GEORGE'S FAVORITE SUGAR WASH RECIPE

um all you moonshiners if you won't hear [Music] me welcome back to boiling hops I'm George if and as always it's wonderful to have you guys here and it's always good to be here with you so yep subscribe share us with your friends and like the video Thanks all right you know we just did a video on fermentation you know from an maintaining temperature and a Fuhrman and we can't do a few tips out there about fermenting what we're working on right now and this is something I wanted to stop and share with you because it's so interesting um and it's one of those times that I'll dip into a recipe that I don't normally do and the reason why I don't normally do specific recipes is that should I give someone a recipe and you don't how many times I've heard the phrase I would never do that and then they mess it up well I get the phone call said all your recipes are useless it's no good it doesn't work it works for me but if you follow me so when it comes to specifics find your own recipes develop your own recipes and then our annals and oodles of them online but I don't normally work with recipes because there's a bit more consternation there than there is the outpouring love of assistance that I tried to offer okay now I'm working on this one this let me tell you what I've got in here is my thirty quart stockpot and I've already got that's hot i heated that up to like oh the 200 degrees and I poured in 20 pounds of sugar you have two great big old bags and this is your regular table sugar now the reason I got it so hot and I've got Rob I've got about a little over three quarters of the way for the reason I did that was because I wanted to I want the liquify all that sugar and I've done this in the past but let me show you this is a step I normally don't share and that is I get for that amount I get two bottles of cairo syrup now this is cairo light corn syrup i'm gonna show you this cairo light corn it's ingredients there's corn syrup salt vanilla extract and that's what I'm looking for see instead of I could add vanilla bean I don't want to do that I want to get a little bit more of a firm this will ferment just as well it's a syrup and it's sugar based porn I'm not looking for the corn flavor which oh by the way I don't even know what corn tastes like if someone out there could tell me you know there's a lot of things in the world you go oh yeah it tastes like chicken everybody knows what take chicken tastes like but it if you put some in your mouth some sense that tastes like corn you've really got nothing to compare it to you know what I mean I've just you know to me corn has a texture and a little sweetness that's about it but I'm not said about that so I'm not looking for any kind of the corn texture or flavor I'm really in search of that hint of vanilla that's in there so I just open these up and I get two of these this is one there's a 32 ounce one quart 0.95 liters and I just pour these directly into that water that'll survive and if you want to get that out real quick of course squeeze the bottle or you can always submerge the bottle first and get a let it get real nice and hot and it'll all come out real easy and there's one I'm not even going to test the gravity because I know that my hydrometer will probably sit straight up the gravity in this is going to be so super elevated and the reason it's going to be super elevated is because stop and think about it a pound of sugar in a gallon of water is about 32 to 36 gravity points all right I've got 20 of those in here and there's more than likely four gallons maybe five gallons of water in here so that is a super high gravity and now I'm adding some corn syrup this is Cairo it that means that it now you know believe it there are some people that will throw yeast in here and then complain about why I wanted ferment you know there is a point where your gravity is the environment that you create for your yeast remember the water is a natural medium that it's necessary for life okay and it's necessary for things to happen in life and if you reduce that water to such a level that it's there's not enough there your yeasts are not capable of going through their metabolic phase and start to do anything so they'll just sit there and wait it's just it's an inhospitable environment well it's like putting it's like putting a person in a in a vacuum chamber without any oxygen in there it's just the environment is just inhospitable of course you'll die but your yeast will just sit in wait cause I'll go dormant so if you have a challenge like that you've got and you know you got a buttload of sugar and it's not fermenting split the load what I mean is just get another bucket pour half of it in that bucket add water to both of them you dilute it and that way you're gonna bring the gravity down gradually you'll bring it down to a level that your yeast are able to propagate now you're gonna have the same amount of alcohol by volume you're just gonna have a whole lot more volume to work with you follow me but that's one way to fix that okay and right now if I put yeast in here it wouldn't it would not start off it would just sit there the same thing if you put yeast and straight into honey you know you use the honey's a natural