How to Make TEQUILA w/ AGAVE SYRUP!

okay it's not tequila but it's not not [Music] tequila [Music] okay today is a good one so today we're gonna make an agave spirit i'm calling it an agave spirit because technically it's not tequila or mezcal because those are regional legal designations just like bourbon is only made in america anywhere else it's whiskey tequila and mezcal are only made in mexico and only in certain regions but if i said agave spirit in the title i don't think many people would know what i was talking about so for a little background tequila and mezcal are made from a desert plant called agave tequila is only made from blue agave whereas mezcal can be made from a whole bunch of different species of the agave plant so the plant itself is a big old spiky boy with big old sharp leaves coming out and kind of a giant starchy pineapple-like structure or pina in the middle of it the basic process to make the spirit is pretty straightforward agave penis are harvested by hand split roasted and then the juice in the roasted pulp is then taken and fermented after it's fermented they distill it so the bad news is that you and i cannot really get agave pines in order to roast and then crush to make real mezcal or real tequila from the the raw ingredients so we're gonna cheat now there are several commercial distilleries here in the states that use agave syrup or nectar for our purposes the terms are kind of interchangeable the resulting agave spirit made with agave nectar has the same basic ingredients as tequila but it's going to lack some of the complexity that you would find in those traditional spirits and that's because the process to make the syrup reduces the flavors that you get from traditional agave pulp until i can get some real agave to roast and ferment myself this will have to do by the way if you know where i can get some real agave hit me up down in the comments despite the fact that we're not using the real deal agave syrup still makes a damn good spirit and i've got some options for you to crank up the flavor profile so hang with me okay so let's get this recipe knocked together so i can tell you how much fun it's going to be to actually get this sucker to ferment to make the agave wash add 1.25 gallons or 4.75 liters of agave syrup or nectar to 4 gallons or 15 liters of water toss in 5 teaspoons of yeast energizer and the yeast then aerate it and take your gravity reading mine came out to 1.070 then air lock it and let it roll easy peasy right sadly no so the tricky thing about fermenting agave syrup is that stalled fermentations are very common that's mostly due to the higher fructose content in agave syrup now yeast can break down fructose very easily but they need it to be in combination with glucose the ratio has to be right if the ratio of fructose is way too high and glucose is too low they're going to have trouble and a lot of times they'll end up stalling so i wanted to make sure that i didn't have another melon shine debacle if you don't know what i'm talking about link right up here so i did a ton of research to make sure that my recipe ferments like a beast and then you guys can end up being successful if you try it out i'm treating this almost as if we're trying to ferment something that's got a crap ton of preservatives in it it can be done it's just a heavier lift to get things over the hurdle so here are my bullet points for how to make this work so the first bullet point is going to be starting gravity of all the cases of stuck fermentations that i read about both hobbyist and professional when folks would use agave nectar a lot of them would try to treat it in the same way that they would honey so they would aim for a high gravity wash but down that road lies only disappointment don't be greedy agave fermentations are much more likely to crash and stall the higher you go in saturation of sugars so keep it on the low side 1.060 to 1.070 is the range you should be aiming for don't go any higher than that you're just stacking the deck against yourself the second point is your fermentation temperature when agave juice is fermented in distilleries in mexico it's usually wild yeast and that stuff ferments without any temperature regulation at around 95 degrees fahrenheit or 35 c that is a hot ferment you need those high temperatures for the yeast to be able to break that stuff down so it's best to keep your fermentation vessel as close to 95 as you can i have an old mini fridge out in the garage and i just stuck a couple of electric heating pads in it and put my bucket in there and then go turn them on every few hours in order to keep that temperature nice and warm i've also got a thermoprobe in there so that it tells me whether or not i'm actually hitting that temperature but you really want to keep on top of that temperature for at least the first two days of the fermentation eventually you may need to use the heating pads less and less because the yeast activity will actually start generating a lot of its own heat and you won't need to add heat nearly as often so my third tip is about nutrients because the yeast is going to be stressed from the jump it's best to make sure that you're using a really good yeast nutrient something with dye ammonium phosphate in it magnesium sulfate and yeast hulls and i'll put the link for the one that i used down in the video description you just put your yeast nutrient in at pitching time but you're going to do it one more time this is kind of like a high gravity mead in that it needs staged nutrition so what you're going to do is monitor the gravity of your wart and when the yeast is eating up about 30 percent of that sugar that's when you're going to go with your second nutrient edition for example my original gravity started at 1.070 and by the time it got down to 1.047 or 30 percent reduction in the original that's when i did my second edition of nutrient and i just used some dye ammonium phosphate at that point and i only did a half dose because i i didn't want to overload the system and i wasn't sure if i needed that much but you know if the yeast starts to lag then you can always add a little bit more but you can't take it out so the fourth tip to a successful fermentation is monitoring your ph normally when you start a wash you might check your ph at the beginning to make sure that it's sitting in the right range but with this stuff you need to check the ph daily and then make adjustments with either baking