I am starting a hobby thread here because I want to. Simple as. Any hobby is welcome as long as it has to do with building or creating something somehow. The exception is software. Farming, trains, sticker collections, I don't care, share it.
For my own hobby I brew. Last thing I finished was a mead. It had big downs in the brewing process and also I didn't add yeast nutrition at the start so it has a hint of some pungent smell. Stressed yeast, especially due to low nitrogen, can produce some phosphates that give an unpleasant smell and taste but are no risk to health. Luckily enough it only produced enough to give a slight smell and taste that most don't think about or notice unless they know about it. Anyway, I decided to distill some of it. The process I used was freeze distillation, also known as jacking. I made some Honey jack, picrel. How do you go about freeze distillation? It's very simple: Get some PET bottle, empty it, and fill it (not entirely full tho', don't be retarded) with the mead (honey wine, or any home brewed beverage of your choice), then throw the bottle in the freezer. Wait one day. Now you have some ice in there. Get another container that you can use to have the PET bottle upside down in so it can pour and drip out the alcohol. Alcohol doesn't freeze at the temps water does. Also, most chemicals responsible for flavours also do not like to freeze and end up being diluted in the alcohol. When you let it drop do so in the freezer. Wait until all ice is white so you know you got every last drop of alcohol (there is a surprising amount in the ice flakes when they are still stained, don't rush it, let it drop slowly in the fridge. I suppose if you can make it fit in a freezer to drip that's even better). Ok, so lets say you made a mead with 10% alcohol. How do you know what the end result is? Well, you compare how many liters you started with and how many you have at the end. You get an average. So you start with 10 liters and end up with 2 liters. That is 5 times less water. If you didn't stress it and let it drip properly before throwing the ice away you can think of it like this: 10% alcohol > 10 parts alcohol and 90 parts water. Only water was removed > 10 parts alcohol is preserved Only a fifth remains > 20 parts remaining This gives you 10 parts alcohol and 10 parts water e.g. 50%. To go higher is pretty hard.
Alright, no one has interacted. Perhaps I should lower the bar a bit, let's go with anything hobby related (still irl) but not necessarily a hobby for you. For example I did some sewing about 1.2 years ago. I sewed a wizard hat using felt. I also made the decorations on it using felt and my sewing skills which are subpar, since I never really sewed in my life before. I put in some paper to make the pointy end of the hat not collapse and be entirely flat. The staff I hold is also made by hand. It is hazel wood from the garden we have. I let it dry in the sun for a few days to make sure it was dry, and then I started coating it in candle wax, stearin. I dripped it on but noticed that it didn't really impregnate the wood, it solidified too fast. So I put lighter on it to make it melt while on the wood. That worked, the staff gained a coating of wax and got impregnated with it. It is now water proof. The blackishness on the staff is just carbon dioxide/smoke from the fire that's stuck in the wax when it solidified.
The teeth hanging on the staff are elk teeth. I found an elk skull in the woods and played elk dentist. But oh boy let me tell you how fucking hard it was to remove the teeth. I almost gave up after taking a hammer and smashing the head as hard as I dared. It just bounced off like in some kind of cartoon. I couldn't smash the skull or well jaw, to get teeth out. Some really stuck hard. I don't really remember how I got them all out but some I just pulled on the tooth and wiggled and smashed at the same time, and it never got crushed. I think I used pliers on the jaw to try and crack it a bit to make more space for the teeth to move out.
So this was a one time thing I did and thus isn't really a hobby but let's welcome this kind of stuff as well.
Picture 1: Whatever is left of the Elk skull. Picture 2: Close up of the Elk teeth. Picture 3: Me with the hat and the staff. Picture 4: My hat today. Yeah it's been used a lot when grilling in the forest. Also sorry for the blurry mess no idea why cam decided to do this to me.
Anonymous · 2026-08-12 03:56 [#12214][report] >>27041 Good thread, Anon!
So far, I have only ever done a sugar mash (without distilling) once. I plan to make mead (without distilling) and a sugar mash (with distilling). I have a few questions:
1. Have you ever done a sugar mash? Will "jacking" work for it? 2. In general, when brewing, how do you separate the alcohol from the yeast? I tried pouring out the liquid slowly to leave the yeast at the bottom, but it only worked somewhat. 3. Should you separate the yeast before "jacking", or is it redundant? 3. For making mead, do you have any tips or gotchas to look out for? Keep in mind I plan to distill the sugar mash, but not the mead. I see honey as too precious to distill. I would rather drink the whole thing. I don't want to steal the bees labor just to get drunk. :(
>>27196 1. I don't know what sugar mash is. If it is sugar + something for flavour then yes. Jacking it should work as long as it has alcohol.
2.You pour it slowly just like how you described. Doing it fast will make it mix up more. However, you let it age. When it stops fermenting/is really slow, you let it age. The yeast will settle and the drink will clear. The shit at the bottom will be better sludged together as well the more time you let it age. See pic for example of just two or three weeks of aging a mead. Compare it to my jacked mead which is same batch but only aged for one week. You can help it by "cold crashing it", put it in fridge, not freezer, and make it cold. That speeds this up. If you inpatient then wait one week, separate it, and repeat. The bottom sludge will kind of repel the stuff still making the brew murky, but stick harder to it once it settles. I've heard that you should separate it at least once if you want to age it before you let it age for longer.
3. Separating the yeast is by letting it age and do the slow pour is better but it doesn't taste as bad for some reason if you aren't that patient. Not sure why. I always let it age at least a bit and separate it.
4. Use yeast nourishment. Honey has almost no nitrogen and other stuff the yeast needs. If you don't add yeast salt nourishment (not sure about the correct term in English) you can get a somewhat pungent smell and flavour. If it gets pretty bad then it will smell and taste a bit like fart. The yeast produce phosphor stuff when it can't get nutrients. Use a yeast that's made for mead to lower the risk for this. But yeast nutrient salt is probably more important. Personally I use Mangrooves Jack M05 yeast strain.