Distilling Cheap Wine : Is It Drinkable?

do you know what I have not distilled yet cheap red wine and it is about time I do it because people keep asking about this can you distill it of course you can but is it going to be delicious when we're done with it that is the question how's it going Chasers I hope you're having a kick-ass week I'm Jesse this is still it and today I am taking this cheap wine I'm going to pop it into bam that little air still over Yonder and we're going to see if we can make something delicious essentially people ask me about this quite a lot and it is amazing to me that I have not done it yet so let's get started uh step number one let's open this bad boy up man I have not done this in uh in years so this is totally a normal thing in um don't need to be neat about this do I uh totally normal thing in New Zealand to have literally bags of wine in cardboard boxes um is this normal elsewhere Americans English Europeans um I know it's it's dirty I figure I may as well have a try and this can go in here country red wine a soft red wine perfect for sharing with Friends apparently friends that you don't really like that much all right this is taking forever let's get it out of here um it's actually to be honest like I'm always surprised with these things like yeah they're not great but dude considering it comes in a freaking plastic bag like if you haven't seen these before like a bladder um it's it's it's not terrible like no you're not going to be impressing friends with uh your wine selection but dude so the joke was always that you drink the wine and then you've got a pillow for when um you inevitably crash hard we need to finish that man like I said memories from a misspent youth when uh we used to buy alcohol with Mass if you know then you know all right let's get that turned on uh because that's going to take some time to heat up while it is heating up there is a a consideration a assumption that I'm going to make about this wine uh and an action I'm going to take to try and make it a little bit more drinkable later on and that is sulfates am I here to pass judgment on whether that's a good thing or a bad thing in wine if you want to talk about that down below go for gold I'm not a wine guy I'll be honest I don't really care but there is a pretty good chance that New Zealand's favorite wine seeso right here I have put sulfites in there and when we distill those there's a pretty good chance that those are not going to do anything Pleasant in terms of our final product and there is one thing we can do to sort of help combat that and that is to use copper or utilize copper or include copper in two places one in the liquid itself and also in the vapor path so I am going to Chuck a bunch of this into the liquid by ands into the little um what do you call it gin basket thing that goes into the top of the Estill all right so uh that is ready to go let's get it all put together and plugged in I'll be honest with you guys I have no idea let me step over here so that's not so noisy in the mic I have no idea what this is going to come out tasting like or um you know what style of products we're going to aim for here uh so I think what I'm gonna do is just let this get up to temperature start distillation and start tasting it and we can kind of make a a call from there as to which way we want to push this I think that is the way to handle it uh so while we're waiting for that I've got to tell you about something very exciting this is the awesome new collaboration t-shirt between into the am and Chase the craft into the aim of having a dirty great big sale on their website right now I think for the next three days so you need to get in pretty quick to take advantage of it it is up to 80 off well worth taking advantage of and if you use the link in the description down below you'll get a 10 discount which I believe Stacks which is is kind of crazy anyway this shirt uh the patreons helped us design it there's a bunch of little Easter eggs sort of baked into it for you to find go and have a look on the website and trust me guys you're not going to regret buying into the am products they're comfortable they're insanely soft they wear really well compared to how soft they are it's kind of amazing honestly they're pretty much the only shirts I wear anymore because I just love them so if you haven't seen this new shoot yet get amongst it if you've got one but your buddy needs one Now's the Time to pick one up all right let's get back to the wine shall we the still is up and running now and I've collected only that much so far uh and I'll be honest with you guys it's actually smelling not terrible already this early in the run so my hopes and expectations just Rose significantly assuming we are going to double distill this will become our stripping run so stripping around is just we put our wash our wine into the pot we're going to run it from beginning all the way through to end without making any Cuts don't worry we'll do that later um so we can double distill it raise the ABV even higher again than what we would get just out of this so by the power of video editing I'm going to come back to you in 15 maybe 20 minutes and we'll make a call on whether to lock into a double distillation or switch over to just doing a one and done run [Music] I think I will go to a double distillation I mean it was almost It was 95 chance that I was going to do that anyway I just wanted to leave the option open but a few things about what's going on here