Sometimes you just don’t have the right resources to make a decent drink. But when sober, thirsty minds focus on the problem and humans find some pretty creative ways to turn something unusual into alcohol.
Here are 6 crazy things people use to make booze:
Carrots
All you need is some sugar and yeast and voilà, you have carrot wine. It’s less alcoholic than grape wine, but it still comes in sweet or dry varieties.
Maple Sap
The same tree goo that makes syrup can make spirits. Where there’s sugar, there’s some human trying to make booze out of it. The Vermont Spirits distillery’s Vermont Gold Vodka is a fine example. It’s made from 100 percent maple sap, which is then fermented and triple-distilled. The result is lightly sweet and quite smooth.
Milk
Once again, where there’s sweet, there’s sugar—and the potential to make alcohol. Milk sugar can be extracted from milk and then used to make a sweet, fermented liquid. After filtration, the result is remarkably smooth with a hint of sweetness.
Beets
These root veggies are very high in sugar and there are recipes all over the internet for beet wine. The additional sugar in the recipe is mostly responsible for the fermentation and the beets add a nice, earthy flavour, not to mention that distinctive tongue-staining colour.
Honey
As our opportunistic ancient ancestors learned, some bees can make a hive out of a hole in a tree. Rainwater could then flood the bees’ hives, making a sweet soup. If enough wild yeast could blow in there, it would start the fermentation process. Today, mead – a.k.a. honey wine – can be produced in a controlled environment, like a Brooklyn closet.
Pineapples
Like bananas, pineapples had their moment during the COVID-19 lockdown. With booze bans in countries such as South Africa, the bibulous had no other option but to look at alternatives, sending pineapples sales through the roof. Although you can brew pineapple beer without yeast, most recipes add yeast to speed up the fermentation process and turn the tropical drink into a boozy sip with a kick.
