If you ever decide to engage in this home distilling hobby, here's a primer of some points you have to familiarize before you start. Just invest on these information and also do your own research. Before you know it you can be perfecting your very own homemade liquor!
Everything starts with the mash! First, you'll need an ingredient to source sugar. You can either use sugar rich fruits like grapes or any edible fruits or starch rich plants like corn or potatoes, then of course water and yeast. So you basically mix the ingredients in their correct amounts.
The mash will be left to ferment. Fermentation happens when yeast breaks down the simple sugars and convert it into ethanol. The mash will yield about 14%-20% of alcohol by volume.
After about 2-3 weeks or when all activities in the mash stops, the distilling process follows. Distillation will separate the alcohol from water. This is where we need the copper still. From the two, alcohol has a lower boiling point so it vaporizes first and moves to the coil or worm then gets condensed back to liquid. Ideally this is how we extract alcohol, however since the two liquids have boiling points close to each other they don't separate completely. Nevertheless, the obtained mixture will still have more alcohol than water.
So what we've just gotten is already the moonshine, that's good to go! But there are still a number of stuffs you can do with it. You can either cut, re-distill, filter, flavor or age the alcohol. These things will help increase the proof of your moonshine, add wonderful tastes to it or turn it into whiskey. Check this link for detailed information.
Posted by Jason Stone on