one is we are getting a little bit too much of the sort of sulfur influence than I'd like so when I double distill it I'll put the copper back in there and see if that'll clean it up a little bit more two it's just kind of meh there's nothing interesting about it it doesn't taste fresh it doesn't taste vibrant I mean I have to imagine that this wine is made specifically to offend the least amount of people possible excluding anyone that actually cares about wine so the fact that it is doing nothing interesting here is not overly surprising to me so uh we have our work cut out for us in terms of trying to make something interesting out of it from here I'm in streaming Run's done the pot has been emptied out and I've collected a little bit over a liter worth of low wines the result of a stripping run the lower stuff that came at the end this is kind of like raisiny through to prune and actually quite clean a little bit of kind of cardboardy oxidization flavors in there as well we'll see if that cleans up and up the top I'm actually slightly more happy with this now that I'm smelling it all together it has that bright kind of almost Herby earthy um aspect that Grappa often has but it's mostly like a bright raisin flavor anyway so let's get those in there I only collected down to about 15 coming off the still so this is sitting at about 35 percent ah it's the only downside with this little unit the way I use it is that it doesn't have a lot of grunt once you get down to the bottom end of a stripping run just takes a long time and I was impatient and I gave up um by the way if you haven't seen this before this is the ear still by still spirits um in New Zealand uh you can get on our website chasercraft.com in America we don't have any of this sort of stuff there at the moment your best bet is honestly probably probably Amazon um I'll stick a link down there for you all right let's get this thing fired back up again and we can start running the still and actually making Cuts [Music] we are coming up to temperature now it's just starting to drip let me have a smell okay that is brighter um and to be fair we've already collected more than I would call four shots for this I'm just going to collect four shots and heads together in this case um because I'm going to throw it all out it doesn't matter I'm not too worried about it so if you're completely new to this guys uh as we distill this product different chemicals are going to come over at different times during the run and the first part the very first part you normally collect a little bit and Chuck it away it's no good for you you don't want it there's no point to to keep it other than if you want to you know have fire light or a weed killer or cleaner or something the next part is heads which is uh not nearly as nasty but you still don't really want to be drinking it in your product uh it's going to make you feel like crap and it just doesn't taste good it's very sharp and jaggy on on your palette but if you want to you can save that and reintroduce it back into another spring it run later on I'm not going to do that so like I said I'm just going to collect it all together and then toss it after the heads come the hearts and that is where the product starts to clean up and starts tasting much more like the um the actual product you want to drink so for me right now what I'm getting off this that I don't like and I'm calling heads is a very volatile um almost nail polish removery kind of Aroma that I just don't like so I'm going to let this run for a little bit longer but because we have such a tiny volume in the still our cuts are going to happen really really quickly so I'm gonna watch it like a hawk one way that you can do these cuts to make things a whole lot easier for yourself is to just keep collecting little jars like this so we'll switch this out Bonk there we go and I'm going to Chuck this I'm going to get rid of it over here and I'll um give that glare glass a wash in just a sec but if you collect very small amounts for a little still like this into different jars you don't have to make the cuts in real time so we've run a little bit longer I've collected exactly that much heads in four shots and I think I'm happy uh to be into quite unquote Hearts now um the flavor's not bad um the cats in terms of you know the alcohol side of things is pretty good um but we're still getting let me switch this over so we can yeah they're still still just a little bit of that sulpheriness just on the nose um so I'm gonna run out and uh see if we can't come up with a plan to salvage this and make it a drinkable still and then I guess the inevitable question is uh was it all worth it uh and is it worth doing at home apologies this all happened so fast that I wasn't able to catch it on camera I didn't want to walk away because I wasn't sure exactly what was happening but I got down to about 57 in all of the more sort of fruit flavors just disappeared and I almost turned the still off um but something told me to wait for a little while just to see and I started getting some interesting vanilla kind of Oaky notes uh not Oak specifically like Oak aging and a Spirit uh more like what has come through when they've redistilled a spirit that has already been oaked so I can't say for sure um because that's sort of vanilla sweetness here that's done [Music] um could have come from the fruit but I I do wonder if there is at least part of the wine that is in that box had some Oak influence on it so yeah from about 57 