liqour / shine distillation - questions tips & tricks

[A2Z&NBETWEEN]

brandy, whiskey, rum....so many questions, small batches with the cooker distiller thingy

 

[twotoomany]

You probably can, but I wouldn't. Asking for problems with your still. I have a still myself, so feel free to ask away.

Brandy is the easiest. Cheap white wine (chardonay works well) in the still, run twice, will get you around 140 proof brandy. Age it in oak chips for a week or two, then water it back. If you want to get into making a mash or wash to run, it's a little more complexed, but still pretty simple.

Ps...distilled alcohol has no color and very little flavor, so even if you did distill a bunch of beer, its likely to just taste like vodka. Really strong vodka.

 

[A2Z&NBETWEEN]

wut chu think about distilling that home made sugar wine?

 

[twotoomany]

I've used 5 gallons of spring water, 12lbs of corn sugar and yeast. You HAVE to be sterile and use an airlock on the top. Otherwise bacteria can kill your yeast, ending fermentation prematurely. Once it's done fermenting I run in through the still twice. The first 150ml if the first run is unusable. It's best used as lighter fluid. It contains a lot of nasty chemicals. You'll need a hydrometer to test for alcohol percentage so you know when to stop collecting and what to keep/what to save to run again later.

 

[paranoid android]

I have never made moonshine myself but alot of my friends have and it is still pretty big around here. The most common moonshine here is homemade screech which is just homemade rum. Their is a really awesome tasting rum called screech but it's regular rum not shine. Rum moonshine still has a rum taste to it as it's made out of molasses and it goes awesome mixed with coke or Pepsi. It's basically like regular white rum only a hell of alot stronger. I was quite the drinker when i was younger and one time i grabbed a bottle of what i thought was rum from my uncle. As it turns out it was moonshine instead and it had such a burn to it that it literally took my breath away and had me running for water.

Some people just use water, sugar and yeast as their mash and it tastes pretty much like vodka if you double distill it. Some of the sugary taste can remain in it depending on how strong it is. Basically people use whatever is around and cheap to make shine. People here used to grow their own vegetables alot and they would make moonshine out of potatoes which basically yields a very strong vodka. Distilling homemade wine was also another trick to get good moonshine.

All this talk of moonshine is makin me thirsty

 

[Venrak]

^Aha!

You just gave away your location. Or at least, I just figured it out.

Screech is potent stuff.

 

[electrodevo]

Ps...distilled alcohol has no color and very little flavor, so even if you did distill a bunch of beer, its likely to just taste like vodka. Really strong vodka.

I have tasted distilled homebrew beer (a bad batch of homebrew that someone basically "saved" by distilling it) and it was closest to scotch in taste, which makes sense. If you stick with more premium beer (all malted barley), the mash for this is kind of similar to scotch whiskey. Beer mashes often have hops or caramelized / roasted malted barley, while a scotch mash usually is strictly simple ordinary malted barley period. But still, it's "close enough". For best results, you'd probably want to stick with stronger, malt-forward beers, I'd think (not sure if hops would go well in liquor. An interesting experiment would be a non-hop beer distilled, eg Fraoch which is a beer spiced only with heather and sweet gale.)

Non-barley beers also might be interesting in itself, as other forms of malt whiskey (American, Canadian, etc.) use other various grain mixtures. Most beers however are a good percentage malt barley, so even with something like your standard non-lite American lager (with a good % of corn), I bet you are still going to end up with something more malt whiskey flavored versus all-corn whiskeys like Kentucky bourbon, Jack Daniels, etc. The "interesting experiment" to me would be something like a German wheat beer distilled (German wheat beers use a heavy percentage of malted wheat... there are *very* few wheat whiskeys around for comparison...).

Buying beer at the store to distill it is probably an extremely expensive way to go about this, of course. I imagine these are better thought of as "what-ifs" scenarios for mashes (or, as in the case where I had it, you brew some homebrew and it turns sour). I think you wouldn't get good results with a cheap "lite" beer, as much of the carbohydrates have been enzymed away. It'd be a lot of effort for a vodka-like product, I would think.

 

[paranoid android]

^Aha!

You just gave away your location. Or at least, I just figured it out.

Screech is potent stuff.

