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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28218 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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And cannabis is just a plant you can grow. Easily in fact. It even requires fewer tools and resources than making alcohol.

It even requires fewer tools and resources than making alcohol.

This is definitely false, you can make an alcoholic drink by blending fruits/berries and letting them sit for a few days. No need for seeds, soil, fertilizer, regular watering, sunshine, waiting for the plant to flower, etc.

This feels like sophistry. No negative social consequences that result from alcohol will result from people home brewing weak berry wines. The bad stuff, alcoholism etc, happens because of readily available distilled liquor and beer in volume.

Beer of course is not distilled. Even spontaneously fermented beer can have ABVs above 6% (which is a pretty normal beer abv), so you don't even need special yeast to hit this ABV.

Yes but you can't get it in volume from the local corner store, which was the qualifier I put on it. Nobody drinks 64oz of spontaneously fermented homebrew and beats his wife.

We know this because even in countries with significant illegal alcohol problems, no illicit alcoholics are drinking homemade wine or beer in a problematic way. They're going blind from moonshine or bathtub gin.

Making alcohol illegal results in more distilled liquors and less lighter stuff, for the same reason illegal opiates results in stronger opiates being preferred.

Sure, but that makes the argument about "alcohol can't be outlawed because you can just ferment berry juices" rather silly and sophistic as a point of comparison. Sorta like what shinzo Abe zip gun is to gun control. Like yeah you can do it, but gangs in gun controlled countries aren't and haven't been killing each other with gizmos.

I'll always just return to my actual experience: as a teenager weed was illegal period while alcohol was illegal for me. I could text any of half a dozen people and get weed within a day. Getting alcohol was a process.

Counterpoint: legal cannabis has resulted in higher potency products. Highly concentrated cartridges and resins easily available, and higher potency flower as well. Granted, the higher potency flower has been the trend for longer than we've had legal cannabis in this country.

I've both make my own alcohol (cider) and grown my own cannabis. Both have some challenges and different aspects that make them easier or harder than the other.

For the cider I get the apples from a local orchard's roadside stand where they crush the apples into cider and put it in milk style jugs for you. I've processed the apples myself in the past but its a pain. Once I have the soft cider I use a few of these https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K5Z78SC/ fermenting bottles with yeast from the local wine shop. Takes about two weeks to ferment. You can easily screw it up and make revolting vomit cider if your equipment is contaminated. I give some of it to my father in law who makes apple jack out of it. I drink very little personally so 3 gallons last about a year. You can make it at any time of the year but I do in the fall, as that's when the local apples are up. This is the only alcohol I consume.

Cannabis is dead easy to grow and process if all you want is dried flower. You can put effort into preparing the soil, using fertilizer, staking the plants to encourage multiple flowering runners etc. You can also just literally throw handfuls of seeds at your yard. Cannabis is an extremely hardy, robust plant that can overcome some pretty rough conditions. I've seen seeds sprout in wet carpet near a window. With even a small amount of prep: tilling the soil, checking on the seedlings a couple of times, maybe giving them a generic garden center fertilizer, they will do the rest of it on their own. This assumes outdoor growing. Indoor setups are a whole other beast and largely driven imo by prohibition and the need to hide it. I put a fair amount of work into my outdoor plants. I grow them from seedlings in planters inside until they are about 6-8 inches tall them transplant them outside when the weather is foretasted to be nice for a week of so. I prepare the soil well with a tiller and fertilizer, stake them up, and check on them regularly. Its legal in my state so they are just beside the house. 5 plants per person is the limit, so my wife and I grow 10. Curing is easy, I just cut the flowers off in the fall and hang them in the barn for a week. I live pretty deep in the country so I'm not really worried about passers by bothering it. Everyone in eyesight of my farm is a family member anyway.

The cannabis is ostensibly more work, but not that much more. Not really any more than growing tomatoes tbh, which I also do, and peppers and some herbs. What is a bit of work is that I process the flowers into hash oil, which requires specialized equipment (https://www.dabpress.com/products/4x7-rosin-plates-diy-heat-machine) and has a learning curve. Of note, 10 outdoor plants produce a tremendous amount of product for personal use. Each plant can easily output 1.5 lbs of dried flower. With high quality seeds and care, before it was legalized, this was like $30,000 worth of cannabis per year. Honestly its still worth that much now, IF I was part of the legal market, which I'm not interested in. Prices really haven't gone down for the high end stuff. I give about 2/3rds of it away, as wax or oil. For personal use I ingest it in cookies/gummies etc. I haven't actually smoked dried flower in years, I may occasionally vaporize some of the oil.

The cider is less work, but mostly because I produce so little. In equivalent dosage it would probably be more work overall.

Apples are harder to ferment nicely than other fruits/berries due to the high levels of pulp and pectin in them. Every time I make cider dealing with the pulp is a huge pain in the ass, and it varies by apple variety as well. Berries are much easier to manage and generate much less pulp, and since they don't have any pectin, they clear up nicely just standing in the fermenter without the need for fining agents.

Since fruits and berries are and always will be available at any market (unlike cannabis, which in most places and times is a specialty product), and yeast is in the air all around us, there's really no contest here between growing and processing a plant by yourself vs blending some berries and letting it sit.

Having done this, it might be possible to make an alcoholic beverage this way, but usually some degree of intentionality would be required or you’ll produce vinegar, not wine.

Your mileage will certainly vary based on the microbiome in the air and on the berries. There are styles of beer that are spontaneously fermented and can be quite tasty (e.g. lambic), and I've visited family in the countryside that literally just blend berries picked in the woods and make a kind of fruit wine from them that's also pretty tasty. However in my spontaneous fermentation experience at home, off flavors are much more likely.

I've never managed to try it, but the literature on palm wine suggests that palm sap will ferment to a nontrivial ABV (4% or so) in just a couple of hours sitting out unrefrigerated at what I assume are tropical temperatures.

No need for seeds, soil, fertilizer, regular watering, sunshine, waiting for the plant to flower, etc.

How exactly do you get fruits/berries without seeds, soil, sunshine, rain, waiting etc?

You buy them from the supermarket. Obviously.

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