For more than one year I have a wish of prodicuing my own booze. I like to drink. I have right now a cup of Jack Daniels with 3 ice cubes. Tastes amazing. I wnat to make something for myself. First I thought of brewing mead. But it is a tad expensive. Guy sold me a 1-litre bottle of honey for 20 Reais (round 10 dollars). would need a bit more to have a gallon. anyways. WHat about distilling beverages? For instante, hypothetical example: Dill seeds taste amazing. Sweet, a bit tangy, and really aromatic. What if I brew some Dill Beer, add some other herbs (mint, for instance, or even Basil), make a beer out of it, age it propperly and then distile the end result and age it on an oak barrel?
Would I get… something that makes me drunk? How much would I have to invest on this settup? I have at my folks an old (and gorgeous) destillation bowl. I love creating things. I am experienced with cooking and woodworking, so building the stuff I want would be easy. I found a lot of brewing groups round the net. Would be awesome to have my own personal drink…
distilling your own alcohol is illegal y’know
You know the laws regarding alcohol production in Brazil off the top of your head? Just wondering.
No, they repealed that amendment. Distilling alcohol is legal but the paperwork admittedly can be a bitch.
Here’s one for you: how do you make the cheapest possible prison hooch? The obvious way to make an unlimited supply of virtually free alcohol would be to react yeast with sucrose. However, that doesn’t work very well, because sucrose doesn’t contain the micronutrients needed to feed the yeast. If you tried it, you would wind up with a very weak alcohol solution with a lot of second-order alcohols. So if you wanted to make a mash out of just table sugar and plain old Fleishmann’s yeast, what would be the cheapest possible way to fertilize the yeast?
There is an extremely inexpensive way to do it–and by “inexpensive,” I mean that it can be made out of foods commonly served in prison. (Note that I am a lawyer who defended jail inmates on numerous in-house disciplinary charges, including making “prison hooch,” for a few years. As a result, I know how to do it.)
However, I don’t believe that the SDMB allows discussion of such illegal things, so I won’t say anything more.
We distilled ethanol out of a fermented glucose solution in high school chemistry. We were supposed to use it for experiments.
Tasted yum.
Here’s an easy way to produce wine from grape juice.
(I wish this guy were a little more careful about sanitization, but hey, he’s the one drinking what he makes…)
A vote for wine. You can make an acceotable “white” from orange juice in a relatively short amount of time (maybe around 6 weeks - I don’t remember exactly). Wine made “properly” (from fruit) can take a year or more to be ready, though. Cider can be made very quickly from apple juice, but it might taste that great. Applejack made with freeze distillation seems popular, but I’ve never tried it.
you need to decide what you want to end up with.
some you consume as produced, maybe with some aging for flavor.
other things you might distill, maybe with some aging for flavor.
what taste and mouth sensation are you after?
The best yeast nutrient is dead yeast. I would boil the hell out of the Fleishmann’s yeast to kill it, then mix it with the sugar solution and add a “turbo” or distiller’s yeast, as they can achieve much higher alcohol percentages than your bread yeast.
You’re basically talking about akvavit as it’s produced in Norway (aged in oak barrels). You can distill it with the herbs in the still or add them to a neutral grain spirit (vodka) to steep.
Just to help with your volume question. If you’re running through a pot still, which is sounds like you are the best you’ll get is a 4X step up in alcohol concentration. Typical home brewed washes are between 5-10% so you may in the best case scenario be able to get to the strength of Jack on but more then likely you’ll need two runs. Either way you’ll end up with about a quarter of the volume you start with and then you’ll need to toss 2% of your original volume since it’ll be acetone so you’ll end up with 23% best case.
You want a recipe for toilet hooch? They’re on the net. Glucose tabs from the diabetics (better than sucrose), carbs from the kitchen (old bread, vegetables), yeast from the kitchen, and your toilet.
My toilet only produces the finest wines this side of France.