the following is a post I left on alt.vacation.Las.Vegas, cause they know me there, but then since you guys are in the hobby, I thought I'd post it here also just in case it turns out I made something poisonous. If you have time, please read and let me know.
Thanks.
---------------------------
Subj: billb gets into wine
So last year we went into the whole deal of billb's ice machine and how it requires a drain etc.
This waste water got me to thinking, gee that's good water, how can I use it for something else before tossing it? I thought, an aquarium full of plants would be nice. I bought a tank, some PVC and went to work. Well, the gist of it is, the water from the IM goes to a small trash can with a pump, and with some float switches (made from old pinball machine parts and aspirin bottles) and a latching relay water gets pumped via a tee to one of two places, either the tank or the drain. If it goes to the tank it goes thru a filter from an old RO system. When the level in the tank starts to rise, a self filling siphon deal I hooked up dumps water back to the trash can. It all goes round and round and out, you get the idea. Plus when the pump cuts off, the last of the water in the fill hose pushes back thru and backwashes the filter. Total aquarium water change automation. My kind of deal.
What does this have to do with wine you ask? Nothing, except this, in reading about aquarium plants -- on this here internet in general and Usenet in particular -- I came upon advice suggesting that to get plants to grow well you need lots of CO2 in the water. This means spending big bucks. Well, you know me. But they also said you can make a DIY deal using sugar, yeast and a 2 liter bottle. The CO2 is then bled off to your tank. You can look all this up yourself. I improved on this notion by buying one of those action toys, you know the kind, a doodad, in this case an alligator head -- it was the cheapest -- (but could be a cannon, treasure chest, sinking ship, whatever), fills up with gas, rises, the gas disperses and the thing collapses again. I rigged this up so that the slow forming gas would get some extra time to disperse into the water. . But the point is, it didn't take billb long to remember that sugar and yeast make more than just carbon dioxide, they also make ALCOHOL!! Black gold, Texas tea. I'd had the CO2 generator for a little over a week before I worked up the nerve to give this cloudy brownish mix a taste test. Just out of curiosity mind you.
So I uncapped the messy looking bottle, poured a little of the mess into a small glass (I had poured off the yeast foam at the start). Recapped the bottle quickly so as not to disturb too much the -- CO2 for the plants generation process -- and then picked up and looked at the glass. Cloudy and light brown. I checked the bouquet. All yeastish. I actually like the smell of baking bread so this was not a particular turn off, but it didn't look good. I gave it a taste. Holy shit, this is alcohol no doubt about it! Then, I mixed in some grape juice I had, and to be honest, I would not be able to tell the difference between my mix and Gallo Rose. So I went to the library and read up on wine etc for several hours and it occurred to me that it would be cool to get slightly drunk off some "home brew" -- just once.
That was yesterday.
Right now, ten thirty roughly, I've had several of these drinks, and have a slight buzz on as a result. So, to all you cheapskates out there, you know who you are, you read newsgroups, if you want to get drunk for next to nothing, now you know how!
billb