How To Make Potato Vodka

today we are taking the humble tata brussels you know boil it mash it stick it in the stew and we're gonna turn it into vodka cheers guys how's it going chases i hope you're having a kick-ass week i'm jesse and this is still it and today yes today we are finally making potato vodka so no beating around the bush we're getting straight stuck into this and the first thing i want to talk about is the selection of potatoes because this is kind of important turns out that potatoes aren't the uh the greatest source of starch on the face of the planet they're just not that dense with it so you are going to want to choose the most starch dense potato you can now you could get all technical about this and look up all the potatoes that are available to you figure out you know the starch content the starch percentage and go from there but a basic idea is the more floury and fluffy the potato is the higher they are in starch so at the very least you want to go out and find a potato that is sold as a a roasting potato because the roasting potatoes are the ones that get crispy on the outside fluffy on the middle the higher in starch i'm using agreea potatoes we're using 20 kilos this is going to make a 50 liter wash and about 2 liters of 90 vodka now you could peel the potatoes to prepare them but it turns out that a whole lot of the flavor in potatoes actually comes from the skins i like flavor so i'm not gonna peel them instead i'm just gonna brush them and throw them on into the pot any potatoes that are actually nasty i just biff them it's not worth keeping them things that have small blemishes on them i just cut the blemishes off and wax the rest into the pot once all 20 kilos of potatoes are prepared i put around about four liters of water into the bottom of the pot i'm not covering the potatoes i'm just covering the bottom of the pot next it's off out to the shed and we're getting the gas fired up to steam these taters pop the lid on and let them cook for around about 45 minutes making sure that you don't run out of water i've just checked the spuds and they're nice and uh tender i guess you would say they smash apart relatively easy so the next job is of course smashing these things up and the reason that i steamed them instead of just straight boiling them was because i've only got this little tool for smashing which is obviously kind of inadequate and i figured it would be easy to smash if there wasn't hot freaking liquid everywhere once the potatoes are roughly mashed add in another eight ish liters of water and get to mixing i found it easiest to use a big old mash paddle in conjunction with the masher to get the rest of the job done now i have 20 kilos of potato the starch has been gelatinized so it's going to be accessible to the enzymes once we get that going and honestly you could use you know you could use bottled enzymes if you wanted to i'm going to be using barley because i've got some on hand and i feel like this is i don't know i feel like this is a recipe where i don't want to take stuff out of a bottle and put it in i just want to do it the natural way i hate it when people say that but in this case for some reason it means something to me so i've got five and a half kilos of barley sitting down there and i'm gonna add this in very very very slowly and do a lot of stirring so we don't get any grain balls we don't get it all clumping up and everything is accessible to the liquid so the enzymes can do their job um we're going to be pushing this pot to the limit hopefully i can fit it all in we'll soon find out normally when i'm mashing grain i just mash straight into mash temperature barley is converted so well these days that the idea of a step mash just isn't in my opinion necessary but because we're using potatoes today we're going to do a pseudo step mesh to help to utilize different enzymes in the full enzyme packet that come in the barley that's why we added cold water earlier on so right now we're sitting at about 40 degrees celsius i'm going to get the gas turned back on turn it right down low and slowly slowly bring the temperature of the mesh up to 63 degrees celsius once we hit the 63 degrees celsius we can pop the lid back on insulate the pot and just let it sit for a solid hour because we made this with potatoes and not just barley i decided i wanted to do a starch test to make sure that everything was converted in the mash during that hour if you want to learn how to do a starch test click on the video in the top right corner once you've passed the starch test let your wash cool down to 25 degrees celsius and pinch a little bit of liquid off the top to see your original gravity you can then pitch your yeast i'm just using baker's yeast and i'm pitching three tablespoons of this stuff heaps of yeast get the pot covered back up and ferment it ideally at around about 25 degrees celsius if you can temperature control great if not just find a temperate part in your house to keep it in for about a week this potato mash wash thingy [ __ ] what's it has been fermenting for eight days now and it's uh sour just a little bit which is great now the problem is uh i'll be honest with you guys if you're doing this at home one of the biggest problems you're gonna have is trying to separate the solids from the liquid if you don't have a still that can handle uh distilling on the grain now uh one tip i will give you guys is you can get one of those mop buckets you know the ones with the uh the big levers uh and a brew in a bag bag or even a pillow case or something you can scoop the mash into it pop it in the