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.

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.

I've been using wild yeast for various beers, wines, etc since 2012

I've made tepache a few times and it will go alcoholic if you leave it too long. if the abv is 2-3+% then it's likely safe to consume (if you're overly concerned you can also check to confirm that the pH is below 4). However there probably won't be any residual sugar and it may not taste all that great.

I made moscato wine from my grapes a couple of weeks ago and then a second wine that fermented on the skins that I pressed last weekend.

My apples have been harvested so I will probably grind and press those either this week sometime or next weekend to make hard cider.

I finally finished picking all the hops (Glacier and Mt Hood/Tettnang) off the bines that I harvested 3 weeks ago, I'm don't have any plans for any sort of fresh hop beer or anything but I would like to maybe brew something soon. I was thinking about a high (50+%) wheat saison while using chopped up wheat straw in the mash for a filter aid and fermenting with some of my wild yeast cultures.

Hops grow better in northern latitudes (within reason), they generally need longer summer days in order to produce flowers. People have successfully grown hops in Scandinavian countries (and not just southern Denmark). You probably can't grow them in Svalbard tho.

it was likely so humans could make booze

Needs more whiskey