🍇Wild Muscadine Grape Brandy + VEVOR Pot Still REVIEW!

so what do you do if you spend all summer picking wild grapes but you still don't have quite enough to make brandy cheat I just said yes [Music] I spent all summer every time I I got off work I went and I picked wild muscadine grapes I ended up with between this and those bags over there about 13 pounds for this much in metric of wild muscadine grapes that's what grows in my area and if you don't know what muscadine grapes are they're kind of weird I mean granted these are frozen so they look a little strange muscadine grapes are an acquired taste they are spicy if you eat them raw off of the vine sometimes they can have so much acid in them that they will actually burn your mouth they're not that sour but they do have this crazy almost pepper-like spice to them so muscadines have some flaws the seeds are big the flesh is kind of gelatinous and the Skins are very tough so why would you pick them because the jelly that they make is exquisite it is really really good and they also make good wine I've had muscadine wine I've never made it but I've had it and it was really good I just don't have enough grapes to make it today we're gonna find out if we can actually take those muscadines that I've got and make brandy with them if you've done any Research into home wine making you've probably come across recipes where people are using Welch's grape juice or any other type of grape juice to make homemade wine it's really easy it ends up tasting a little Concord grapey which is completely different from normal wine grapes those varietals have specially cultivated to one make giant clusters two they have a ton more sugar in them so you end up getting a lot of volume of wine when you're using real wine grapes so making homemade wine without those is a challenge so it's easier to just go get some of this you might be worried about the clashing flavors like are you really going to be able to taste the muscadines in the the Welches or is it just going to taste like Welch's wine well if you've ever had muscadines then you know that when I say you will definitely know there's muscadine grapes in there you know I'm telling the truth like I said the flavor is distinctive to any other grape you've ever had even Frozen the smell of muscadine grapes is so different from any other grape so let's get this going and remember as always my recipe is going to be down in the video description but it's very simple I'm not going to add any sugar there's no added sugar to my juice so basically all the sugar that we're getting to ferment is coming straight from grapes all right so we're just going to throw all of our Frozen grapes into the bucket it looks like I have about two gallons worth of grapes I'm gonna add three and a half gallons of grape juice to give me roughly five gallons of finished wine after it's fermented and I strain out all of the grapes so next we're going to add some crushed up Camden tablets these will prevent a bacterial infection and kill anything that's on those wild grapes I'm also adding two teaspoons of pectic enzyme to help to break down all the cell walls in those grapes and that'll release more juice and flavor and we're also adding one and a quarter teaspoons of fermaid K yeast nutrient and I'm adding three teaspoons of acid blend to help kind of balance out the flavors in case I want to save a bottle of this for one if you're not planning on using this for wine you can skip the acid blend so you may have noticed that I didn't add any yeast yet and that's because I added some of these Camden tablets if you were to add your commercial yeast right now it would totally stop it dead in its tracks so you want to wait 12 to 24 hours 24 is better after you get this Camden in there so that it can do its thing and then it just goes inert and you can add your own yeast in so what we're going to do is let this sit overnight all right see you tomorrow all right so now that it's been 24 hours now we can add our yeast mmm and I just want to reiterate that the recipe I'm doing is not really a specific volume ratio I'm just doing this to prove the concept that if you don't have enough fruit you can always add some fruit juice to it in order to stretch it along and hopefully get a product that's very tasty and is going to work out for you I'm 99 sure you're going to be able to taste the muscadines and to that end I have decided to go ahead and throw my blender in here to blend this up to bust up the fruit because those Skins are rather thick I really want to make sure that every cell wall is exposed if I can and then I'm just going to strain it after it's fermented one thing that you might want to do before you blend it up is get a sample of your juice so that you can get a gravity reading so you know you're starting gravity this one is at 1.065 let's go ahead and throw the yeast in before we blend it so we're going to try co-pitching yeast we're gonna do Some Lovin 71b and some k1v116 now we're going to lock this up this is a vented cap so if you're going to do this for wine you should definitely use an airlock on your bucket if you're doing this for an eventual hypothetical Brandy you don't necessarily need one you just need it to stay covered so you can keep bugs and dust and crap from