bucket squeeze it out collect it down the bottom you know tip the grains out carry on i'm not going to be doing that today do you know why because i'm a dirty cheat i'm a dirty dirty cheat and i have a oil jacketed still so i can just throw everything right on into the pot and i don't have to worry about i know this still looks kind of crazy but in essence it's just running as a simple pot still right now the only thing i'm utilizing from all of this is the fact that it is oil jacketed which means i can just throw everything in there without scorching so it's just a simple pot still down there in the pot the mash is boiling away the vapor's coming up through the column over through the line arm and down into the condenser over here for those of you that aren't used to this stuff or new to the channel or new to distilling i'm running this as a stripping run all i'm doing right now is the first distillation like i said it's a stripping run and we're doing that to collect the low wines this stuff here once we're done with it i'm gonna go and pop it in another still so give me a little bit of time i'll get this run out we'll collect all the low ones up and we'll pop it into the next still now we're getting towards the end of the run and people always ask me how far down into the tails i go on a stripping run and honestly guys it's up to you it's uh basically how much time do you have versus how thrifty you want to be with what's in the pot what's in the in the still i like to go down to at least 20 i go down to 20 pretty much all the time and with something like this because i'm trying to scrounge up as much alcohol as i can to go into the next run i'm going to go down to they'd say 10 percent at least and we'll uh we'll see where we go from there yes i could be using a parrot but no i'm not i know this is a vodka video and generally for vodka what you want to do is to distill it to the highest abv you can to clean it up as much as you can but i've been tasting this stuff coming off the spout over here and i'm actually kind of enjoying the flavor that's in it there is a really interesting earthy it's like potato skins funnily enough and it's faint it's not overpowering and it is not disgusting at all i actually quite like it so i am going to run it through four plates on my still so that's four bubble plates uh instead of running it in full reflux if you don't know the words that i'm talking about if you don't understand what i'm talking about i get it i don't want to get into now because that's another whole 10 minutes of talking but i'll put some videos up here for you to help understand it if that doesn't make any sense ask some questions in the questions down below i'll make sure to get into the comments after the first uh day or so that this video has been up and answer as many as i can there's also a buttload of other people out there in this community that'll help you out in the questions down below so if you do have a question feel free to ask guys that have been around forever you know the drill be nice be nice so once these low winds have finished collecting out i'm gonna pop them into my other still and once again guys i'm doing this to show you guys multiple different things you don't have to use different stills like this you can just use the same still i'm gonna have to proof that down for two reasons one is uh around the home distilling community we like to not put anything higher than 40 abv into the boiler it's a safety thing so i'm going to proof it down to at least 40 but i'm also going to run into a problem with volume i need enough volume to completely cover the elements in my still so i use just enough water to get above those elements and then we can get set up for the next run [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so we got the still charged up we added in some filtered water to get above the elements uh and now i have run the still for a little while to get all the plates balanced out i slowly bled off some four shots at the very beginning and now i've adjusted the still to run a little bit faster to start collecting the main chunk of the run so right now we're collecting heads soon we're going to be into the hearts and into the money part of the run now i understand that there is a whole lot going on here and to be honest we don't have time to go into exactly how to run you know this kind of still if you do want to know more about that please guys check out this video up here uh that talks about how i run my plated still and kind of what's happening within the still i'll check back in with you when we've got uh solidly into the hearts [Music] on the pointy end of the still we're collecting off the spout and i'm collecting into multiple little jars and the reason for that is that i want to be able to later on select which parts of the run i keep and which parts i don't so as they fill up switch them out put a new one in and it just means that once the run's done then i can go back and select exactly what i want i can make the cuts the way i want to make the cuts and keep what we want to keep leave the other stuff out because it just doesn't taste good and because i know there's people out there they're going to want to know it's coming off right now the alca meter's saying 90 it's probably a touch cold so maybe 91 92 something like that but a result i'm happy [Music] we are now far enough into the run where we're starting to hit tails the abv is dipping slightly the taste has gone horrible tastes like nasty ass wet cardboard wet dog funky earthy nastiness that we don't want on the run but i'm going to