How To Make Gin At Home - YUM!

I hear you want to make gin at home well I've got some good news for you this is the perfect video because I'm gonna take you through the whole process and step-by-step increments to get all the way from making a vodka wash to the distilling of the Vodka to the Gin Botanicals and of course the Gin distillation and we're going to come out with two different recipes in one video a gin base recipe the bare minimum Ginny gymnast so you can get used to how to make gin and use this as a springboard to add your own Flair to dial in your own preferences and make a different gin I've done over here as well how's it going Chasers I hope you're having a kick-ass week I'm Jesse this is still it and I am excited for this video I've been planning on doing it for ages this isn't going to be some wussy little 15 minute video where we kind of dance around the idea and just kind of go from when we've already got vodka we're going we're getting to end uh and we're gonna go deep we're going to get stuck in and you're gonna know pretty much everything you need to know to go and start making Gin from scratch yourself at home let's get stuck in shall we the first thing we need to do is of course make a vodka wash a vodka recipe I made this vodka recipe special for this video it's going to give us a nice clean fermenting clean tasting product at the end of the day but it's going to add in a little bit of grainy Flair and some extra velvety smoothness as well to really make our Gins sing so here's what you're going to need you're going to need three liters of water there will be Freedom Units popping up all over the place and of course a recipe in the description Down Below guys come on you should know that by now but uh three liters of water in a pot and to that we're going to add that in Freedom Units or 160 grams of wheat bran along with 50 grams of Oats the wheat brand is going to add a serially little bite to the end of the the mouth pellet and also it gives a interesting kind of licoriceiness that I really like and the oats are going to give us that extra added smoothness and that's actually going to be kind of important for this video you'll see why in a second anyway get them in there get them all mixed up and we're going to boil those for 30 minutes now when the 30 minutes is up you can take all of the stuff that was in the pot tip it into your fermenter you're going to need about a 25 liter fermenter for this recipe let me jump in here real quick and say that this is going to make 15 liters of wash and two bottles of gin the reason I'm doing that is because we're going to be working with a four liter still the easiest way to figure out the volume of wash that will work best for you is to take the size of your still the capacity of the still that you can actually you know the liquid you can actually safely fit in there and multiply that by three to four times and that's going to give you the right volume so a four liter still times three is twelve times four is sixteen I'm going kind of in the middle ish on the high side and aiming for 15 liters if you're using a 50 liter still you can safely fit 40 liters into that it's going to be 10 times the size so just multiply everything by 10 and the recipe down below and add in three kilograms of sugar give it a really good stir get it nice and dissolved and then you can go about adding water you're aiming for 15 liters in total and you want to hit your pitching temperature as well so what do I mean by that well add either hot water or cold water so you get the right temperature when you hit 15 liters if you're aiming for 30 degrees Celsius and it is 20 degrees Celsius put hot water in if it's 36gb freeze then put cold water in it's pretty easy really it sounds like it'll be tricky but it's not just keep adding smaller and smaller bits of water and add less than you think until you kind of get the hang of this now pitching temperature what temperature should it be that is going to a hundred percent depend on your yeast pitching temp is just the temperature that the washer is at when you throw the yeast in now I'm going to be using a yeast called the Red Label that is fine with high temperatures 35 degrees Celsius for this stuff is absolutely nothing but you really don't have to use it I'm kind of doing my own little slide testing thing outside of this video as well you could use baker's yeast if you wanted to and if you're going to use baker's yeast I'd suggest around about 30 degrees Celsius for pitching temperature or BYO yeast and just read the label see what temperature it says once you've got volume right and putting temperature correct you're going to want to add one good sized teaspoon of yeast nutrient as well as one half teaspoon of dab basically this is just a nitrogen source for our yeast uh Google damp you'll find it at most Brewing stores next up it's time to put the yeast in and I'm using one teaspoon like I said I'm using the temperature resistant Red Label yeast if you're interested in it and you're in New Zealand you can get it from our store there'll be a link in the description down below Americans I know you keep asking we'll see what we can do about it all right we're working on it now it's time to let the wash ferment it is ideally worth trying to keep the temperature of the wash relatively stable throughout the fermentation and as close to the temp range that your yeast likes if your yeast has a dirty great big range of you know like 15 to 40 written on the box generally aim for the middle and it doesn't matter too much if you're on one side or the other of that it's it's more important to try and have it even so don't stress if you don't have a stc-1000 or one of these controller boxes that'll look after the temperature of the yeast for you it's nice to have it's not 100 necessary it is however better to take your wash and you know wrap it in some blankets at the very least if it's out in the shed or take it out of the shed and put it in the hot water cupboard and try not to get in trouble for it because you know 35 degrees Celsius during the day and five degrees Celsius at night cycling back and forth isn't the best thing for it how do you know when it's finished all that stuff stops so if you have an airlock the airlock bubbling will most likely stop uh the the like the tuning and the boiling sort of action that you see especially if you've got a glass Carboy that'll stop and the fizzing on top will slowly stop as well I would suggest you wait until that point and then wait another two three days but ideally what you'll do is test with a hydrometer a hydrometer is a little piece of equipment that tests the density of liquid compared to water why is that interesting to us because it pretty much tells us how much sugar is left in there so if you get down to a density of around