getting in there but still allow the CO2 to escape so your bucket doesn't explode now as with all fruit wines you need to come through at least once a day take a big spoon and stir down that cap punch down the cap of fruit because it's all going to rise to the top and lock the CO2 inside and if you leave it too long the top layer is going to get dry and it's going to start growing mold and that'll ruin your entire batch so Stir It Down at least once a day preferably twice a day so every 12 hours or so just to keep things fresh keep things moving keep things healthy hello again welcome to my bathroom this feels familiar anybody else getting Deja Vu it's been about a week and this stuff is fermented all the way out to dryness I'll do a gravity reading once I strain it but uh let's go ahead and get this done [Music] so I saved a little bit of the pulp in a container to hypothetically use in a thumper so we're just going to let this sit for 24 hours so that it can settle and get all the any more sediment and yeast down to the bottom and then we'll siphon out into the boiler before we send it off to the liquor fairy so now that it's time to run the muscadine Brandy that brings me to today's sponsor vivore those guys the reason why I decided to review this still is because I've seen a ton of posts on the Reddit R fire water section people asking are they any good let's take this thing apart and see what's going on all right so this is the eight gallon version and the reason why I wanted to get this one is because most of us in this hobby we're brewing in some sort of a plastic bucket or water jug something like that and those are usually about five gallons or 20 liters if you get a five gallon still and you have five gallons of wash especially when you're brand new to the Hobby you want to just get it all in there but if you do that you're going to run out of headspace never throw your boiler you don't want the wash coming all the way up to the top you need some heads space in there to prevent stuff like puking so if you order one of these it comes all together this is all that's in the Box what that means is this still is completely self-contained so when you're done with it you clean it up you can shove everything back in the pot and stick it in the back of a closet or hide it out in the woods whatever you need to do you know it doesn't take up that much room so let's uh crack this open and see what's inside so right away you'll notice it's got its own gasket in there a lot of the other ones you have to they have a loose gasket that you have to place on there now the only problem I see with this is you may have to pop it out of there in order to get it really clean but just be careful that you don't cut it when you're trying to get that out of there use something like a plastic fork or something to dig under there and pop that out so you can clean that gasket so we got some silicone hose that's for running our water lines for the condenser thermometer that's your main line arm to go into the thumper some little grommets and a nut piece of copper tubing rubber stopper some grommets and a little piece of silicone hose and you've got a little water pump here maximum height is 100 centimeters so that's pretty good this is your condenser pot your worm good copper line not a huge fan of the brass fittings or I'd prefer copper on that and this little guy is your Thumper it's got good strong buckles on it I like that comes with its own gasket for the lid and last but not least there is some stainless steel flex hose with these little fittings and that's going to fit onto your little brass fittings all right so there's one more feature about the vivore that's kind of cool they send you an airlock you just put your thermometer in one hole and this guy down in there and then you can use the kettle as a stainless steel fermenter especially if you're going to do all grain whiskey and ferment on grain you could do your Mash in there then just throw the lid on put your airlock on and let it go but one thing you need to remember is you cannot ferment in here and then start distilling if you do that you're going to end up burning your stuff even if you just have a sugar wash the yeast is going to end up settling to the bottom so what you need to do get your fermentation done when that's complete siphon it out to a bucket so that you leave all the the sludge and everything behind then clean out your Kettle pour your clean wash back in and then you can start distilling just wanted to make sure that that's very very clear for everybody this one is a hundred and fifteen dollars on the vivore website you cannot go to the hardware store and get everything that you need to put together still this complete for 115 dollars it's not going to happen this is an eight gallon stainless steel Kettle this thing by itself is probably 60 70 bucks and then these buckles that are on the side those are about five or six bucks a piece figuring out how to attach them without having a spot welder that's tricky to me this still is perfect for somebody who says I'd like to try that out this is a still that you can use to jump in into the hobby relatively quickly and find out whether or not you actually like it you don't want to drop six hundred dollars on a bunch of equipment to