anti back our microbial and there's not enough water in there for your yeast to do anything okay okay good now another note about let me stir this up that's all good next another note about yeast your yeast are capable if you put it in there I always have mark and I had this long discussion and he was right too and I agreed with it if you play the yeast in there it's at 120 degrees will will your yeast propagate that's the question will they five well certainly it's not too hot you may have a hard time getting it going but they will well and then they'll take off and go nuts but remember above a certain temperature you start to stress those yeasts now it's you're not going to kill them off until you get somewhere around 100 3540 or so or maybe even a little bit higher but that will kill off your yeast because you know we go through what's pasteurization Pathak pasteurization is 145 degrees for 20 10 minutes or 20 minutes I say that's how they pasteurized milk and what that does is it kills off any of the microbes that are in it so that it doesn't go bad pasteurization so yes your yeast can survive in a very wide range of temperature but what you're looking for is optimal performance out of your yeast so remember if it gets too low they go dormant they go I'm out of here if it gets too high they just go absolutely batshit and they start creating that off older those off gases and now they're doing something you did not intend them to do so work with your temperatures within your kettle or your fermenter now is it okay to pitch yeast at 110 degrees yeah it's okay but make sure you allow that fermenter to cool its way cool down because as it cools down your yeast will get into a normal routine okay don't leave it at 110 degrees but we normally pitch below 90 soon as it gets 90 or starts to drop below 90 though yeast it you'll be more than happy at that point okay well I got that mixed up I'm not gonna be able to mix that much more than that so so what's left what is left to do well we've checked our pH and I started off at 5.2 I know that that is probably drastically changed I know that so what I need to do now is I need to separate this into my three fermenters I'm going to make 18 gallons of this vanilla hyped sugar wash and so I'm gonna split that into my three fermenters and then I'm gonna add water and once I add my water I'll check my pH again and I'll adjust that by using the citric acid or if you got a lemon just squeeze a lemon in it there's a bunch of different things you could use but you want to adjust your pH to about 5.2 you see your yeast er looking for an acidic environment to thrive in as opposed to a what they call a base or an alkaline environment in that environment if it's a base above 7 what you have is is you have the capability at that point for many many other microbes to start to formulate and to start to propagate on their own and then they start to compete with your yeast and you don't want that to happen so you you you create an environment that is more healthy for yeast than it is for anything else okay there all right and I'm gonna separate this in there and then what I'll do is I'll use what yes I'll use my hydrometer now I have another bag of sugar on standby and may needle use just a little bit of it probably not much but my point is is that once I put this into my three buckets or my two buckets in my one fermenter I'll add the water and I'll check the gravity and I'll adjust that to one point zero nine zero which brings me to right around 13 percent alcohol by volume should it ferment completely all right so bear with me I'll be back shortly okay I've tested my pH in here just like I told you I knew that there would be an effect my pH rose up dramatically to about six point eight so it took me about a half an ounce of citric acid in my larger fermenter and I've got that down now to five point two what I'm going to do is uh I also know that in here I'm at one point zero eight zero and in both of these buckets I'm wound up at one point zero seven zero so what does that mean now I can leave it as it is in ferment my hands are sticky and from that like it is but what I want to do is I want to bring that up so I've got probably a half a gallon of water in here and I don't mind increasing the volume just a little bit boy I'm going to do is I'm going to add maybe two pounds of sugar see I only want to bring it up 20 more gravity points in each one of these and maybe 10 more gravity points here so so it just sort of like that dance between volume of water and amount of sugar I'll put about two pounds of sugar in here and I'll make a really really thick sugar slurry but I'm I'm gonna heat this up and the woman I get this is better off I'll be because I'll be able to liquefy all that sugar let's all have like a slurry of sugar and I'll pour that in there then I'll do my gravity test and of course I'll have to adjust my pH and those as well okay now here we are we are one point zero nine zero one point zero nine zero one point zero nine zero and right around that five point I'm five point three five point one and five point two on my pH I'm well within my lip I'm in good shape now now it's just time yeah I keep my yeast nutrient in a mason jar but you know those small package