keep collecting it because i can save this stuff and whack it into the faint's jar and use it again later on once i've got this finished we'll jump on over to the bench we'll blend it and we'll uh we'll have a taste you know what let's taste it next to the tomato paste wash and uh see how it stacks up i have spent the last 15 minutes just sort of going through these having a nice little uh assessment of each of them basically this is the beginning of the run and the end of the run it started out uh fruity and almost uh oily smelling which is quite interesting but it is super super jaggy up the top end here by this jar it's cleaned up and it is almost identical down to this point here where the tail started coming in yeah down there it is super musty pungent wet dog but a little bit more grassy than that so we're definitely not going to be keeping this one we're going to get rid of it the one that is interesting to me is this it's heading towards that flavor but it's not there yet and it has a lot of potatoiness it it reminds me of that reminds me of the flavors i go looking for in a whiskey funnily enough so we're going to get rid of these two we're definitely keeping these four so i'm going to throw those straight in now and what i like to do when i can't decide on on something like this is make a little uh tincture up so what i want to do basically is put four parts of what i've got a half part of this because it's the rough ratio that it'll be in proof it back down to roughly 40 interesting okay i like it but i don't like it that much so what i'm going to do is i'm going to put half of this in if you were trying to make a super clean um you know heading towards a much more neutral flavor profile you would want to add things like this but the beauty of this hobby is you do whatever the hell you want you make stuff the way you like i like flavor i always go looking for flavor and we're going to proof some of this down and have it next to some tpw for those of you who don't know tbw stands for tomato paste wash it's a vodka that i made a little while ago once again video card up here if i've got any left my word i've used a bunch this video but i thought it would be really interesting to taste them side by side and i'm sure that you guys at home would be interested as well the tpw smells like sugar wash i feel like i could blind test this and tell you that this came from sugar the potato vodka does not have that funny enough what it does have is a interesting earthy potato skin aroma on the nose i will admit it's probably not everyone's kettle of fish but i actually quite like it i'd be really interested to see what we could do with this i gotta say the first thing that comes to mind is like a kind of a weird and wacky gin like what does it make me think what about like a roast lamb gin i don't know like literally rosemary uh some lamb fat and then gin stuff i don't know it makes me want to do weird things okay so the biggest difference to me is the mouth feel this has a slick but piercing mouth feel this has a smooth almost oily but very light mouth feel when you put this in your mouth it feels like it soaks into your tongue and kind of attacks your tongue when you put this into your mouth it feels like it coats your tongue it's velvety on your tongue but then it um it sort of evaporates and you feel it more up in your sinuses i want to talk about a couple of other interesting things about this stuff but before i do i need to say a huge huge thank you to the patreons thank you so much guys i don't get to do this stuff without you uh i am so freaking lucky in 2020 to be able to mess around with this stuff in my shed and it's my job i don't know i don't know how i got this lucky but thank you so much guys a huge part of that is because of you patreons thank you the last thing i wanted to talk about guys is efficiency potatoes uh you would assume are a really dense source of starch but well i did i must admit before i heard about this stuff turns out they're really not so uh from 20 kilos of potatoes and what was it five kilos of grain i got two liters and that's not horrible but imagine if that was 25 kilos of grain that volume would be a lot larger it's a lot of effort it's messy it's takes more time than other types of vodka but it does yield a different result so if that's what you're into guys uh i gotta say i really do have to say this would be a fun one for you guys to try at home if you have tried it at home please please drop a comment in the comment section down below tell me if you got a similar result to what i have here tell me if you did it differently for those that haven't tried it make sure you go down and check those comments because you're going to get some cool suggestions and ideas down there as well i hope you found this interesting if you did please guys give it a thumbs up that helps me out immensely if you're not subscribed yet and you yes you want to chase the craft of home distillation make sure you hit that subscribe button down below the video as well have a kick ass week guys i'll catch you next time keep on chasing the craft see ya

Channel: Still It

Views: 1,878,583

Rating: 4.8882174 out of 5

Keywords: potato vodka, poatoe vodka, making vodka from potato, how to make vodka, how to make potato vodka, can you make vodka with potato, vodka, distilling, home distilling, how to distill vodka, how to distill potato, Jesse, Still it, chase the craft, CTC, moonshine, potatoe moonshine, potatoes, potato moonshine

Id: uhSWIeTf92s

Length: 17min 47sec (1067 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 09 2020