find out that this is kind of not my thing or I'm not making good stuff and I I you know I'm not really into it so jumping into this with a hundred and fifteen dollars is a lot more approachable for most people this picture is kind of cool because it shows you how compact you can actually be with this thing but I don't think that's the ideal configuration so I'm going to see if I can figure out something a little bit better and I'll show you when I get done so my dog is gonna drink all the water like I hope you guys saved some water Where You Are he's gonna drink all of it you done already oh that's a short that was a little sip for her all right so I've got everything over here just about ready to set up and I wanted to point out one thing this unit is supposed to have a thumper with it this guy right here this is not currently a thumper because it has no down tube and it doesn't come with one uh so to me that's a bit of a problem one it's mislabeled two they don't have anything in there that specifically made to give you a down to however for no extra money you can use what's in the box to make a down tube for this thing and turn it into an effective usable Thumper so let's do that in your box of supplies that come with your vivore you have some flexible silicon tubing and it also comes with something else which is on the condenser you'll notice that the output tube is a little short they give you a little piece of silicone hose not the same diameter is this stuff it's a little bit narrower and a little piece of copper tubing that's the same diameter as the stuff and the worm plug that on there and you've got a little extension for your output tube but we really don't need that there's better way to do that so what we're going to do is we're going to repurpose this guy now this tubing is too small for what we need so we're going to take that so what you're going to do is you're going to take this silicone tubing for your water and you're going to cut off about an inch to an inch and a half slip that on there now this will fit onto that guy and now you have a down tube that'll work perfectly fine to go into your Thumper we line that up that's pretty darn perfect that goes down into the bottom but not all the way and so that leaves you a little bit of a gap for the vapor to escape and then bubble down through whatever material you put in here make sure you include a little piece of steel wool or copper wool for your little cup or tube to go on that'll prevent it from getting clogged just like that and you're ready to rock and roll which one did I put the copper on make sure you remember which one you put the down tube on so that when you connect it the outlet tube from the boiler goes to your down tube because you want that Vapor to come out go all the way down to the bottom and then have no obstruction and then it just Rises to the top to come out of this one got it if I skipped anything or if you want a little more detail on Thumpers and how they work and why they work check out my Thumper video right up here so that's a downside with an upside and again it keeps us in that cheaper price point so we don't have to spend any more money to do exactly what we want all right so let's finish getting this thing together you know these flex hoses are a little bit fiddly but they actually work great for what we're gonna do now I set mine up differently than the way they do in the picture everything is on top of your main boiler and I don't really like the idea of that for everything if you want you can definitely put your Thumper up there because that's going to pick up some heat from your boiler and they're just going to help each other maintain that nice Heat uh but I don't like the idea of putting the condenser on top of the boiler for two reasons one it's also going to pick up heat it's going to make your cooling less efficient for your condenser and two the outlet tube for your condenser would be too close to the fire if we just had it up here it's going to be dripping Spirit or hanging a tube off the side a little bit too close to the flame for my personal taste that's basically why they included that little copper extension tube to go on here but we're going to do something a little different we could just use some more silicone tube to stick on there and it'll be fine what's he doing with the vinegar I'm going to do a vinegar cleaning run because this is a brand new still and despite the fact that everything looks perfectly clean and sanitized this was in a factory it was in a shipping warehouse and then it came overseas and you just never know if there could be some sort of chemical contaminant or maybe a spider crawled in one of the holes or something you just never know it's always a good idea especially if you build your own still to do a vinegar cleaning run you can even do a sacrificial alcohol run after a vinegar cleaning run if you want to and if you've never done one it's really simple put some vinegar and water 50 50 mix in there put everything together and turn it on full blast and run it for about 15 minutes that's it oh also don't put any cooling water through your condenser because you want that steam to touch every surface in the tube not to lay down at the bottom and drizzle out you want it to just scour everything