Another giant mess in the kitchen (aka excess fruit management)

Not too long ago, the grapes in the backyard came ripe.  Yum!  We like fruit.
However, the vermin do too.

We don't want to encourage the vermin, so I mass-harvested all the fruit.  This is maybe half of it.

Turning all the grapes into juice required getting every large pot in the kitchen dirty, of course.

Then I was faced with a lot of juice.  It was pretty juice, but there was quite a bit of it.
One of many bowlfuls:

No more jam needed, as we still have some left from last year's crop.  Didn't want to make fruit leather, as there is a bunch of apricot fruit leather from this year's apricots already extant, with more apricot puree in the freezer.  Too much fruit in the house!!!  What to do, what to do....

I drained a couple tablespoons of whey out of the yogurt in the fridge, mixed it into the bowl of juice, and let it sit for a few days under a loose lid.

Ooooh---bubbles!  It turns out you can easily make fizzy lacto-fermented soda out of fruit juice by adding a bit of whey or various other things to get it started.  Sourdough hooch (the liquid that forms on top of a sourdough starter when you are lazy about feeding it) works too.  As does a teeny-tiny bit of champagne yeast.

My first batch.  I neglected to filter this batch, so there were some grape solids in it that needed to be decanted out.

I moved on from grape to other excess fruits.  Lemons from our overly-laden tree, oranges from the other overly-laden tree, grapefruits that my friend Kathleen was trying to unload.  Small amounts of other fruit bits added in (juice drained off of wild blackberries from my mom's visit, apricots, etc.)  All delicious.  The only disgusting one so far was the one made with soaked pineapple skins, which tasted oddly like bandaids.  I suspect that the outside of that pineapple had some sort of cleaning residue on it, as it came from a conventional grocery store.

Eeew.  Fizzy fermented band-aid-flavored beverage.  One can't win them all.  (And we did eat the pineapple, which was good.  It was just the attempted salvage of some good from the bits that were cut off that failed.)

Back to good stuff.  Occasionally, the surface scum looks sort of interesting, but is harmless.  Stir it back in; the end result is still tasty, as the good microbes outcompete the bad ones.

One challenge with this process is that the fermentation process which generates the carbon dioxide likes to keep going and going and going... If you don't want exploding bottles from excess CO2 buildup, you need to keep them refrigerated after the initial rest after bottling.  Given limited fridge space, this means small batches only.

The current fizzy bottles of yum in the fridge are grapefruit and blackberry lemonade.  Mmmmm.