Reddit mentions of SocalHomeBrew Plastic 3 Piece Airlock (Pack of 3)

Also, it's incredibly simple to make. Here is a very basic recipe to make cider. I would recommend using a glass bottle and a real airlock like that to make it, simply for sanitary reasons.

I'd look into something like this with this with this. So that's $11.50 plus shipping, which at worst would be a total of $20 for 640 ounces of hooch.

If you always keep your hooch at room temperature, you should be able to pour out about 60 oz into another bottle, drink that, then pour new juice on top of the four ounces of remaining old hooch, and the whole process should start over again. Keep on top of it, and you can perpetuate the whole fucking thing.

6.5gal plastic fermentor - $17.88 (Don't bother with glass fermentors!)

6.5gal Bottling Bucket - $18.81

Hydrometer - $12.99

3 3-piece airlocks - $5.00 - trust me, they'll break.

stopper not needed with plastic fermentor

Bottle filler - $5.09

10 ft 3/8th inch tubing - $10.99

Auto siphon - $8.76

don't need a bottle brush with plastic fermentor

144 bottle caps - $5.78

Use any pure sugar for priming - just calculate it right. I use cane sugar without issue.

Wing bottle capper - $15.48

Dial thermometer not really needed if you're slapping on an adhesive one, but definitely get this for a hot liquor tun if you're doing that.

Wine thief - $11.20

I never used a funnel or fermentor brush - you can use anything to clean but I suggest Oxyclean rinses

32oz Star San - $20.70

Adhesive Thermometer - $4.84

Total Cost: $137.52. Not ridiculous savings BUT you get 32oz of star san instead of 4oz of io-star which will last you years and sanitizer is expensive. You get a plastic fermentor instead of glass which is so much easier to clean and keep light out. Glass carboys are good for aging and aging is good for wine or special beers. Focus on simple ales that don't require it first.

The real savings come when you do all grain and make your own equipment. You can save $137 alone if you buy a big stainless steel pot and slap on a dial thermometer with a ball valve.

It's easy. EASY. It's not like the sweet hornsby's stuff. IT's drier and closer to beer.

If you wanted to experiment I'd buy a gallon or two of apple juice, like tree top. You don't want anything other than ascorbic acid as a preservative, a packet of chapagne yeast. Like this (http://www.amazon.com/Champagne-Yeast-10-Packs-Dried/dp/B00434CB74) You only need one and they're usually about .55 a shot.

Get an air lock like this: http://www.amazon.com/Piece-Plastic-Airlock-Sold-sets/dp/B000E60G2W/ref=pd_bxgy_gro_img_z.

Take your juice and pour yourself a small glass to give it a little airspace.

Take the lid and a drill bit and drill a hole in the juice cap sized right for the air lock to fit into the lid tightly. The plastic is soft so you can force it to get a tight seal. I used a pocket knife. If you want to save the headache, you can spend $2 on a rubber bung to fit the container lid.

Put a couple table spoons of sugar and dissolve it into some warm water. Add, I don't know, maybe a quarter of the packet of yeast. THat little packet is usually for five gallons. Eyeball it.

Let it set and get a little bubbly then add the measuring cup of liquid to your juice jug. Recap it with the air lock and enjoy. YOu can put distilled water or booze into the airlock. It doesn't matter which.

Then you wait.

After a week taste it. If you like it, drink it. If it doesn't taste hard enough wait a few more days. AFter you do the first one, you'll want to do two gallons then five. A gallon goes pretty fast. When it gets to where you like the hardness and sweetness of it, put it in the fridge with the airlock on it. IF you cap it while it's still actively fermenting you could get too much co2 built up in the bottle and have a problem.

Seriously talking about $15 at the MOST to start up and after that, it's the cost of yeast and apple juice.

PM me if you have any questions. I'm not an expert, but I do okay.

