Making fruit alcoholic is pretty easy, but it seems most fruit based hard drinks taste awful or are really low in alcohol, why did beer become the favourite and why don’t we see more options on shelves?
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She short answer is that you can store grains and use them whenever you want. Fruit has a limited shelf life.
Additionally, when you make alcohol from fruit you have a very limited range amount of time to pick it and start the fermentation process.
I used to be the cellar master of a winery. When it was time for the grapes to be harvested it was time *right now*. Even a single day more would result in a wine what was problematic.
Once picked and dried grains stay in essentially the same condition for as long as you keep them stored. This gives you the opportunity to make beer any time you want. With fruits you have 1 chance each year and that’s it.
That’s not to say that ancient people didn’t make alcohol from fruits, they absolutely did, as well as honey (which has some of the same advantages as grains in terms of shelf-life), but it was on a much more limited and seasonal capacity.
An experienced beer maker will have made beer hundreds of times. An experienced winemaker will have made wine maybe 10s of times (note, that’s 10 seasons, within each harvest they will make many different lots of wine depending on the grapes, ripening times, etc).
Regrading alcohol content, that’s determined by the initial sugar content of whatever you’re fermenting, and yeast can’t survive in high alcohol environments. With grains you can keep cooking and concentrating the wort (the fluid from the cooked grain mass) and increasing the sugar content by extracting more and more of it and cooking off the water. With fruit you’re limited by the sugar content of the fruit. The ratio of sugar to alcohol conversion is *roughly* 2:1 (actually less), so taking something like apples, which have a sugar content of 11-18% you’re never going to get more than 5-9% alcohol, and usually far less due to the need to pick based on other factors like flavor, acidity, etc, not just sugar as well as the fact that some of the alcohol will evaporate. Most apple ciders are in the 4-6% range. Grapes are pretty high in sugar (wine grapes, not eating grapes) and can be as high as 25% sugar at harvest time (sometimes even a little bit higher), which gives an alcohol of around 12%. Most fruits are more in the apple range of sugars, or less, so you have a built-in cap on how strong your alcohol can get.
18% is about as high an alcohol percentage as you can get via fermentation, after that the alcohol the yeast is producing winds up killing the yeast. It takes a very vigorous yeast to get to that point, most strong yeasts cut out closer to 12-14% alcohol, and some much earlier. You can get stuck fermentations, where there are still fermentable sugars, but the yeast simply can’t ferment them any more.
If you want stronger alcohols you have to start doing things like distilling or freezing and pouring off the unfrozen alcohol.
In the past all the yeasts used were wild yeasts, so you never really knew what kind of yeast you were getting, or how robust it was. When people found ones that worked well they’d save the yeast, but keeping it alive means constantly feeding it, or doing some careful washing and separation, followed by drying it. Even in the latter case the yeast doesn’t remain viable for long.
Additionally, when you cook the grains to make beer you sterilize them, killing off unwanted spoilage bacteria, fungus, etc. With fruits you can’t do that, the fruits are used raw, so you run a much higher risk of having other things contaminate your fermentation and ruining it.
In short, there are a lot of factors, and making alcohol from grains has an enormous number of advantages.
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