for example) - even doing nothing was an experiment.
I'm not saying covid was fun, or that the very real human cost should be minimised, but clearly some countries fared better than others. Being able to understand why that is the case will be really important next time.
>One cool thing about the pandemic is that many countries took the opportunity to run large-scale social experiments under the guise of Covid Restrictions. I expect social scientists will be digging into this data for years to come.
So I wonder how much was learnt from the error rates and signal strength variations from wifi enabled devices in a phased array radar setup in order to track human beings walking around their homes. I wonder what patterns were discovered and if it was possible to discover when arguments and falling outs showed up. What other data was garnered that could predict certain behaviours?
I also wonder what would be discovered which will help with the isolation of space travel, like limited human contact, small human group dynamics, things like that.
It's not like the Prohibition was the first or the last such attempt. The one I'm personally familiar with was Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign. It was also beneficial on paper, with statistically significant improvements in average health etc. But it was similarly flouted in practice. My family lived in an apartment in panel housing at the time, and if you went out onto the balcony and looked around, every balcony around you had some kind of glass flask or jar brewing fruit wine.
The question you should be asking wrt South Africa is how they're enforcing the ban on sales - because people will sell regardless. The general problem with any kind of ban that goes against what a significant part of the society enjoys is that it either goes most unenforced, weakening the rule of law in general; or is mostly enforced, and then you end up ruining numerous lives by running them through the law enforcement grinder.
The alcohol ban on sales was temporary and lasted around 3 months. There was minimal enforcement required - shops simply didn't sell it. The time scale was too short to develop home brewing to any significant degree.
Yes, the effect of a permanent prohibition is well known (illegal alcohol production, which given how easy alcohol is to produce at home is unenforceable) but this was not that.
That's interesting. In my state in the US, government took an opposite approach due to the pandemic to where now cocktails can be ordered "to-go" and curbside. It started as an emergency order and was recently passed as law.
1. you buy 5 gallons of grape juice for ~$20 per gallon.
2. yeast is dropped into your grape juice
3. you come to the store to decant your grape juice into wine bottles and cork them up.
Since no alcohol is bought or sold, you avoid the (very high) taxes on liquor. You end up with ~28 bottles of wine for ~$4 per bottle.
It's not the greatest wine, but it's ok for sangria and cooking, and it's a good story if you hang out with people who like to talk about tax loopholes...