about one or even potentially slightly lower you know you're done and you're good to go so it's time to get on to distillation and introduce to you that special equipment that I was telling you about and the sponsor of today's episode this is the brand new airstill Pro by still spirits and still spirits are sponsoring this video this is not a review it's a product Spotlight you can't buy a product review on the stilt Channel but you can get a product Spotlight which essentially means I'm going to use this product because it's going to do the job we need it to do and teaching you how to make a gin and along the way I am going to point out some of the features of this new product which is I got to admit kind of interesting let's fire the thing up and perform our first lot of stripping runs what is a stripping run you ask well it's the first of two sets of distillations we're going to do a stripping run is essentially cutting down the volume in the fermenter and raising the ABV by removing mostly water from what we're going to carry on using later on so we're going to take wash from the fermenter and pop it into the airstill pro generally I do this just with a pot I actually filled up both the airstill pro and the air still because well I mean honestly these are kind of small Stills so doubling up and cutting the stripping run time in half is fine by me uh and I'm a you know a sport YouTuber so I've got both but I also wanted to show you some of the differences between the two so when we turn the where is the where have I put it oh my word ah it is still on the fans spin up which is actually kind of a good thing because there's nowhere to tell whether or not there's power going to the pot itself other than the fan spinning with the airstill pro however we press it to make sure it's in standby we get the white light and we hold it down oh it's running and listen listen the fan turns itself off until it's actually needed which is genius because over here [Music] still coming away and we have a little indication like down on the pot to let us know that yes this is in fact on Love It none of this stuff is groundbreaking but it is you know nice little quality of life stuff we have a little heat up time here so I'll come back to you when the Stills are running all right we are now into our stripping run uh so I'm not worried at all about making Cuts I'm not worried uh about the speed these tools uh running at all I'm worried about is making sure that uh we're getting this done as quick as possible purely just for time's sake uh and making sure that the condensers are not being overpowered there's not Vapor coming out with these Stills these two Stills I don't have any choice in the matter they're just going to run at the speed they run at but if I was you know using one of my bigger Stills my keg still my 50 liter Dr Gratis uh the um t500 pots with the Olympic Dome on top uh I would run it as fast as I could without steam coming out the end so essentially as fast as your condenser will allow you to run and I'm going to run quite deep into the quote-unquote tails even though we're not separating them simply because I worked hard to make this vodka and I want to keep as much of it as I can so I'm not worried about ABV now I just want to get the good stuff into the pot with as little water as possible [Music] so we are down to 10 off the spout on the air still Pro uh and 27 coming off the spout on the ear still this one was uh about 15 minutes behind 20 minutes behind in terms of when it actually got started up so I'm not too worried about that so I'm going to stop this one now at 10 10 kind of like a nice goal to get to for a stripping run um for a vodka in my mind the plan is essentially to just keep doing this uh do a stripping run empty is still out fill it up again until your ferment is empty and then you'll have the low wines which is the stuff in here which we can turn into vodka in the next thing a quick note to say that another advantage of this kind of recipe is that you don't need to worry about the wash being super clear when you distill it especially for a stripping run and to be honest these little Stills if you're using the air still either of them they can actually even handle a wee bit of chunky stuff if you're using a different kind of still design I would suggest that you make sure to filter out anything that's actually chunky now stripping runs are done in all of the liquid all of the spirit that we collected from that first batch of stripping runs so the accumulation of all the liquid from all the stripping runs in my case it was two in the install Pro and two in the air still I collected here uh and we're going to call this low wines so this is uh uh not a finished product any value between like 20 ABV and 35 ABV is about on the money the only consideration to make is that um if it's over 40 ABV you want to proof it back down just with water to below 40 ABB anyway now we have the low wines it is time to make our spirit run now to do this we're going to use a different kind of distillation which is reflux distillation here is the t500 a very common let me move that over uh reflux head you can buy these things just about anywhere including our website if you're in New Zealand but the idea with a reflux still the only difference is that as the vapor comes up through the column you have a means some means of cooling some of that vapor and sending it back down the column the interaction of vapor coming up and liquid going down essentially means that you're getting more distillations than just the one that we had going on with the pot Stills beforehand what does that mean for us it means that the percentage ABV coming off the spout that you're actually collecting goes way up so if we just redistilled what I have here now in a pot still and we took all of the product we kept and averaged about you know in terms of ABV ah 70 75 ABV from vodka we want that number to be way higher that's where we need a reflex still using the airstill pro because it actually does reflux as well let me get it set up let me get it started and then I'll explain to you you know what you could do if you're going to use different equipment all right here we go low ones go in still here goes on so you can see it get it all plugged in and with this little guy what we need to do actually is switch this little nozzle out so they have two different nozzles one for pot still mode and another for reflux mode there is a spanner in the little bag that it comes in I've been assured that the only reason the spanner is there is you know um with it heating up and cooling down it might get stuck so we don't use the spanner to put this in we only use it to take it out if we need it go on there we go so we're just going to do that finger tight and because I'm crap at things like this I'm going to