Five foods that Brody uses to make moonshine
Title: Five foods that Brody uses to make moonshine
Author: Shenandoah Risu
Rating: G
Content Flags: It's 90 proof.
Spoilers: Season 1 "Sabotage" onwards
Characters: Adam Brody, the Destiny Crew
Word Count: 767
Summary: It was the way to go for a quick trip into blissful oblivion...
Author's Notes: Written for prompt #141 at sg1_five_things.
Disclaimer: I don't own SGU. I wouldn't know what to do with it. Now, Young... Young I'd know what to do with. ;-)
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oOo
Five foods that Brody uses to make moonshine
The most potent hooch Brody brewed was made with Purple Sweet Potatoes. At first Brody tried other foodstuffs, but many of them did not contain enough complex carbohydrates and sugars to sustain the fermentation process properly. Dr. Inman, in an effort to determine whether the vile tubers were fit for human consumption, discovered that they were ideal candidates for a still, and so Brody gave up on the orange-fleshed gourd he’d been working on and tried the Purple Sweet Potato instead.
Potato hooch was by no means the most popular of his products. But it was by far the strongest, carrying the highest alcohol content and the biggest hangover quotient. It burnt down your esophagus, set your stomach on fire, warmed your belly for hours on end and then made for some regrettable time spent in the loo.
Still, for many of the Destiny crew it was the way to go for a quick trip into blissful oblivion.
oOo
“They look like kumquats,” Eli said about the small bitter-tasting fruit that nobody but Amanda Perry enjoyed but everybody ate because it’s what they had at the time.
“They’re yellow,” Becker deadpanned.
“Well, yeah, they’re yellow kumquats from outer space… so they’re spacequats.”
And the name stuck. Spacequats surprised Brody as hooch material because of the lightning-quick fermentation, indicative of lots of sugar which seemed once again weirdly illogical, given their natural nasty flavor. Not only was spacequat hooch the fastest to make, it was also the prettiest. It was Chloe who discovered that it glowed a brilliant yellow under ultraviolet light, which prompted many of Destiny’s residents to experiment with various hooches under different kinds of light, but out of all of them, spacequat hooch was the only one to look, well, really cool in a geek sort of way.
oOo
After the embarrassingly popular ketchup schnapps Brody had made due to popular demand he tried his hand at tomato hooch. He was careful in selecting only the worst of the fruit and painstakingly removed every seed so it could be used for planting. Since the grape tomatoes were so small they had a high skin-to-flesh ratio, which once again resulted in high sugar content and speedy fermentation.
However, like the fruit itself it didn’t taste all that good. It wasn’t that it tasted bad as such, just - kind of lame and watery, and the flavor didn’t improve with repeated distillation. However, for people who couldn’t stomach the strong taste of the other hooches tomato hooch was pretty popular.
oOo
No hooch raised more eyebrows than protein slop hooch. It was more of an accident, really. Brody had taken his daily ration of slop into the still room so he could eat it while he soldered a few intricate connections. But, as luck would have it, he got sidetracked and forgot about the slop, and days later he discovered the bowl, slowly and quietly bubbling where he’d left it.
He stared at it for some time and then on impulse processed the nasty concoction in the still. The result was an extraordinarily smooth liquor that maintained its natural vanilla flavor throughout the distillation process. He added some tea leaves later on, and then it looked remarkably like whiskey. Rush was particularly fond of it, although he’d never admit it to anyone.
oOo
Brody’s crowning glory was strawberry hooch. Grown from tiny seeds that somehow had made it to the Destiny in a box during the evacuation, everyone was slaving over the cherished fruits in hydroponics. Like most hydroponically grown foods they were bitter and tasteless, compared to the ordinary supermarket variety, but they still tasted like heaven to the Destiny crew. Stripping strawberries was one of the more arduous tasks in the galley until TJ supplied two pairs of tweezers to pick off the seeds, and after that they had bumper crops of berries; the leaves were processed into tea and the rest of the plant was quite edible as salad greens or a spinach-like cooked vegetable, and of course the runners were always kept to grow new plants more quickly.
Strawberry hooch looked like pale pink Depression glass and it actually tasted like floor-cleaner strength merlot. It was a particular hit with dating couples, and TJ quickly discovered that as a sedative it was beyond compare. Most people - even the sickest - readily accepted a beaker of strawberry hooch and would then promptly turn into docile and cooperative patients.
Medicinal strawberry hooch was reportedly even better than the stuff Brody handed out, but of course that was just a rumor.
Cheers!