Third world product reviews: Brousse Wine

Today's special edition of TWPR (yeah, I know there are only two) is dedicated to one Kris Webb, brewer par excellence, who helped me with the logistics of this whole affair. Using a very marketable talent honed in the breweries of New Mexico, he has taken the formerly savage PCV custom of making homemade hibiscus wine (hereforth known as "brousse wine") out of the desert, taught it how to speak and act properly, and reintroduced it to high society as a cultivated art form. Kind of like a shitty version of "My Fair Lady." This is the go-to product for those looking to kill the pain of living in a dry country among goats and donkeys and that one person per day who thinks that you came over here solely to dole out visas to the person who lays it on thickest.

Until this past weekend, I had yet to indulge in PC Mauritania's most clandestine custom. The taste? Surprisingly, it's pretty good. Depending on how much sugar gets transmuted into the sweet nectar of deadened feelings, you'll be drinking anything from sugar water to Kool-Aid with a kick. This batch featured a mixture of younger and older vintages, leaning towards youth, and remained somewhat sweet. While you can't taste the yeast (at least, I don't think you can - I have no frame of reference), it will give you a mean case of the runs if you don't let it ferment completely. Be warned.

And just so you can have the whole "African armchair experience," I am providing the recipe below. Not that I expect anyone to really go through with it, but if you do, please let me know how it goes.

Ingredients:

• 20 liters of water
• 1 kilogram of hibiscus leaves
• 3.5 kilograms of sugar
• 4 tablespoons of baker's yeast

The process:

1. Soak the hibiscus leaves in the 20 liters of water overnight. Strain to remove the foliage.
2. Add the sugar.
3. Boil the water for about 10 minutes (this kills any critters that may have wandered in with the hibiscus leaves or sugar, and reportedly improves the taste).
4. Let the water cool, and place it in a gerrycan. Think 20 liter gasoline canister.
5. Boil a small amount of water separately, and let it cool (again, this is a sterility issue).
6. Sprinkle the yeast on top of the cooled water (this rehydrates and essentially preps the yeast to work at maximum efficiency once submerged in the wine-to-be).
7. Let the yeast soak for about 10 minutes.
8. Add the yeast to the gerrycan (you can just dump the water in with it, which is why you only want to use a small amount).
9. Slap a condom over the opening, and place the gerrycan somewhere cool (not your fridge - your goal is to keep the fermentation from topping 75 degree F).
10. If you've done everything properly (which isn't difficult), within 24 hours that condom will be fully inflated with the resulting gases of fermentation. Let the gerrycan sit for about 4 weeks, and you've got yourself 20 liters of palatable homemade wine.

Note:

• Sterility is key. Clean everything that will come into contact with the wine with bleach, and rinse thoroughly, because bleach kills yeast.

Personally, I'm picturing whole families gathered in a Christmas setting (soft-focus camera shot), with small children handling large pots of bleach and boiling water while mom and dad continue to swig their homemade booze, telling the kids that they're just "making sure" the last batch came out well. Happy holidays.