put these back in the bag and put it on my bench right behind me otherwise I will lose it power on press the button we're green we're in reflex mode and we have to make sure that our four shots collection is in the right spot as well all right this is going to take a while to heat up so what if you're operating on a larger scale uh you might be using something like a milk can like this one from claw hammer or the t500 boiler both of these are good options or of course maybe you've got like a 50 liter keg still or something like the 50 liter uh Dr Gratis sort of setup I've got over there all of that is fine the only difference up to this point is that you would have scaled your wash and your stripping runs up to meet the the volume of the still that you're going to be filling so once again just to recap the easy way to think about this is to do three to four probably four times the volume of your reflux still size that you want to run in wash and then strip all of that out and then you'll be about the right the right volume so the fan has just turned on which means we're getting pretty damn close and yep there we go you can see that the automatic four shots collection is working you can do it pretty easily yourself though the idea is that you just want to throw away the first little bit of the distillate it's not going to taste great and it's definitely not going to leave you feeling good the next day so ditch it in my mind it doesn't really matter exactly how much four shots you take because we're still going to collect heads and separate those anyway I like to be pretty ruthless with my cuts to you know have a really nice tasting product at the end and if we're removing the heads anyway you know what does it matter if the extra or too little or too much like 10 mils goes into heads or goes into four shots makes no difference either way let's break this whole Cuts full shots heads Hearts Tails thing down a little bit more shall we uh the way to think about this is Imagine uh the beginning of the run and the end of the run and between those two points we're going to get a few different things and we're going to divide it up differently so at the very beginning we kind of take a very small amount of four shots like I said we don't wanna we're gonna ditch it we're gonna throw it away the next part right after four shots is heads and that's going to be a larger chunk of the the overall products that you collect and it's no longer as nasty as four shots but it's pretty damn nasty still to be honest when you're doing a reflex run like this you may not even want to differentiate between four shots in heads the reason home distillers differentiate between the four shots and the heads is because quite often you can reuse these in something later on and reflux distillation that makes less sense because the still is doing a better job of separating everything out anyway so the heads are going to taste and smell uh like nail polish remover they're going to be very Brash very harsh um tingly spiky in the mouth they're gonna smell very very volatile they can taste kind of like um almost like potpourri sort of fake sweet fake fruit uh smells that can sometimes smell kind of attractive but if you taste it it's going to be really harsh so let me have a little a little smell first get a little bit on your finger give it a little bit of a rub to sort of get it all evaporating all over your skin and then give it a smell quite often to me heads especially on a run like this where we're creating quite a clean vodka they're gonna smell slightly sweet slightly sweet but just a little bit kind of like cleaning product I wouldn't taste it yet I would wait a little bit longer now after we get past the heads we're going to get into hearts and this is the chunk that we want to keep it is the stuff that is going to turn into our final product but don't get too relaxed because down near the end we're going to hit tails and Tails are going to be bad as well we can talk about that later on but first right now we need to focus on figuring out where we're switching from heads to hearts there's different ways to go about making these cuts and I've got a whole lot of videos about that I'll link them in the description down below the first way is to collect multiple different jars and then keep them all in the order that you took them off the still and the reason you do that is because you can go back and visit them you can sort of like smell this one and smell this one say this sort of smelt clean but now that I smell this this is really clean no this is no good that's kind of the idea and it means that you're in no rush you don't have to make any decisions in real time based on what the Stills doing you can just keep on collecting them and come back the next day if you're tired and your pellets blowing out you can't smell anything anymore cover them up come back the next day and make the decision then the other way to do it is as it still is running you just keep on smelling it and sniffing it start tasting it and make your decisions that way and of course you can do everything in between I quite often do rolling cuts which is I'll have three or four jars and just to switch those out so I've got three or four jars worth of the past to compare with I think that's what I'm going to do today so uh I need some more cups all right I've got more glasses uh let me assess this again I'm gonna have a little taste now yeah this is starting to change so what I'm actually going to do is switch over to these smaller glasses uh because uh I mean let's face it with a run the size it doesn't really matter but uh the smaller glasses are nice when you're thinking about the sort of transition points so what's changed here is that it's no longer so just pure cleaning product and sweet smelling it is that sort of sweet almost baby sick sort of smell has faded away now it's just it smells like almost nothing to be honest but when you taste it a little bit better a little bit astringent okay yep so the bitterness and the astringency are starting to fade we're getting pretty close to switching over to Hearts I believe which is interesting we haven't taken a lot small run remember that Jesse I'm used to doing like 50 liter batches in this stuff all right let's check ABV we are at 89 so that's actually kind of respectable considering I mean dude look at the size of the column we've got in here like I said before the size of the column is Purity like the higher the ABV you can get um it's a cool new product but it's not magic you know it's not going to do anything crazy and the low ones that we put in there weren't super high ABV either so if you push that up higher uh you'd be getting a slightly higher ABV now as well we're getting very close to switching in fact I'm gonna so this is what I meant by Rolling Cuts right so