MuteDog

The salt definitely phased what was already there, it stopped yeast activity, that's why this ferment remains sweet. If yeast was active it'd eliminate all the sugar quickly.

Wood chips work well, you can also get cubes, that impart the character a bit more slowly, and a lot of people swear by them over chips.

a 5 gallon barrel will impart a ton of wood character to your beer really quickly (compared to a 55 gal or 225L barrel) due to the wood surface area to beer volume ratio. You probably wouldn't want to put a stout into one for an entire year, at least not right away, maybe once you've sent a number of beers through it and stripped out a lot of the wood character from the barrel...

Damn, you could have probably just bought bulk blue raspberry syrup too.

it's possible, I tried making a candy wine once and the chalk from the centers of the atomic fireballs messed it up pretty badly, not that I really expected it to be good, but...

Obviously warheads are sour while atomic fireballs aren't so ymmv

I wouldn't use warheads as their cores are chalky and it'd probably mess with your fermentation pH.

Maybe make Mountain Dew (aka moonshine) out of Mountain Dew?

Thanks! I'm not planing on using hibiscus or rose, I'm wanting to produce a 'gin' with all botanicals grown on my property. Was thinking of using cypress and blue spruce boughs for the 'juniper' (hence the 'gin'), I've got a bit of coriander seed I grew this summer, dried lemon balm, and elderflowers. I've also got mugwort, rosemary, lavender, costmary, mint, and some other stuff. I'm not sure I'm gonna use any of those or not yet.

Instructions about things to not do is as equally helpful as instructions about things to do.

Cool, I'm planning on making a gin soon. Does the elderflower come through at all? I was considering using some in mine.

A number of years back someone posted the idea of pumpkin gin to the homebrewing subreddit. Supposedly some senator arguing against prohibition in the early 1900s claimed you could just hollow out a pumpkin, fill it up with sugar and you'd end up with booze. So I gave it a try. One pumpkin I filled up with apple juice and another I filled with brown sugar. The apple juice pumpkin actually fermented and I got a somewhat drinkable hard cider out of the deal. the sugar one just turned to sludge and grew mold.

Another thing I tried was to make my own amylase producing mold using millet and rice cakes and ginger root to inoculate it. They grew mold (some of it white, some of it green) and I used them to inoculate some steamed rice that sort of fermented. It went sour of course, and it ended up tasting a lot like lemon juice, so I must have gotten some citric acid producing mold in the mix as well.

You could probably grow horehound or costmary in pots on a porch or deck, I grow them in my garden but I don't think their root system is too huge and they don't get big like mugwort or gigantic like hops. Obviously coriander works in pots, so that's another option.

yeah, you can back sweeten it, whether it tastes bad for other reasons is really going to depend on what sort of flavors the wild yeast and bacteria produced. Good luck!