Beginners Guide To Making Spirits - Part 1

[Music] so the first thing and most important thing is everything that comes into contact has to be clean and sterilized and that's why we use a sterilizer to actually do that I'm going to come on to that in a minute okay so the second thing we're going to deal with is temperature we need to make sure that we've got a temperature between 20 and 25 that's what we're looking for to be able to ferment so we're looking at a room temperature of between 20 and 25 now look that's not an absolute given we can drop down to 18 and we can go up to 27 but the problem is most people haven't got rooms that are accurate enough to record it so if we go for a given of between 20 and 25 we won't be too far out and again I'll come on to temperature in just a moment as to how we can help that so sterilization first what we said was anything that comes into contact with the wine beer or spirit needs to be immaculately clean here I have a bucket and the bucket is going to do the initial fermentation so with the bucket I'm just going to take here about five liters of water now if you can use warm water so much the better the sterilizer does dissolve much better in warm water now the thing to remember and it's great at the start because all your equipments new but the thing to remember is to try and keep all your equipment lovely and clean so every time we've used it make sure you give it a really good wash so that when you come back to do it it's all nice and clean now with two sterilizers we have a cleaner sterilizer and we also have a no rinse sterilizer and with your starter kit you will have one of these two that you get if you're using the no rinse all we do is we have the no rinse and it means as it says we don't then have to rinse it out with water with the cleaner sterilizer we've got a lot more chlorine in that so that were and that will remove stains as well as sterilized so with that one we do need to give it a rinse with water afterwards now the sterilization process normally takes about 20 minutes okay so I'm just gonna lift this up here now as you can see we've got about 5 liters in the base of it we're going to add a teaspoonful of the cleaner sterilizer I just like to just sprinkle a bit in there like so and what we're going to do is we're going to put in there all the things which are going to come into contact with our making process so that's the airlock the bung the mixing spoon a hydrometer that we've got here and a thermometer that we've got here and this is going to take about 20 minutes for it to come into effect so while we're waiting for that to clean it and sterilize I'm going to talk to you about temperature but just before we go there what I always tend to do is to find a nice clean sponge really clean sponge or a really clean cloth and all I'd do is just put that in my liquid and then I'll run the water all round all parts of the bucket so that all parts of the bucket are coming into contact with this cleaner sterilizer and also the lid needs to go in as well so again I'm going to run solution all over the lid to make sure that is covered and I'll repeat that two or three times in the 20 minutes and don't panic if you get your hands in there that's great because not only your hands are going to be cleaned up and it means that then when we do in the mixing later on you don't have to worry about any infections coming off your hands so that's a really good thing so as I say don't worry about that so we're going to move that to one side and we're going to leave that for about 20 minutes all right so we've now been around 20 minutes give or take I mean we're not tilt like so we've got on our our bucket and it's all nicely clean and we know it's lovely and sterilized okay so what we're going to do now is we're just going to literally shook it away [Applause] sterilization all complete we're going to now talk about temperature so we've said we're looking for a temperature between 20 and 25 now luckily in the UK most people have the problem that they can't get up to temperature unlike in Australia New Zealand where the Toronto actually drop the temperature because they've got it to heart we're actually looking for raising the temperature in the most in most average houses so what what options have we got well as I said we're looking for a room temperature between 20 and 25 easiest way is we insulate the container so we can wrap the container in a blanket quite simple that's going to help to retain some of the heat if we're still struggling with temperature than with three things which are available to us and I would add I would ask you to look on our videos because we actually do some really good videos on temperature control but the three things which are quite simple we have what's called a brute belt and this is a belt that will wrap around the container so around 20 pounds it's it's okay it's not my favorite we always use a time clock with anything which is not thermostatically-controlled so with the brew belt we'll use a time clock we've also got a heat tray which the bucket can sit on and this is also great if you do in beer because you can put your beer on for a secondary fermentation now with the heat rate made a plastic it's quite strong about thirty five ish pounds and it will be on the whole time uses about the same as a light bulb and that's why I'm saying because this is on all the time we need to use the time clock with it because the time clock will control when this comes on and when it goes off if your house is around 20 during the day you don't need the heat tray on when it's at night and it's going cold or it might be in a garage or whatever then you will need the time clock so that's why we strongly recommend a time clock and the third thing that we have is the immersion heater now this will actually drop inside your liquid and a lot of a lot of people will remember that as a fish tank type eater so that's gonna drop inside your liquid through the lid now if you do want one of these when you order you need to make sure that you're specifying that the lid has been drilled to take this because it's a different size hole so that's something to bear in mind this is preset to 24 so that's within the range of 20 to 25 room temperature now one thing I always say is your liquid temperature will always be 2 or 3 degrees higher the new room temperature the reason for that is the yeast is working in the bucket the yeast is giving off heat and as it gives off heat its raising the temperature in the bucket so remember that please if we're setting this to a room temperature of 24 sorry liquid temperature of 24 in reality we're saying room temperature is about 22 because once it gets up to 24 it switches itself off so no need for a time clock on this one okay [Music]

Channel: Love Brewing

Views: 14,534

Keywords: making spirits, cleaning, Sterilisation, Temperature Control, spirits, home brewing, home brew, love brewing, still spirits, how do i, how to, guide to, beginners guide

Id: 20-6wm3hSxE

Length: 8min 7sec (487 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 23 2018