so I'm going to put my muscadine wine that's fully fermented into this boiler then I'm going to summon the liquor fairy once we have all of our jars then I think it's fair to make an actual assessment of this still and it's pros and cons I will see you in a little while after the liquor fairy has done their magic foreign so before we do the tasting of what the liquor fairy brought me I want to go ahead and thank all of these people right down here and all of my patreons thank you guys so much for constantly engaging with my posts and helping me to come up with new ideas and supporting me so that I can keep making these videos thank you guys so much for keeping the channel alive and my lights on thank you so much so what I got back from the liquor Ferry is about 600 mL of the keepers and that's kind of what I expected from a run like this with a lower ABV wine and a smaller volume because there was so much sediment and fruit pulp and I didn't really strain the hell out of it but it smells fantastic it's it definitely smells like the wine and I'm also picking up a little bit of a peppery note from the muscadine grapes so it smells really good this is definitely a grape branding but also there's an interesting kind of butterscotch note to it and keep in mind this is at 60 so it's a little high I'm interested to put this in a glass with a little bit of water and see what we have yeah that's amazing I'm still a little bit stuffed up from allergies today I can smell the difference between the concord grapes in the the grape juice in the peppery sharp notes of the muscadine wow okay on the flavor you get a much more pronounced pop of grapiness um it's really smooth thank you there's an interesting sweet character I'm not really picking up that kind of butterscotchy Aroma butterscotch isn't quite the right word I don't know sweet and buttery but not quite to butterscotch and it and there's a tiny bit of a pepper note and I think that's from the muscadines that's really good now I have to decide if I want to Oak this right now it's classified as an Ode to V because it's unaged I have some French Oak from my buddy Ken over at Barrel Charwood so I think that might be interesting and we're gonna let this sit probably for three months and then I'll do a quick taste man that is amazing it's literally been like two minutes since I put this in and it's already starting to pick up color I love aging stuff all right so uh last but not least we got to talk about the V4 is it worth it yeah it's 115 bucks if you're new to the Hobby or you're you're just kind of interested in it you want to try it out I can easily recommend the vivore you know I made that little modification to turn it into a true Thumper you don't have to do that you can just run it with a sliver box and it's gonna run fine you're still going to get good alcohol out of it I just did this because I wanted to really Infuse the flavor and the best way to do that is to pump the vapor down into that liquid and get it to condense and then re-vaporize inside that flavorful mush so do it or don't you know it's up to you and here's the other thing you can run it without the thumper you don't have to put that on you can go straight from the pot over to the condenser with one hose and you're good one of my patreons actually said uh he wasn't sure if something like this would be able to make whiskey and I made a brandy brandy and whiskey are similar only in that they are flavored spirits that have a lot of flavor carry over from the initial wash into the distillate so I think this thing is perfectly capable of running a whiskey rum obviously Brandy and if you want to get one or just check out their website because they got a whole bunch of different ones I'm going to put the link down in the video description and also in the top comment and there's a coupon code for you to use if you're gonna get one make sure you use that coupon code and then you'll get a discount on anything that you buy on the site all right so I've got to go edit this monster of a video so if you enjoyed it do me a favor and hit the like button because it really really helps out the channel tells YouTube that you value this kind of content and they'll recommend it to others if you want to see what I'm going to do next time it's be pretty cool I've already got it done then go ahead and hit the Subscribe button and the little bell icon right next to it so that you can get notified when I post new content if you have any questions comments you want to share your own brandy recipe especially if it's muscadine grapes please post it down in the comments section down below alright thanks for watching talk at you later [Music] hello foreign [Music]

Channel: Bearded & Bored

Views: 78,335

Keywords: Bearded and Bored, Vevor pot still, vevor, vevor moonshine still, vevor still review, muscadine wine making, muscadine wine recipe 5 gallons, how to make muscadine wine, muscadine brandy recipe, muscadine brandy, how to distill brandy, how to make brandy from wine, how to make brandy, wild grape wine, wild grape brandy, vevor still, vevor alcohol still, vevor still instructions, vevor still assembly, vevor still how to use, vevor thumper

Id: dK8CKl6vNXM

Length: 23min 33sec (1413 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 02 2022