All right, you want to make some great homemade wine, but you do not have the money for all of the equipment, ingredients, nor do you have months to wait! It's all right though; thanks to no little ingenuity (and sometimes some strong taste buds), you can make wine in your home using the most basic of household materials.

Making easy and fun homemade wine is based on the fact that at the end of the day, alcohol is fermented sugar and to ferment anything, all you need is yeast. The fancy equipment is used to make fancier wine; if you just want something fast and dirty, then you can use fast and dirty techniques. The results will not be award winning, but you will have wine that can be used either to drink or cook with and you will have it with far less time and effort than the people who use every last piece of equipment on the market.

So what do you need? Well, the recipes differ a bit, but it boils down to a sterilized container (milk jugs are a favorite, though you could also go for a glass jug if you want to avoid the plastic flavor), a balloon to hold the gas, fruit juice (not from concentrate is best), sugar, yeast, and cold water. However, from there, your experiences may differ. You should filter out the wine once it's done aging so you don't have any bits of sugar and yeast floating around and you should store the wine somewhere cool, but not too cold. Depending on what kind of juice you use, you'll have to adjust the sugar; for example, cranberry wine will require more sugar. Finally, keep in mind that this sort of wine is strong and so you'll have to get used to it! Homemade wine of this caliber takes between three and six weeks to finish; you can tell it's done when the balloon has deflated.

Not only is this sort of wine easy to make, but it's also entertaining. You can see the wine fermenting via the balloon; as it ferments, the balloon will inflate and when it's done the balloon deflates. Plus, you can feel like bootlegger, without actually being one; all in all, a fun process! And since you won't be using expensive equipment or ingredients, you can experiment with all different flavors of wine and if something doesn't work out, you won't feel as though you wasted anything.

If you want to make fun and easy home made wine, then you can do it with far more ease and less money than you would have thought. Making home made wine should be fun and it's a lot more fun if you aren't stressing out about the money you had to spend on equipment or ingredients. It may seem like it won't be good wine or worth drinking, but you'll be surprised at the results; though it may take some experimentation to get it to the point where you'll look it! All in all though, it's well worth trying to make homemade wine with only the most basic of materials, especially if you don't have a lot of money to burn.