Yup, that's probably your problem then. I highly recommend a simple airlock like this:

https://www.amazon.com/SocalHomeBrew-Plastic-Piece-Airlock-Pack/dp/B000E60G2W

There are other methods you can use, but this is the simplest and least likely to blow up. If you want a really basic set-up to get started, just get an empty two-liter soda bottle, poke a hole in the lid to fit the airlock and then brew your kombucha with that. You might want to pasteurize the kombucha before you add the champagne yeast to minimize the possibility of introducing unwanted yeast strains and bacteria, but that's up to you. You'll probably get alcohol either way.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Compleat-Meadmaker-Production-Award-winning/dp/0937381802

Start there if you look to make future batches. Also, I wouldn't have used distilled water. Spring water is better. Yeast needs vitamins and minerals. I would also use better yeast in the future. Lalvin D47 is a good mead yeast. I'd replace your baloon with an airlock. They are really cheap. http://www.amazon.com/Piece-Plastic-Airlock-Sold-sets/dp/B000E60G2W

I'd keep what you have out of direct sunlight (so in a closet or throw a blanket over it) and I'd keep it at 70 degrees F.

This is an airlock:

http://www.amazon.com/Piece-Plastic-Airlock-Sold-sets/dp/B000E60G2W

You fill it up to the little line with sanitizer or vodka and it allows the CO2 being generated by the yeast to bubble out, but nothing from the outside to invade. If you can find one, you'll need a stopper that'll fit your 2-liter bottle that has a hole in it the right size for the airlock. If you can't find one, you should maybe loosely cover the top of the 2-liter bottle with sanitized tinfoil.

I'm sure the mix is fine; the pressure just built up. The fermentation process creates CO2.

The Lactobacillus bacteria responsible for the fermentation are facultative anerobics, and fermentation works better without oxygen. If you like you can punch holes in the lids and glue in some airlocks which can be found at winemaking supply shops.

Amazon might not be ideal for anything but the airlocks, but here goes:

Airlocks, pack of 3 for $5.39 at the moment.

Lids, probably available for the same or less at your grocery store.

As for grommets, the hardware store is your best bet. They're classed by their internal and external diameters. Internal diameter (ID) is what you're going to squeeze the airlock stem into, external (ED) is the size of the hole you've drilled in your lid. The ones I use have an ED of .5 inches. I don't remember the ID, but that's more flexible. Easier to jam a tapered stem into a rubber hole than it is to make the grommet fit into an inflexible hole in a plastic lid.

Just match the ED to whatever drill bit you're using, and you'll be fine. Oh, speaking of, none of this is going to work without a drill. But the cheapest drill you can find will work just fine. I like a spade drill bit for making clean holes in plastic lids, but other types will work just fine. If need be, you can remove burrs left in the hole with a hobby knife or file.

I'm afraid I'm made this all sounds harder than it actually is. It comes down to:

1. Drill hole
   
   
2. Put grommet in hole
   
   
3. Put airlock in grommet
   
   If you attempt this and have any trouble, feel free to PM me. I stumbled a bit with this at first and would be happy to help you DIY it.

Are you looking for a recipe that specifically uses ginger bug? I've only done a little fermentation as far as food, but I've done a little more of beverages. If you seal your concoction right after bottling, you can put it in the fridge as soon as it's carbonated and it will not have produced much alcohol (based on my limited experience with homebrewing). The fridge will stop it from carbonating as long as it's below 45-50 F-ish, so you want to leave it at room temp until it carbonates.

If you're concerned about how much alcohol it produces, I recommend making a small batch and bottling it in 2 containers. Seal one so it carbonates and give the other one a bubbler so it won't carbonate. When the sealed one finishes carbonating, you can check the alcohol level with a hydrometer (do you have friends who homebrew? I bet you could borrow theirs). I assume the carbonated one will have a similar amount of alcohol. Note: you do need to measure with the hydrometer both before and after fermenting to know the alcohol content. Plenty of resources online to find the calculation. Edit: I forgot to say - check the alcohol content of the non-carbed bottle as the carbonation will mess with your hydrometer readings.

If you're willing to not use your ginger bug, read on!

This recipe uses bread yeast to carbonate (is that heresy on this sub? I've not spent much time here). It takes just a day or two to carbonate then you put it in the fridge to stop the yeast. Tastes pretty good!