these are the the nasty heads so I can get that out of the way now these are the kind of like borderline in betweens and I'm thinking yeah we're getting pretty close so we started with that just like cleaning product like sweet almost like weird sick sweet smell uh through to the sweetness of cleaning out but it getting kind of astringent and bitter and now there's the bitterness and the astringency is starting to clean up as well I don't think we're quite there yet [Music] all right we're on to jar number four well five if you count the um four shots in here and this is why rolling Cuts is really good because I actually thought here that this was going to be Hearts um but I'm gonna push it and I think maybe this is going to be Hearts now uh and why do we call it rolling Cuts well we know that this and this is definitely not Hearts right so I'm going to take these and go and pop them in in a keg I've got over there which I use to hold faints which is basically uh uh heads and tails all smushed together in case I want to do something different with them later on and because this is only distilling you know it's not full reflux there's definitely good stuff in here that I can reuse again I'll keep it apologies my camera overheated thanks for that Canon but I'm back now uh you haven't really missed anything because we're still collecting hearts and it hasn't really changed at all since about three quarts of the way through this jar here so once again rolling Cuts I now know that this I'm definitely not going to use so that can go into the faints as well this I can now taste there's a difference it's not huge uh but it is I think worth making the differentiation so that is going to be faints as well now like I said you don't have to do this now you can line all the glasses up and do it at the end that's entirely up to you another little tip is I'm I this is going to sound Macho and and Winky and that is not what it's supposed to be at all I've just been tasting a lot of high ABV Spirits for a long time it sounds like it wouldn't happen but I kind of know my limit about what I can and can't taste and I'm happy tasting this at higher ABV and not wrecking my palate if you're new to this game that's not going to be the case okay what I would suggest you doing is taking a teaspoon getting about half a teaspoon worth of spirit in there and then another half teaspoon of water and taste it that way that'll preserve your palate for a lot longer anyway there's nothing really to do at the moment other than just ride this out and uh I'll let you know when the Tails start showing up Cuts haven't changed but I did collect a small sample off the still just now and put it into the easy dents again and check it out we're still at 89.6 percent uh so once I've run this enough times to really understand it I will do a full review that uh still spirits has no sway over they won't get to see it or anything so keep your eye open for that anyway I guess we just keep on trucking until we look like they're starting to head into Tails I'll see you then oh objectively when you're making vodka you'd rather this be up you know pushing Asia trap around 95 ABV but uh Knight 89 is not horrible getting to 91 92 percent it's not too difficult with a like a proper reflex still 92 to 93 gets a little bit more tricky like you'd have to run a t500 properly to do that and could I tweak it a little bit and then getting from that 93 up to 95 percent is um that's an achievement like actually hitting azeotrope is pretty impressive what does it mean in terms of actual difference in flavor I mean it's relative right like a lot of people will taste this and taste something that was distilled to 95 and say it's the same uh uh some people will say that world's apart uh the skill of the distiller comes in a lot like if you screw your Cuts up it doesn't really matter what percent you're still into it's all all the stuff's going in there anyway so I mean it's all relative can we get a solid result like this 100 this is pretty damn clean and the reason that we picked the recipe we picked at the beginning of this remember is because it's going to Aid us it's going to make things a little softer a little smoother because of the oats and some of the flavor that's coming through is going to be interesting grainy flavor rather than you know just sugar bowl or weird nutrient flavors or any of that sort of stuff uh so we are 100 on track to make a solid gin still right now uh what generally happens with reflux is that you will suddenly like very quickly change from it's fine to I think maybe there's a little bit of tails to holy crap that's all Tails I find it really hard to describe the tales to me it's like wet cement uh or cement powder it's not acrid it's not bitter it's not astringent it's not spicy it's not peppery but somehow it's somewhere in between all of those things all related to each other you know that that feeling of cement powder in your nose or smelling wet cement and it kind of feels like it's attacking you that's the um The Taste the smell oh yeah yeah yeah okay it's coming in now definitely so I think let's try this again still not sure about that I'm gonna sit on that for a little bit uh but I'm almost positive that I'm going to call this uh this Tails here now yeah I don't think I'm gonna keep that but I'll sit on it for a little bit yeah definitely okay so this is this is now Tails I'm not going to keep any more of that now it's up to you you could run this out more and collect more of the tails to put into your face jar and potentially reuse later on but I'll be honest with you guys I got a buttload of faints I don't need it what I don't have a buttload of is time speaking of time it is 6 15 and I put this on at uh right on 12 o'clock so this took uh just over six hours now what I want to do is get this proofed back down uh I would like to start maceration at 50 ABV so we're gonna get this down to 50 so what I need to do is measure it and then dilute it just with water so Boop [Music] are you proud of me I'm proud of me and number two all right so we have a little bit less than I thought I guess these are 500 mils up to the top but that is uh 800 mils at 89 ABV let's get this proof down uh the easiest way I've found to do this is uh to use a calculator I've just pulled a random one up here the one on Chase the craft still hasn't been finished and put up we're having a little bit of trouble with it I'm working on it I promise you it will come back in fact as soon as I finish recording this I'm going to go and send some emails about that but anyway so I need six 690 mils of water and if you're a little bit unsure what I would suggest is running the calculator and then putting in you know about three quarts of the water because you can always add a little bit more in you can't take it out without