Alcohol

Alcohol is ludicrously easy to make at home. Prisoners make pruno using fruit, sugar, a sock and a plastic bag. The finished product can have have up to 14% alcohol.

While I was doing research many people in the community though it would make a great barter tool, a good spirit lifter or even a disinfectant, but we are mainly going to use it for near to middle term food storage. Being able to shift your overly abundant fresh grown produce from summer to the dead of winter will be a life saver. Of course this is only reasonable if you have enough land to grow an excess of food.

One of the biggest problems I imagine for a long term SHTF situation is needing to grow everything you and your community need to survive.

A good start would be making your own Hard apple cider. It's easy to convert into apple cider vinegar, and the ingredients are readily available, or able to be grown locally.

While growing apples for Hard Apple Cider (or any other type of fruit) is easy here in Ontario, other options for sugar, alcohol and vinegar might be needed.

Unless you happen to have a fruit orchard ready to go during an emergency, it's going to take you a few years to get up and producing. Not good if things are crashing around you.

In good times we can easily convert the carbohydrates in corn, hops and wheat to alcohol, but this takes amylase, an enzyme that converts carbohydrates into sugar. Without amylase the sugar is locked away and unusable.

One option might be keeping a large supply of amylase on hand 'just in case', but I have no idea how long it lasts.

There are two very interesting options to keep in your back pocket: Sugar Beets and Sweet Potatoes. Both of these mature in 90 days and are grown locally.

A quick word of warning:
I would be very wary of drinking anyone else's homebrew moonshine until someone else has tested it out for a while. It is easy for beginner distillers to make the mistake of forgetting to discard the foreshot, which can lead to blindness or death from methyl alcohol poisoning.

I'm pretty sure this will be a common occurrence for a while when things get bad and people start experimenting with producing moonshine themselves.

If you or someone you care about starts to get sick from methyl alcohol poisoning, the best / most available course of action is (counter intuitively) to drink a large amount of alcohol from a reliable manufacturer (free of methanol).. Any type should do... Beer, wine, vodka etc. Just get the ethanol into the victim.