Spike Your Juice, Juice to Alcohol Kit - Part 2

From Epic Objects

White Grape Peach Mango

For the second try I went with one of the Spike Your Juice website's recommended juices, Welch's white grape peach mango. I drank and bit of the juice before spiking, just a little, to lower the level in the bottle and it was delicious. I followed the same procedure as before, to review:

• Pour the packet (yeast and cane sugar) into the juice.
• Do not stir.
• Discard the original bottle cap. (I saved the cap as before, intending to use it against the product advice as I did before, since I liked the effect. But I continued to check the capped and refrigerated bottle twice a day)
• Fill out the supplied label and affix it to the bottle. 
• Fill the airlock with water to the fill line.
• Seal the bottle with the airlock and stopper. 
• Store at room temperature.
• Wait 48 hours.

Here's what it looked like on day 2:

Day 2
The first day I began to be worried that it wasn't working. This juice didn't have any foam on top like the other juice did and I worried that I did something wrong. But on the second evening, about 48 hours later, the juice had become somewhat cloudy and when I poured a glass it was fizzy. It tasted very good, still sweet and pretty similar to the original juice taste, but I could just detect a slight alcoholic taste and the sparkling quality made the juice much better. Off to a good start.

Day 3
It was New Years Eve so I made sure we did some spiked juice tasting before we opened the champagne. It tasted great. Still quite a bit like juice, but with a very slightly stronger alcoholic taste. However, I had two glasses (with ice, by the way, which makes the juice taste better) and detected no buzz. And as a drinker, I'm a lightweight. Clearly more fermentation was needed.

Day 4
Late on day 4 and, hey, this juice is tasting very good today. Less sweet but not in a bad way at all. A little more like a grownup beverage and I think I've detected some effects from the alcohol, just from one glass. I'll give what's left one more day and see what that's like. By the way, for these 4 days I've had the juice on the counter with the airlock on it, not refrigerated at all.

Day 5
I still like the taste today, but an odd artificial aftertaste has emerged. I'm wondering if it's because the sugars are being consumed that were masking some odd flavoring. It's not bad enough to ruin the drink, but it's disconcerting. There's only about a glass left so I strained the juice with a paper towel draped in a funnel, washed the bottle and capped it with the original cap that I had saved and put it in the fridge to finish off tomorrow.

Day 6
Today the taste is similar to yesterday. That slight aftertaste is still there, but it doesn't seem as noticeable. Maybe something to do with the juice having been refrigerated since last night. I definitely can tell the alcohol content is higher than a couple of days ago. In my rough and very subjective estimate I would compare a glass of this juice to a half a glass of white wine in terms of how it makes me feel, buzz-wise. Juice all gone.

I would say this juice was a great success. I can't wait to try another one.

At the top of this article I've linked to the double pack of Spike Your Juice. I can't recommend it highly enough. I definitely wished I had bought the double pack instead of a single. It's great to have two bottles going at the same time. Getting a double pack so I can have 3 bottles going is on my list.