Well your from Montreal so it would be rather easy to figure out where i am from by that post. Though screech is available in some other Canadian provinces particularly Ontario and Alberta though only certain liquor stores stock it and i only saw the 26oz bottles up in Toronto. I didn't see any flasks, 40ozers or 60ozers of screech up there. The screech that is commercially made and found in every liquor store here is just a pretty good dark rum ( it has a almost purple color to it actually) that has a sweeter taste to it then most other rums. The only brands of rum i like nearly as much as screech are Bacardi dark, Bacardi 151 proof (talk about strong shit ) and old sams. Screech in liquor stores is very different from the homemade moonshine called screech. The screech that you can get at any liquor store here is just 40% alcohol so it's no stronger then your average rum.

Screech moonshine on the other hand will knock you on your arse pretty damn quick if you aren't used to drinking alot or if you don't mix it in with coke or pepsi that right way. If you drink it too fast it tends to hit you all at once like vodka does. Me and a friend of mine got blind drunk on it one night and we ended up in a argument and eventually a fight or atleast we tried to fight each other but it's hard to do when you can barely walk or see. The only damage we did to each other was by falling around when we where trying to kick the shit out of each other. A friend of mine used to make screech moonshine and along with tasting pretty damn good it was also really really potent. Well it tastes good if you make it right anyway . Occasionally you will find old stills by streams and rivers that people just left there after they where done cooking the liquor. It's not as popular as it once was (the younger crowd don't seem to be as industrious as we were) but a good many older peope still make it. We would trade anything from Salmon and other fish to weed for moonshine off people years ago. we rarely had the money to buy anything other then a flask of rum, whiskey or vodka so moonshine, homemade wine, homemade cider made from the crab apples that grow around here and homemade beer where very economical ways to get drunk.

Another way to distill booze is freeze distillation where you chuck it in a freezer or if it's really cold in winter just chuck it out in a snow bank. That would work better in central Canada then where i live as it usually just hovers around the freezing point in winter here now. This method of distillation is very hard on the head the next day as along with concentrating the ethanol it concentrates the methanol. Using this method to give cider a extra kick pretty much ensures a nasty headache the next day as cider has a higher methanol content then other booze. You also won't get it nearly as strong as you will with a still. I have heard of people using it for beer and cider and apple jacks which is a homemade cider popular in New England is made this way. I have yet to use this method but i may give it a go sometime.

 

[A2Z&NBETWEEN]

thanks to all for consideration and input ... i found every comment to be quite incitefull, peculiar, and unique(as is the hooch)...one luv thanks again

 

[bronson]

Moving this BDD --> SO seeing that alcohol discussion is allowed there, and you might get some more interesting thoughts.

 

[Josair]

My father used to distill grappa (pomace brandy) for a while. It's legal here if it's for personal use, and we still have a 50 liters copper alembic.
The question is: what do you want to produce? Cheap moonshine or something that tastes good?

Anyway, if you're controlling the whole process I would pay attention to the fermentation: do some research and find a strain of yeast with high alcohol tolerance and good or neutral taste, some nitrogen supplement/yeast energizer and whatever else you need. If you do everything correctly you could end up with something around 14-15% abv and little or no presence of bad alcohols. I do not know what's a cooker/distiller thingy, but if it is small (like, less than 5 liters) you will produce so little of the end product that you might find the whole endeavour unrewarding.

Single distillation (taking care to cut off the head and tail) and a bit (some months ) of aging with wood chips or in a barrel could give you something drinkable if you start with corn syrup/sugar, but I think I would try to distill once, infuse herbs/fruits and distill again. On the other hand, I really like fruit brandies (and here they can get quite expensive), so I would try to get peaches or something and start from the beginning.

And be careful: distilling was fun, but everything ended after one day when overpressure built inside the distiller, the cap literally blasted off and my father (luckily it was not me ) got a few liters of boiling liquid on his leg, causing a nasty (and quite widespread) burn and a number of days of cursing when changing the medication

 

[paranoid android]

^ Your dad got off easy cause if a still blows up it can cause really severe burns or death. A guy here was cookin moonshine in his shed and got pretty damn drunk while he was doing it. He decided to light up a smoke while he was distilling and boom he went and was blown right out of the shed door or right through the door. His face was black and every hair was burnt off his face and most of them off his head but he got no serious burns thankfully. So besides looking funny for a few months after it wasn't too bad. You really have to becareful when your distilling it as it only takes one wrong move to blow the fucking thing up and have it go off like a bomb.

I never thought of making a fruit brandy or something like that out of it? Id imagine gin would be pretty easy to make as well.