A few years ago, we made a lot of wine. I stomped on the grapes and everything- much to BAH's disgust. (My feet were clean!) We made grape wine from the grape vine in our back yard, and
mead from a huge thing of honey we got at a farmer's market. I think we were riding our bikes by this guy selling honey, if I remember right. Then BAH picked all the flowers from our weeds and made dandelion wine.
A few more years back, we brewed our own beer. This was in Pueblo, Colorado. We had a little two story house there, and brewed it on the stairs, because it was easy to get it to go down from one bottle to the next. We spilled a lot of beer on those steps, and I remember our house smelling pleasantly like a pub for months to come. We grew our own hops, too. Hops are very pretty plants. The beer was very heavy and almost non-alcoholic. It was like eating a meal, drinking a pint. You couldn't get drunk off of it because you could never drink enough before being terribly full. It was also very bitter. But I liked it, just because we made it.
The wine is better, but varies greatly in quality. The grape wine is okay. Some of the Dandelion wine went bad. The mead, though! Fantastic! And so alcoholic, too!
Mead takes five years to get good, though, so if we make some more now... we'll have more in five years!
All of this self-reliance stuff takes some patience.
I think we were gearing up for this move to the country for a long time, without realizing it. We made mead five years ago.