From some personal experimenting, the flavor ratio I like is:

• 10g sugar
  
• 10g ginger juice
  
• 20g lemon juice
  
• 140g water
  
  This quantity isn't much (maybe 3/4 c?) but the ratio should scale up. I was playing around with tablespoon-type amounts because I didn't want to go through loads and loads of ginger. For the ginger juice, I grated the ginger with the grater blade on my food processor (had to stop to pull fibers out of the holes every so often) and then hand-squeezed the juice out of the pulp.
  
  It's fairly ginger-spicy (which I find good) but not overpowering. You can always start with less water and add more as necessary. I used this lemon:ginger ratio because more lemon made it taste like ginger-flavored lemonade (good, but not my goal) and more ginger made it taste like disinfecting floor cleaner (also not my goal). I played with sweetness by making a light syrup (25 g sugar to 100 g water) and trying varying levels of that in the final mix.

Molds, fungi and yeasts are all around us, absolutely. They're everywhere. If you want to do an experiment, you can open a bottle of fruit juice for a day or so and after that day, fix an air lock to the opening. It won't take too long before you see air being forced out of the bottle through the air lock. That's local yeasts that found your juice while you left it open, eating the sugars in the juice and breaking them down into alcohol and carbon dioxide. The alcohol stays in the liquid while the CO2 escapes through the airlock. If you choose to use grape juice you may have drinkable wine by the time it's done.

Before you pull the trigger on that, there's a groupon for a homebrew set:

http://www.groupon.com/deals/gx-midwest-hydroponic-atlanta

It's the basic kit plus brewing ingredients, PLUS a $25 coupon. The kit you linked also includes:

-Carboy, if you really want to get it. Honestly, for a first batch, you can get by without one and just do a single stage fermentation, but it's recommended to get a secondary. My first batch was an extract that spent ~2 weeks in a primary then straight to bottles. Came out great. There's a good deal at Amazon right now on a 6 gallon glass carboy. Also add a bung and Airlock

-Bottles. Drink some beer, keep some bottles. If you want to buy them, get 48 for a 5 gallon batch (about $25) or go cheap and get some plastic PET bottles. Also a good option. See: every argument of plastic vs. glass for a comparison.

-Large stock pot. For a first extract, you won't need more than a 2 gallon boil, so you can get by with as small as 12 qts. A cheap 12 qt pot can get you started.

Airlocks

One of my other airlocks has broken (cat jumped on the bucket of fermenting mead and attacked the bubbling airlock), so I am down to making one bucket at a time right now. A new airlock would go far towards allowing me to make enough mead to gift to all my friends/family for the winter holidays.

I've considered buying the e-z caps too. But then I realized it's essentially one of these airlocks with a convenient screw top attachment to fit on a standard 2 liter bottle and some yeast. If you're trying to go cheap, it might be worth putting together the few pieces necessary to DIY, add some rubber stoppers and a gallon jug of juice and you're pretty much good to go.

In fact, I might just buy all that stuff now...

Edit: It'd probably be cheaper at a local homebrew shop, none of these links I put in here actually come from Amazon so you can't get combined or Amazon Prime shipping. :(

Another option is to use airlocks for the second phase

http://www.amazon.com/SocalHomeBrew-Plastic-Piece-Airlock-Pack/dp/B000E60G2W/ref=zg_bs_979848011_1

the only thing with these kits i didnt care for was the airlock that comes with them. most come with a "S" shape airlock, they work just fine i just dont like them because you cant really clean them well. might want to pick up a 3 piece like this.
https://www.amazon.com/SocalHomeBrew-Plastic-Piece-Airlock-Pack/dp/B000E60G2W/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1464846742&sr=8-1&keywords=3+piece++airlock

You could try a 3 piece airlock like this. Mine makes a little noise but from 5 feet away I cant hear it.

https://www.amazon.ca/SocalHomeBrew-Plastic-Piece-Airlock-Pack/dp/B000E60G2W

This is the airlock. The reason I can't brew in the winter is that it's too cold for me to sit outside for two hours making my mash and then my boil. -15 Celsius is a little crazy to be doing anything in outside.

I used those for a while and had siphoning issues I switched to these http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B000E60G2W?cache=0def084219be6974be04a3df0f07f8de&pi=SY200_QL40&qid=1408932109&sr=8-3#ref=mp_s_a_1_3 and haven't had a problem since