those little silica gel packets that you get in a bunch of stuff that just absorbs moisture I like to drop one of those I keep that in and it keeps it from any moisture you get you know on top better okay Oh Dewey pin tablespoons in each bucket one two now I'll get questions about this a thousand times how much do I put if you're putting two tablespoons in five gallons how much do I put in ten gallons if for all right these are about six gallons each it's not that critical or specific there you go and my next addition is of course my yeast I do the same and so I keep my yeast in a mason jar I put a couple of silicon packets in there and that just absorbs any moisture that could be in the jar now in this particular case I have I'll use two tablespoons of nutrient - one tablespoon of yeast normally it's about sixty grams for a five gallon batch but I'm like what the hell you you can under pitch yeast meaning you don't have enough will it work absolutely I mean you put one grainy East in there will that work absolutely it will take forever for it because it will start to multiply it pump off daughter cells and then those daughter cells pump off other daughters you know it will take forever for that one cell to create enough to make a colony that will consume all those sugars to make alcohol so you can under pitch but what happens if you put too much in there is of course a point of ludicrous II but one tablespoon and about five or six gallon bucket is perfect for me it's it's enough to ensure that I get a good healthy colony because I'm looking for at least Oh on average in five grams you've got about fifteen billion yeast cells that's a bunch so I'm sixty grams do the math I mean that's a lot of yeast cells so I've got enough there to start a good colony in anything in excess over that it's sort of like the survival of the finish the weakest shell fall out and then as they die they become yeasts are cannibalistic they become food for the other yeast okay some big long science trail behind that so a tablespoon goes into each one of those and I just sprinkle it on top can you rehydrate it first and then dump it in absolutely pull some of this out put it in a jar let it sit and let it fuzz up make you feel happy you get yep it pour it in there absolutely that's one way of doing it or I always just sprinkle it on top in most cases I'll just sprinkle it on top and let it do its thing there are times and I like to rehydrate yeast first and most of the time that's what I'm doing like a brandy or a Mead or something like that or a preparatory specific specialty mash for a follow-on distillation and then I may do a yeast starter give that a good stir just I just you don't have to stir it I just do because you know it's like that old adage about you know you walk by and you got you know Oh chips in your jar and you just feel like you want to shake good god shake it you're not gonna hurt it same thing here stirrup you you're not going to hurt it well I'm not really sure you're even helping it but it just you know it's one of those things if it makes you feel good and you're not gonna hurt anything go ahead and do it you know I don't care what else you do this all right BAM that's enough of that now it's time to place the lids on and I've got the lids with my heater zoom and that one she'll go right on top here all you got to do is make sure you're orient there we go I like to orient the lid the handle so that when the handle comes up the air lock is on this side but if you do it the other way when you if you do it here and you have the lid come up and you're gonna hit that OH so I just orient the lid there correctly ah in adding that water when I did that I actually used a hose I do it from a pretty decent height which actually oxygenates my wash at the same time which is a really good thing to do at the very beginning remember you need oxygen for your yeast to go through there anaerobic phase and their aerobic phase and then after that once the oxygen is all depleted and used up they go through their anaerobic phase so do the same thing and I'll get that oriented the correct way okay those lids click on they're pretty tight because if not guess what yeah you have a leak and then won't see no bubbles and then I can claim it's not for you no oh there we go down that road again this is the lid for my fermenter voila I've got this plugged in already I'm gonna plug these two in and slide these aside and allow those to get going now within a few short hours I should have some activity going on and I'll allow this to go now how long does it take for a fermentation another never-ending question my answer is normally until it's finished that's how long that's exactly how long it takes until it's done keep this in mind if you have an adequate amount of fermentable sugars somewhere in the neighborhood of one point zero seven zero to one point zero nine zero somewhere in that neighborhood it'll take about seven to ten days that's a pretty good average if you've got a say you take a six gallon bucket or five-gallon bucket you put two pounds of sugar in there and then you add yeast in it but it'll be done tomorrow or the next day it'll be done and then you'll wonder what did I do wrong what you didn't have enough sugar it