re-distilling so you know seems like smart advice right of course I'm being a little bit of a privileged YouTuber using the the easy dents so we're at 55.7 ABV so we're pretty much on track I'm just going to dump the rest of that in confident that'll be close enough um you know but you don't need to use this you can use the ABV refractometers I have one here which I just broke not great or of course just an alchemeter in a test jar works wonderfully as well if you've made it this far in to the video and especially if you followed along and you're doing this yourself congratulations you have officially made vodka and if you followed all the steps along in this process you've probably made a pretty decent quality vodka and at this point in time let me have a little taste there is a a silky smoothness from the oats and there's that weird kind of wheaty licoricey Bite coming through as well I don't know about you it's entirely up to personal preferences but I really like this I think this is good uh so the hard work in my opinion is done now congratulations nice work welcome to the craft if it's your first time but now we get to play and we get to actually make the Gin so what I'm going to do is I'm going to set up the airstill pro and the standard distal and make two different recipes here uh the idea is over here I'm going to make my base recipe the the standard gin that I think should probably be your first go-to in terms of gin not because it's amazing in and of itself but because it's a good good platform to move on from on this side however I don't know what I'm gonna make Aaron don't look at me like that Aaron's in the process of dispatching some of her books look at those Monica monarchs of old Tierra very cool there'll be a link down there for if you're interested but Erin uh give me a weird or different ingredient for gin that you want me to try oh yeah you've been going on about this for ages all right seaweed fine all right seaweed apparently we're doing seaweed thank you for that Erin let's throw a spanner in the works but uh the plan now is I'm just going to split this batch so 700 mils into each so uh if I'm sure you're gonna start asking the questions you know like what if I want to make a bigger batch as long as you're keeping things relatively the same size you know and like even probably five Xing the size of the recipe I'm making it's going to scale relatively linearly so these are going to make about one bottle each about one 700 mL bottle honestly probably slightly less depending on what we proof it down to if you want to scale that up and make like five bottles you're probably pretty pretty good just to multiply everything by five and there will be full recipes for everything in this video down below it's time to get the Botanicals the exciting things into the mix here and I'm going to focus on the base recipe first just to give you some background I designed this recipe to do two well actually three things four people that are getting into making gin number one I wanted it to be simple enough to just be kind of carefree and get stuck in but number two it needed to cover off all of the bases that I think gin is supposed to be uh and number three it was supposed to be a springboard for people to try the base recipe taste it and then adjust or add two or do something crazy from it but if you're not quite sure how to start with the recipe this is where you start from and you add to it or take away from it or whatever cool oh and actually one last thing it's meant to be packed with flavor to the point where there's almost too much it's like riding on the edge of it but the reason for that is is if you're a new distiller I I think if you're doing this the first time around and you make a gin and it comes off and it just kind of tastes a little bit like nothing that's really disappointing if on the other hand it's too full of flavor and it goes cloudy when you proof it down because there's so much flavor packed into it that's an easy fix you can just pour a little bit of extra vodka into it and you're golden and to me that guarantees success whatever your success is it like however you define success for your gin more often than doing it the other way anyway here are the Botanicals we're starting with 15 grams of juniper uncrushed and 15 grams of crushed juniper I think crushed juniper tends to give more of that Piney uh resiny Christmas tree kind of flavor and the uncrushed Juniper gives a little bit more of the bearish side of things so once again I'm splitting it down the middle so you can alter if you don't know Juniper is the backbone of gin like full stop hands down that's what gin is built on next up coriander also really important and I'm using eight grams of the stuff uh and I give it just a light cracking you don't want to pulverize it you don't want to turn it into powder but you kind of want to pop the seeds open next up Angelica root this adds the earthy like almost powdery uh undertones to a gin and often I think that just enough Angelica root to almost know it's not there ties everything together if you want to bump it up a little bit more and sort of push it towards being grungy and heavy and earthy by all means I think for my tastes this is balanced nicely and lastly you've got to have some Citrus in there right gotta have some Citrus and we're keeping this real basic with eight grams of uh uh why can I think lemon dear Lord Jesse it's lucky you don't have to talk for a living anyway uh this is going to go into the airstill pro unit and by the way guys you can actually if you want to if you already have a ear still you can just buy the head unit and it will work with the standard the the old the the original yeah still anyway I'm going to put everything into here and what I would normally do is put all of it in but I'm going to switch things up just a little bit and I am going to try saving the lemon and um putting it in the vapor path because I've been wanting to try that for a little while anyway make sure all of this goes in here all right now at this point you've got two options one is to just macerate it for 24 to 48 hours and if you're going to do that to be honest you probably wouldn't put it into the still you could slap the slap the lid on uh you just put it into a jar into a bottle or whatever you've got handy not a problem the second option is to do what I'm going to do now which I think gives a very similar result uh with a lot less time which is I'm going to heat this up to 50 degrees Celsius I'm going to pop the lid on it and I'm going to let it sit for one hour make sure make sure you're watching it because this heats up a lot quicker than you think it does with only 700 mils in there okay don't walk away you'll be disappointed all right we'll plug that in and while this is warming up let's make sure yes the little red