to about 55 percent it was just relatively neutral and then from 55 down to let's check what this is right now actually okay that's 47 uh we're getting those interesting Oaky notes I collected exactly this much heart so I had to guess I'd say 370 mils it's a 69 ABV I just measured it and I have a sample here proofed down to 42 ABB it has cleaned up a whole lot it's cleaned up and it's freshened up as well it actually tastes slightly uh fresher and let's just kind of dumpy and and um flabby than it did in the striping ground which is great okay I wonder if I should have taken slightly more heads it could just be that it needs to sit for a little while I'm I'm not sure on that one um that's neither here nor there because you can fix that yourself later on right um slight Aroma of sulfur still very slight it um it seems to have briefed off really quickly just in the 15 minutes that it's been sitting here while I hit you know change the the card on the camera uh so that's not terrible the thing that's still like not wonderful for me is it's still just it's mostly like dried almost stewed fruit flavors it doesn't have any of that kind of really bright really fresh flavors I need to say a huge huge thank you to the patreons thank you so much patreons uh for being the people that support me day in day out I thank you patrons everyone that left comments on that that video on the the patreon platform check your inbox because I've sent all of the into the am vouchers out uh and you can uh use them for the sale so we could age it we could put it on wood um I think it would go more towards the kind of stewed flabby side of things the longer it sits on on Oak um that's not necessarily a bad thing it's just not what I tend to look for in a quote-unquote good Brandy personal preference up to you if you disagree with me let me know down below so I'm thinking what might be a good way to do this is to actually invest in some decent red wine and this is one of my wife's favorite New Zealand Milos which is Oyster Bay and I'm thinking that we can just essentially mix these and have it as a fortified wine because there is some really interesting kind of um more fresh kind of Melanie and Berry flavors and this to me so let me dose this up I am going to aim for where's my calculator the wine at 14 this is at 69 and I'm gonna try and hit let's say 20 3 percent so I need this much that's actually not horrible that's not horrible at all let me try this so it's not like a Tawny Port it's not big heavy sweet thick what it is is light vibrant balanced it has fresh kind of like red melon and Berry notes now which balance out the the more um kind of fig date and raisin notes of the the Brandy I was expecting that not to work as well as it did I thought that we were going to basically just taste the wine and it was going to taste like just putting vodka into the wine now that that has worked let's try just a little bit of honey in there because I'm thinking you could um well you could just sort of try and push it more towards being like a Tawny port or you could spice it or add fruit to it it's interesting but the sweetness hasn't brought out more flavor it's just made it sweeter so if you wanted that kind of like a dessert one cool if you wanted it more you know like as a um drink it on a hot day man that would be dangerous drinking smashing red wine at like 25 but yeah you could spice it you could add fruit to it you could do all sorts of stuff sangria sangria sound dangerous actually so is this actually you know worth doing at home it's going to be one of those terrible yoda-like answers that really it's up to you so here's my thoughts on it guys I bought the box of wine that went into here at the beginning for 23 bucks uh this was 16 on special uh what's that like 39 I've spent so far on this and for that price I could just buy you know a bottle of Port just going out and buying the ingredients are the prices that I've bought them at is probably not that worth it unless you just want to experiment right like unless you're really into great products and you want to play with them yourself or you've got a specific idea of that would be amazing with whatever I'll add apricot into it or I'll add fennel into it and it'll be amazing and you just want to experiment of course I get asked the question about cheap wine a lot because people say I just got given a trolley load of wine for X reason can I distill it and the answer is hell yes if you've got it do it dude um the only issue really is dealing with the sulfur you can aerate the wine ahead of time I didn't do that just to see what would happen you can add um uh hydrogen peroxide which will react with the sulfites as well you could do that as well I didn't do either and honestly just letting it sit for 10 minutes was enough in conjunction with all the copper in the in the still yeah I can't smell them at all anymore so I wouldn't be too worried about that at least give it a go right anyway I hope this weird Meandering video gave you something something to think about maybe gave you confidence just to try distilling wine if you've got it sitting around if you've got an awesome idea that you really want to try go out and buy some it's it is fun to play with if nothing else and I'll catch you next time keep on chasing the craft guys see ya

Channel: Still It

Views: 147,734

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Id: bQMHm--skwQ

Length: 20min 22sec (1222 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 04 2023