Turbo Yeast: Sugar Wash Alcohol Leaven

Bread yeast is selected to leaven (raise wheat-based dough), produce a lot of CO2 in a life span of 4-6 hours, and die off. Wine yeast is created in a lab and selected for its ability to produce high alcohol in adverse conditions (like no oxygen, low pH/acidic environment, and high sugar concentration). Yes, you can ferment ethanol with bread yeast, but to make quality wine you would need a special wine yeast.

Wine yeast will produce high ethanol (ferment dry without residual sugar or sweetness), does not produce off-flavors, and bring out the best color and aromas from your grapes and fruits. For more details, please refer to this tutorial 

Turbo yeast is a special strain of saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast that is genetically selected owing to its various abilities like:

1. Fast action. It can make 17-20 % alcohol in 3-7 days (compared to 1 month for a traditional winemaking process)
2. It is better suited for summers (high-temperature brewing of 20-30 degrees Celsius without producing off-flavors or hangover inducing higher fuel alcohols.
3. High inoculation and cleaner crisp taste. The resulting ferment will not taste bready and the yeast will die off and settle in the bottom automatically without the need of fining agents (egg, isinglass, or bentonite) to clear the wine.
4. It is also preferred by distilleries because of ethanol production for neutral spirits. However, please check the local permits and laws needed for moonshine stills before trying to distill whiskey, vodka, rum, gin, or brandy at home.

1. Use extra yeast (3gm per liter will ferment twice as fast as 1 gm per liter. With turbo yeast, you can ferment 18-20% in 3 days.
2. Maintain the temperature between 20 to 25 degree Celsius
3. Add a little quantity of sugar syrup daily rather than all at once. If your recipe calls for 210 gm of sugar per liter, add 70 gm daily for 3 days rather than 210 gm on the first day. This will prevent the dehydrating effect of sugar from slowing down the yeast metabolism.
4. Always hydrate the yeast for 15 minutes at room temperature water (less than 30 degree Celsius temperature) so that it hits your wine running.

Typically bottled home brew beer has a shelf life of 6 months. However, most home-brew beer is consumed within a week to a month of bottling or kegging. However, some people regularly store homebrew beer for up to 6 months successfully. Beyond this, the beer is still safe for consumption, just that it will not taste fresh. However, a couple of factors need to be taken into account to determine the shelf life.

1. Storage temperature: Beer is like wine, higher the temperature the faster is the degradation in flavors.
2. UV light: Even a couple of hours in direct sunlight can ruin a perfectly fresh beer
3. Packaging: Microbrewery Growlers don’t last 2 days because the beer was oxidized during filling. If you see packaging in proper crown sealed glass bottles or stainless steel kegs, 6-12 months life is easy
4. Oxidation: Once you open the bottle, drink within an hour.

Sugar + yeast + no oxygen => Ethanol

Converting sugar into alcohol/wine or ethanol is one of the simplest and oldest food transformation possible. Read about our toddy wine to get the detailed recipe. Essentially, you would take 200gm of sugar in 1 liter of water. Boil it and cool it to room temperature. Then add 1-3gm of hydrated turbo yeast and cover it with an airlock. In 2-3 days the fermentation will be complete. Check the hydrometer to measure the extent of fermentation. The specific gravity would drop from 20% BRIX to 0 Brix indicating all the sugar has converted to alcohol.

Freeze Distillation is a misnomer. There is no boiling, formation of methanol, flammable (explosive) fumes production. Hence there is not much concern for authorities. There is also no law that explicitly bans keeping alcoholic beverages in freezer. However do check with local laws before distillation.

Freeze distillation is essentially keeping the cider, sugar-wash, beer or wine in the freezer. At about -10 Degree Celsius, the beverage becomes a slush. Alcohol acts as an anti-freeze so the freezing point is lower than water. As the temperature is further reduced, more and more water crystalizes into ice and residual liquid turns into higher concentration ethanol. We repeat although this technology is called Freeze Distillation, it actually means Fractional Freezing. The freezing point of ethanol is -115 ^oC. However if you are able to achieve -30degree Celsius, then only one can remove substantial water from your beverage.

Glacial Acetic Acid

For school projects a similar and much easier experiment to follow is making distilled acetic acid at home from vinegar. It is called Eisessig or ice vinegar. Vinegar forms ice like crystals when kept at 4 Degree Celsius. Although the water and ethanol gets left behind, the tartness of your cider and vinegar reduces as the oxidized ethanol gets separated in form of white crystals of acetic acid. One of the reason why ethanol always recommend cold crashing of home brew is improvement in clarity and taste (less sour) due to this simple inexpensive process.

Mangrove Jack’s craft brewer’s yeast sold at arishtam.com is in the dry form. Dry yeast is easy to store, transport, and carry. The wet yeast on the other hand needs to be chilled at all times and has a shelf life of a few weeks (as compared to almost 2 years for dry yeast). As a result for a hobby brewer and even microbrewery dry yeast is much more convenient and easy to use.

Although most manufacturers recommend that you use the yeast directly, but rehydrating the yeast is always advisable for the following reasons:

1. When hydrated, the yeast forms spores and goes into inactive state. By hydrating it in a sugar/wort plus nutrient solution, you give it adequate time and jumpstart to become fully active again.
2. Yeast often dies when expired, mishandled, exposed to humidity or high temperaures during transportation or storage. If you pinch it directly in the wort, it will take 24-48 hours before you can detect yeast inactivity. By hydrating the yeast, you are always 100% sure the yeast is active.
3. Hydrated yeast have a jumpstart over any other contaminents or microbial infection. When the wort is cooled, it sometimes picks up infection from the fermenter or air. If the dry brewer’s yeast is hydrated (good yeast count) they are able to fend off infection by the mere fact that they are more in number and faster in activity.

Process:

1. Take 5-10X of sterlized water (boil the wort or water) (50ml)
2. If you are using water then add some priming sugar or table sugar to make a 5% solution (2.5gm or 1/2 teaspoon). DME or wort can be also used instead of sugar.
3. (optional) add nutrients 1/4gm per 50ml.
4. Boil and cool it to body temperature.
5. Once the solution has cooled to 25-35 degrees celsius then add your yeast (5gm)
6. Wait for 30 minutes to foaming to start and then add it to your beer wort or wine must.

If the foaming has not happened. Then wait for another 30 minutes. If not then the yeast is probably inactive and it might be best to use a backup sachet.