light is on so this is in fact working um well this is warming up I am going to do two things one I'm going to make sure that I have my thermometer here which I don't hold on yes yes I do I'm not a complete imbecile and I also want to get the Botanicals sorted for the uh the funky seaweed gin for Aaron so here's the deal guys the reason I'm doing two is to show you that you can take this base recipe and tweak it uh I've dialed the Juniper down slightly and I've taken it away from the Piney side slightly back towards the berry side still 15 grams of uh the uncrushed Juniper but I've taken the crushed juniper back down to nine grams we still have eight grams of coriander I've bumped the Angelica root up ever so slightly to one gram I'm trying to push this towards kind of a I'm gonna going for an interesting sweet and Umami mix that's what I'm after here for the Citrus we've gone with five grams of lemon down from eight and I've subbed out three of those grams to Orange just to mix it up a little bit and of course the star of the show The seaweed I am just going to use the good old-fashioned toasted seaweed for sushi action but there's a lot a lot of native or endemic seaweed around New Zealand so if this has some legs to it I'd love to sub it out for that later on I'm just going to pop all of this straight on into the still I have one more ingredient to get I'm not going to put anything in the vapor path for this one get in there don't make a mess this is bitter orange powder and hold on let me take my own advice here yep 50 degrees Celsius there you go and let's get the still here on there just to keep everything all the vapor in there we don't want to lose that uh power is off we're good double check the power all right a bit of orange powder I used this when I was uh trying to clone Cointreau that works pretty well actually there's a link in the description down below if you're interested in watching that video but this stuff was really interesting it gave more of that marmalade orange flavor rather than like the juicy full like chunky orange juice flavor rather than uh just Orange Peel you know like orange zest so I'm going to use a half teaspoon of that as well that was a heaped half teaspoon actually that seaweed is going to give perhaps a slightly salty but mostly Umami kind of kick to the gym that's what I'm hoping for here's where my weird thought train came from this my mum does This Thing Called marmalade toast butter Marmite and then marmalade on top so it's sweet it's salty it's Umami that's kind of like bitter and tangy and I thought that kind of flavor combination could be quite interesting for gin here we are it might be a train wreck I don't know maceration is complete that's been one hour and like I said I held back the lemon I actually needed to go and peel some more because I got kind of sad sitting here for an hour um but uh I'm gonna put that into the vapor partheastern pro has a little um gin basket thingy on top uh I haven't really tried doing it with us before so even though this is the quote unquote based recipe I'm doing a little bit of an experimentation over here as well uh let's get both this and the other ESL rocking and we can run two Gins at the same time pretty much good to run I'm just going to pop these glasses up so they don't Splat all over the place uh and now we just need to wait for these to both get up to temperature while we're doing that I'm going to talk briefly about Cuts if you've seen me make gin before I'm sure you've heard me say this we've already made vodka and we've made really solid cuts on it so that spirit is quite pure for one of a better word the the cuts we made on it are good because they were compressed by the fact that we distilled it with reflux right we've put that vodka into this still and we're going to redistill it again we're not just going to magically get heads all over it's just not going to happen right so uh do we have to make Cuts based on the Alcohol side of things or on the safety side of things or on the jaggy spiky alcohol side of things no not really but it turns out that more often than not when you're distilling Botanicals like this you're going to want to take a small amount off the top anyway not because you need to make cuts for the alcohol but because the Botanicals just give off a weird flavor right at the beginning how do you describe it it's almost like bad gin Essence like all of the Ginny flavors but concentrated too much and just kinda I don't know like like fake gin in some weird way it turns out if you if you just take a small amount for that we're talking like maybe five to maybe 25 mils on a run this size oh look at that right on cue I planned it let me have a taste of this acrid I guess would be the the way I'd describe it but it's going to clean up real quickly I promise you so let me have another taste and it's gone there we go we've got three negotiate there we go so that is all I took off let me measure this for you with a syringe so it can be relatively accurate eight and a half mils was all it took and it changed drastically in that eight and a half mils this bad boy was turned on about five minutes after this one so I expect this to be up and running very soon in fact that I suspect the fans will be kicking on any second now but we're pretty much sorted for cuts all we need to do now is ride this out until one of two things happens the ABV gets low enough that it starts just kind of diluting what we're making and we decide it's not worth collecting so normally if I was going to call it based on that I'd say 40 45 percent or two what happens more often is either you start to get a slightly odd flavor coming through from the Botanicals uh the flavor from the Botanicals changes distinctly into something you don't like or all the Botanical flavors just gone and you're just basically collecting alcohol at that point in time when we get to one of those things we will turn it off if however you are new to this and this is you know like you've run less than 10 Gins before I would 100 percent encourage you to stand next to the still and taste it as it's coming off the spout because the flavor is going to change significantly every couple of minutes every five minutes every 10 minutes suddenly a different one of the Botanicals will be prominent in the spirit you're tasting so right now okay that's not bad that's actually really nice I'm interested to see what happens over here now anyway my point being is it will continue to change and it is an absolute education for a new distiller to sit there and taste oh there we go the fans just kicked on uh to sit there and taste as you're distilling and see how it changes it gives you a nice understanding of the distilling process remember guys the Estel Pro does the automated four shots collection daily so I'm guessing as soon