How to make bourbon at home [The Easy Way]

hey everybody today i'm really excited because in today's video i'm making bourbon and i'm going to use a very simple recipe for you beginners out there this is a sugar mash recipe this is not an all-grain recipe so for all you purists out there that are going to tell me we're not really making bourbon uh just leave your complaints down in the show notes because uh you know we we are not commercial distillers we are moonshiners by definition moonshiners do not follow the rules anyway so i wanted to make something that is distinctly bourbon uh you taste it you know it's bourbon but we're going to use sugar instead of converting all the starches so that's how we're going to cheat but it's a really simple recipe for the beginners out there and i'm going to use this kit this i offer this kit on still in the clear it's everything you need to make this bourbon in one kit so what it is the recipe is six pounds of cracked corn and three pounds of oats and the oats that i'm using are steamed and crimped and so when you get the kit you've got the three pounds of votes a little thank you card and a an instruction sheet for how to mash you're going to get two american white oak medium charred oak staves you're going to get your yeast and you're going to get your corn and this is what we're going to use so we're going to mash this in i'm going to take you from i'm going to take you from this to this today in this video so let's get it to it okay first thing we're going to do is we're going to heat this water up to 160 degrees this is roughly 5 gallons of water in total we're going to end up using 10 gallons of water but some of it we want cold now my water is up to temperature so it's time to put in the corn and what i'm going to do with this corn is [Applause] i'm going to cook this for about 45 minutes at 60 degrees and you're not wanting to gelatinize the corn here if we were doing an all-grain mash we would want it gelatinized but since we're not worrying about the starch conversion because we're going to be adding sugar then we don't want it to gelatinize because that's just going to make things harder on us than it needs to be but we do want to release the corn flavor so 45 minutes at 160 degrees and i'll get that done and be right back oh don't forget you got to stir the whole time so uh don't forget that otherwise you're going to scorch your corn i'll be right back and now that i've cooked the corn for 45 minutes at 160 degrees it's time to dump in the oats now the oats don't really have to be cooked because the oats have already been steamed all you got to do is dump them in and rehydrate them so all we got to do now is stir this up let the oats get good and hydrated and we're going to transfer all this liquid into the fermenter that we're going to use i don't know if you noticed but i had a fermenter here it was full of a brandy that i was working on so i moved it out of the way now i'm going to bring in the empty fermenter so that we can transfer this into that fermenter dump in the cold water to get to 10 gallons and then see where the temperature is if the temperature has dropped down to 90 then we can pitch our yeast if not then we've just got to let it sit until the temperature falls down to 90. i usually let mine go natural i just let it fall naturally but if you have a way to cool it down maybe you have a wart chiller or something like that there's nothing wrong with using it here all right now i can start transferring all this over and then once i've got this transferred this is also when i will add in the sugar i'll add the sugar [Music] before i add the cold water and the reason for this is the hot water just helps the sugar dissolve more easily [Music] you can you can do it either way if you forget to put the sugar in and then you add the cold water it's not that big i just find this a little bit easier [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] uh [Music] [Music] there's six pounds [Music] [Music] that makes 12 pounds [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] that'll make 15 pounds [Music] we're gonna stir this sugar in real good let it get dissolved [Music] and now it's time to add our other five gallons of cold water and now i'm going to want to take a sample of this so that i can take a specific gravity reading before now the temperature is too hot for it now but to take the specific gravity reading with the hydrometer you've got to be down around 60 degrees fahrenheit and so i'm going to take a sample so that i can cool it down separately because i'm going to add the yeast at 90 degrees once you add the yeast you can't take a specific gravity reading that is your starting gravity and we want to have a starting gravity for this you always want to have a starting gravity because if you run into problems during the ferments you'll need that data point to solve uh whatever to be able to troubleshoot whatever problem there might be so so we're going to take a sample right now and that right there is going to be plenty for us to be able to test the gravity now i'm going to stick my thermometer in there just to see how far we are from being able to pitch yeast it looks like it's gonna it's gonna round out at about 110 degrees so i'll come back later let this temperature fall uh you know it's summertime here so i don't have to worry too much about it falling too too low because the ambient temperature around here right now is probably like 92-95 degrees which is probably why you can tell i'm sweating so you know i could probably come back tomorrow and pitch this yeast if i wanted to looks like we're at uh right about 165 ish which is right about what you would expect for this recipe now it's time to uh pitch that yeast keep on rolling now if you get the beginner bourbon kit you will see on this yeast that we seal this ziploc baggie so that during shipping it doesn't open and end up everywhere so you got to cut that off to get it open oops i didn't get it and this is a 10 gallon batch so you only need about two tablespoons a lot of people like to use more than two tablespoons on a 10 gallon batch and that's okay if you do it's not going to hurt anything this is daddy yeast that i'm using and it's red star so now that's it all we got to do is stir it up real good kind of oxygenate it and let it sit and then it'll be ready to roll so this is the bourbon that we've already oaked and aged obviously and this one is not so i'm going to take the american white oak that's medium charred comes in the kit and i'm just going to drop it in now some people will say that you need to soak your wood with water before you put it in i don't find that that's necessary so i don't do it now this beginner bourbon recipe is about as easy as you can get to make a bourbon i will say nothing quite compares to aging a bourbon in a real oak barrel but this isn't bad and if you've just started out in the hobby you're at least a year away if you do an all-grain mash right now and put it in a barrel you're a year away from getting to taste it so this is just a great way to jump in there and start playing with some other bourbon recipes while you perfect your all grain barrel aged bourbon recipe so jump in there and have a good time with it now i've got other videos about oaking i've got other videos about the specific gravity uh if you didn't if you weren't fully following along when i was talking about specific gravity you might want to go check those out i'll put a couple of videos up here that you can choose from but that's it so enjoy it you don't have to be you don't have to be a pro at doing all grain recipes to start playing with bourbons so

Channel: Still'n The Clear

Views: 89,442

Keywords: Home distilling, moonshine, fermentation, fermenting, home made moonshine, how to make moonshine, distilling equipment, bourbon, bourbon recipe, beginner bourbon, make bourbon at home, how to make bourbon

Id: yjRVO5f4Iak

Length: 11min 32sec (692 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 09 2022