didn't take it doesn't take long for the yeast to eat that little bit okay and let's say for instance you got that five gallon bucket and you put 16 pounds of sugar in there and you managed to get it to ferment if it even gets started but when it does on day 22 it's still fermenting well guess what you've got so much formidable sugars in there it's gonna take a long time for the yeast to get through it so your fermentation time is that has a direct connection to the amount of fermentable sugars you see that's why in the distilling community we always say its average about 7 to 10 days and all depends you know you know 7 or 10 days a lot of things have an effect on that temperature pH level how much fermentable sugars are acidic go through all that we just say anywhere between 7 to 10 days you know if you're with everybody else in the community if you're one of those outliers and you're using 16 pounds in 5 gallons that you it's going to take forever if you're on the other end and you say I'll just gonna put 2 pounds in it and let it go 2 days you're gonna be wondering what happened it's done already there's nothing else you can do add more sugar bring it up the next question can you continue to add sugar you sure can that's called staged fermentation you know every time the fermentation gets down to your gravity gets down to near zero you add another pound or two of sugar increase the gravity and let it go down again it can continue to do that to try to bring your alcohol by volume up what happens alright folks watch this alcohol by volume okay and gravity what will happen is each time your alcohol by volume will go up and your gravity will come back down ya'll call by volume will go up you add more sugar gravity goes up goes down all of a sudden is good this is what's gonna happen alcohol by volume is here you add more gravity and stays right there all of a sudden your gravity is not going to come down and why won't your gravity come down any longer it won't well we've done the same thing that we could have potentially done at the very beginning with too much sugar now we have an environment where the alcohol is so concentrated it's now become its own preservative so it will inhibit that yeast from continuing to populate and your gravity will remain way high and you'll have fermentable sugars floating around in there and nothing happening that's another option G so you have to commute make sure that you're controlling your environment in the beginning during your process and at the very end - you don't want to upset the environment in which your yeast are working okay good I hope I've cleared all that up for you because that should answer a whole lot of those questions out there about really what takes place what's happening why is it like that and remember soon once your fermentation is complete once you're finished in order to clarify you can do one of two things you can use chemicals to clarify can you saw cheetah saying you could use bentonite which is a great clarifier you can use super clear which is another Sparkle oyd which is another one you use turbo clear which are the chemicals or you can let gravity work in your favor but in order to clarify the first thing you need to do is D gas okay you'll have this huge volume and you've got some co2 trapped in there in the co2 that's trapped inside that mash is connected molecularly to those molecules of ethanol and the water that's still left in there because they're connected and then once you beat it and agitate it you'll release that co2 it'll it'll leave once it leaves net allows all your sediment to fall to the bottom so if you're having challenges clarifying it's more than likely you did not D gas at the beginning so whip it with a whip put a paddle on the end of a drill beat it whatever you want to do but just or you can do the vacuum transfer I showed you that on one of the videos as well and that will get rid of all that residual co2 once that's accomplished if you take that off the sediment and put it in a jug and stick it away your mash will never go bad remember it's a natural preservative at this point there's nothing additional nothing extra in there that can do anything else so no it cannot turn to vinegar you have to introduce the acetobacter virus in order for that to happen because the acetobacter virus is what converts alcohol into vinegar if it's not in there it's not happening so I've had mashes I did a video one day I had a match that was sitting I found it I'd had it for almost two years but turned out to make those great gin uh my point is is that no need to rush you don't have to get to it right away no it won't go bad in three days no matter what you hear always consider the source until next time happy distilling

Channel: Barley and Hops Brewing

Views: 224,957

Keywords: neutral spirit, sugar wash, barlerandhops, hops, home, Sugar (Ingredient), sugar mash, distilling, barley, corn sugar vs cane sugar, corn sugar mash recipe, making a wash for distilling, running a still for the first time, first distillation, using yeast, mooshine, whiskey, making rum, making vodka, bourbon, baby step bourbon, making bourbon at home

Id: cvz3rMoZfo0

Length: 24min 8sec (1448 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 27 2020