as I start getting first drops out of here we've already collected enough in the little four shots jar to deal with the the weird Botanical flavors I'll measure the volume of this when the run's done um I actually haven't thought to do it yet and I'm not supposed to take this out while the still is running apparently we have first strips over here and let me see how do they taste yes that'll do it all right I'm just going to start collecting from there which means that's what I need to do now is just let this run and I will come back to you when either we uh hit a lower ABV a weird Botanical tail zeness or um let me just run out of flavor I'll see you soon guys [Music] all right all right we're getting near the end of things especially over on this side let me have one more taste whoa okay um well yeah okay I'm switching that out because I don't know what the hell's happening and I don't want to drop a bunch of stuff into this that I I'm not into so kind of like the rolling Cuts we talked about before up the top of the Run we had seaweed flavored but it was seaweed like when you're just eating sushi and you don't actually taste the seaweed flavor it just kind of like it always just sort of Seasons the rice a little bit it was lemon in that together so that was I was 100 on board with that now we're starting to get down to the more like grassy vegetabley oceany Umami like feels like it's going to be salty but it's not quite salty sort of flavors I'm a little bit unsure about how much that I want so that's why I switched over here and my guess is that we are going to run out pretty soon that sounds like quite a grungy flavor to me that would be down the bottom yeah it's fading already okay I'm gonna leave that for just a second and we're gonna go and test over here [Music] yum yeah that just tastes like the standard gin okay I'm actually gonna let this run a little bit longer to see if we want to keep that but I think you get the idea of what I'm doing here right I'm just trying to decide where where I really want to make that cut if you're not sure you can do the rolling Cuts thing if you're not sure you can you know switch just one glass out like I have uh you know actually what I'm gonna do is I'm definitely keeping all of this so I will put that in there and just you know carry on collecting into the one glass this one I don't think is too far behind yup yup yup yup all right I guess we'll just write it out oh no okay yep that's over I don't know what that is but I don't like it that's a big old note it's almost manure like like horse manure yeah it's really horsey okay we'll cut that off now this is starting to just kind of get to be a little bit Bland and flavor more of the Angelica root coming through most of everything else has disappeared it's kind of like an interesting gingery thing going on with the Angelica Roots I'm going to keep let it keep running for a little bit and we're going to see where this goes all right so we're starting to fade out a little bit to nothing here I'm going to make another switch dump that in there and decide by keeping that see what happens on this one alcohol's starting to drop a lot quicker now as well my guess is if we took an ABV on this it's probably around the 55 now actually let's do that oh it's a little bit lower actually it's 52 ABV so let me have one last taste yeah it's just feeling empty now empty and I will keep this and ditch that right we are pretty much there guys it is time to proof down our gin right now this gin is sitting at I'm an idiot I've forgotten what it's sitting at I just took the reading my weird let me do that again I think it was 75. okay 75.9 ABV if you want to drink your gin at 75.9 ABV groovy uh you are done personally I would like that to be 40 45 ABV bottled so what we need is we need the proof that the ABV is at and the volume so I've got 400 mils at 76 ABV I'm going to proof this to 42 ABV and we need 320 mils of water when you're proofing down it is definitely worth using a water that you like to drink at the very least if you want to go into more geekery on the type of water you want to proof it down for the type of spirits then by all means but the basic is as long as it's something that you're happy to drink is water [Music] then um awesome now all we need to do is bottle this up oh dear lord Jesse you spilled it dang it that would have been 750 mils I think now when you make gin and you proof it down like this it tends to get a little bit beat up in other words what I'm saying is it needs to sit for a little while to be all that it can be generally I find that like 24 hours gives a huge Improvement another two days after that gives a slight Improvement and then after that the lower diminishing returns really kicks in so if you want it to be as good as it can possibly be leave it for like a week um 24 hours is going to be most of the way there just letting it sit for a little bit allows everything to kind of reincorporate back into the Spirit uh it Mellows out significantly so if you try it now and you're like whoa that tastes a little bit like fire don't freak out um because you know it'll probably be fine in 24 hours and um I'm gonna label it as well because I get the feeling that this is definitely going to get drunk I'm putting the label on upside down Muffet nothing fancy just the old Vivid on tape let me get this proof down as well I'm gonna do it exactly the same way and we can taste the stuff and Bam just like that well hey I shouldn't say just like that because let's face it it was a bit of work but the work was worth it anyway just like that we now have two bottles of gin sitting here which is pretty freaking awesome we've got the Bastion on this side and the seaweed gin on this side uh before I taste them I need to do two things one I need to say a huge thank you to the patreons thank you so much patreons for being the people that support me day in day out uh love your work guys you Kick-Ass human beings and thank you for everyone else uh if you're finding value in these videos and you think I've earned it you can go on over to patreon there is a link in the description down below and the long and short of it is that you can sign up uh to different tiers that get different things and support us directly like I said if you're finding value in these videos and you'd like to support us on what we're doing there's a link down there anyway the other thing I need to do before we taste is at least admit the fact that this is not clear it's a little cloudy here's what happened guys whenever you proof something like a gin down you'll get to a point where the flavor compounds in the liquid are no longer soluble and they'll just come out of solution and then hey Presto you've got a a cloudy gin if I was running a commercial Distillery I would either have to steer super freaking hard into the cloudiness and like make it our number one marketing thing I think or uh it would be unacceptable you couldn't do it because I'm not and I'm just making things at home the way I like them honestly I don't really care I'm gonna do nothing about it I'm just gonna drink it like it is and it is a almost like a it's almost like a weird badge of honor that hey look how much look how much flavor I crammed into my gin you can think of it like that if you want to but if you do want to fix it you know make it just look like the stuff on the Shelf at the at the Bottle Store the easiest way to do it would be to dilute this back down with more neutral more vodka that's sitting at a higher ABV than it so you're diluting the flavor down slightly with the Vodka that you're adding and you're raising the ABV potentially a little bit too you know like maybe I'd put this much in a 55 ABV and just see what happened I'm not gonna bother anyway let's taste I'm gonna taste the base gin first because that is what I know and then I'm looking forward to tasting this because that's that's different so cheers team pretty much exactly as I remember this recipe big bold Ginny flavors like I said earlier on tooting this is made to be quite like bold heavy gin if it's too much for you pour a little bit into a glass like this and then just pour a little bit of vodka in until it settles out at about you know the right punchiness for you but anyway big bold Juniper character that's the number one characteristic in this thing there's kind of the sweet biriest side to the Juniper but there's also the reasony Christmas tree almost tar-like weight to it as well I'm getting lemon on the nose but not a whole lot of it I'm not getting any of the root coming through at this stage but here we go hmm to me that's just kind of what gin is there's nothing amazing about it it's just balanced the way that I like it which is a butler Juniper and really heavy flavors overall the alcohol base is actually quite pleasant too like I'm really enjoying this recipe and I think I might use this more for gins I'm not getting much of that licorice note in here just because there's so much freaking flavor in there like start to end it's just gin but the oats are definitely sort of giving it just a little bit of a silky velvety feel without pulling it away from being dry this to me is what a gin should be and it's what I think is a great base for you to start if it's too much you water it or vodka it down a little bit and then you can change the recipe next time if it is too reasoning for you you crush less of the Juniper or add slightly less crushed juniper in uh if it is just a little bit too mundane or not complex enough for you you could think about starting to add in some different citruses or some star anise or aniseed or cinnamon or berries or cardamom is probably the first place that you should look which is another pretty standard gin flavor but the point is it's there to be a base it's there to be the bare minimum in my eyes that a gin can be and still be gin anyway there's also the other there's the orange and also the marmalade Orange in terms of the Citrus and giving that slight kind of pithy butt candied kind of citrus flavor works really well on this I like it now I'm not getting any straight up seaweed on the nose and I'm definitely not getting any brininess but what I am getting is an interesting Umami like slightly savory note sitting under that that marmalady flavor it's working I like that that works well mm-hmm oh that drinks very differently okay so the biggest thing that I noticed compared to the oh that went down the wrong hole compared to the base gin is that the the Atari resini like mouth covering feeling of the Juniper has been dialed back significantly been cut in half I would say funnily enough and that's allowing the the Citrus marmalade kind of like candied orangey sort of flavors to come out but they're being balanced with that interesting umaminess which is a lot more present on the tongue and it it actually it actually funnily enough is not dissimilar to the whole idea of marmalek that I was talking about but it's more Savory and marmalade rather than salty Savory marmalade unfortunately I'm not getting any brininess I would have liked it into that that would have been cool but what I am getting is this I don't know how to describe it man it's this weird Fresh open space kind of note that is just I it sounds so silly to say it but it's kind of like Ocean Breeze you know how this all is air fresheners and stuff that always put that in the description it's always been kind of meaningless to me but this this does get it I don't know it reminds me of being on a beach when it's all stormy and crazy but that fresh like you're alive smell this is probably a totally personal experience for me so I'm just going to stop talking about it but there you have it so this is pretty much what I have come to believe is going to be it's a base for you to launch from the bare minimum a gin can be in terms of complexity in my mind and still be a gin I think you need those kind of components you need Juniper you need Citrus coriander yeah yeah I think you kind of need it and some form of root I think you need that as well it is dialed way up in terms of the intensity of the flavor but it's like that so you can easily you know proof it back down with vodka if you want to or dilute it I should say it's there for you to try as your first gin and use as a springboard and I hope doing this kind of Illustrated how that worked right we kind of took this recipe and then messed with it a little bit and added some more flavors in to get this so I genuinely hope that watching through this video has made you realize that yes making gender is a bit of work but it is a hundred percent worth it and it can be super super rewarding and it just opens up a whole world of complexity in terms of different flavors that you can dip into and change and adjust this is your springboard please please please take it mess with it and go and make something crazy with it put weird ingredients in it dial in your exact flavors by switching ingredients up or changing the amounts that you put in and if you do come back and stick a comment in the comment section down below here so everyone else can get inspired by your ideas and also honestly it just kind of makes me happy to see people doing that so if you enjoyed this video please give us a thumbs up drop a comment in the comment section down below if you found it really valuable please consider signing up on patreon but whether you do or don't it doesn't really matter because I will see you next week keep on Chasing The Craft see ya

Channel: Still It

Views: 90,059

Keywords:

Id: -E5dOVMInOA

Length: 61min 46sec (3706 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 03 2023