soda or calcium carbonate because you need to get that ph up to right in between four and five it's going to want to go acidic really fast monitor it like a mother hen and keep that ph between four and five if it goes below four the fermentation will start to slow down a lot and if it slows down too much then you've got a stuck fermentation and getting it going again is really hard if you're not used to checking ph i just use little ph strips and i'll put a link for those down in the video description they're dead simple to use so my fifth tip is about your yeast you need a yeast with a good ability to break down fructose and also you need a pitch heavy i'm recommending that you use distillers active dry yeast or daddy but before i did that i actually tried some sourdough starter and some ec 1118 champagne yeast and neither of them did anything i mean nothing i put the sourdough starter in waited 24 hours nothing i put the ec 1118 in 24 hours nothing the gravity didn't drop at all in 24 hours which is weird for that yeast ultimately i dumped in two ounces or about four big tablespoons or 56 grams of daddy after i did that the wash took off like a rocket 36 hours after i put the distiller's yeast in there the bucket looked like a roiling pot of soup now according to some yeast manufacturers it's actually a good idea to have a couple of different yeast strains in there and that it may be beneficial as far as like maintaining the fermentation and helping it to finish all the way out to dryness i don't know if the ec 1118 and the sourdough ever like woke up and started helping eventually did they help it to finish out bone dry i have no idea so the last tip i have i know is a lot is about oxygenation and agitation you need to oxygenate your wash i used my aquarium air pump and gave it 30 minutes to you know really flush the the oxygen into that wash if you don't have one of those you can just take two buckets and pour them back and forth to to get the the wash nice and frothy and get some oxygen dissolved into that liquid and then while fermentation is ongoing you need to come by every day and agitate that wash and when i say agitate you can either do it with bucket shaking or you can stir it whatever you want to do you're going to be out there checking the ph anyway so go ahead and do it then don't skip this step this is important honestly don't skip any of these steps the good news is that if you follow all of my tips your agave wine should ferment out in about five to seven days and because i know you guys didn't take notes i wrote all of this out including the recipe in the video description below but wait there's more so now that we've got this all mixed up and it's ready to start fermenting i have a couple of options for you you don't have to do them but you can if you want to remember that since we're using agave syrup instead of the the fresh pulp the flavor profile is going to be narrower the good news is there are a couple of things that we can do in order to boost the flavor profile and inch a little bit closer to being something more traditional tasting so the first thing you can do is make a beauche syrup or caramelized syrup all you do is simmer 18 to 24 ounces of agave syrup for 20 to 30 minutes on medium low heat to darken the color and the flavor you want to take little drop samples every few minutes to monitor the color change you can see here that once it starts darkening after the first 15 minutes it goes pretty fast once you get the color you want in the beauche turn off the heat and let it cool for a few minutes before adding two cups of water stir it up really well to dissolve it completely in the water before adding it to the rest of your wash it's like stirring tar so you may need to reheat it a little bit to get it to dissolve completely reminds me of that black goo from star trek next generation skin of evil armis the goo monster and picard was like i'm not taking you anywhere now i only did one bottle of the agave syrup as a boucher you can do more but i wouldn't necessarily go above 20 of the total amount of agave syrup as beauche because it's possible that heating it creates unfermentable sugars just like it does when you heat up honey the bosche process comes from beauche meads the big problem you've run into is when you caramelize the honey you end up with a substantial amount of unfermentable sugar and you know that's good if you're looking for a sweet mead but it's not so good if you're looking for alcohol but i don't know if that actually happens with this because mine fermented all the way out to dryness down to 1.000 so i'm not sure if heating this creates unfermentable sugars but i know that we have a couple of chemists that watch my channel so if you guys know feel free to chime in down in the comment section now the last thing you can do in order to boost the flavor is to throw in either some sourdough starter or some active culture yogurt both of those things will have a really good chance of giving you a lactobacillus fermentation and the lactobacillus will create lactic acid by eating a little bit of the sugar not much but just enough to produce that acid and the acids will produce esters during distillation and the esters can give us some fruity notes that are really really good but if you want to try it throw in your sourdough starter or your yogurt or both and give it about 24 to 48 hours before you put your yeast in and the reason why is because the yeast activity will actually annihilate the bacteria if you give them 24 to 48 hours to do what they're going to do and then throw your yeast in it'll give the bacteria time to create the acids and increase your flavor profile so the last tip i'm going to give you is on how you actually distill your agave wine and this comes from a professional distiller that makes an agave spirit with agave syrup since the agave inherently has less flavor than the fresh roasted agave pulp they ended up getting a better result when they detuned their still and ran it slow and at a lower abv so that it runs about 60 to 70 percent abv instead of in the higher range and you're going to be able to carry those subtle flavors over a lot more effectively my allergies have been kicking my butt all week so i was at a bit of a disadvantage when it came time to blend so when i was actually doing the blending i had to call in the big guns i had to call mrs board in here to come and do all the smelling for me and describe what she was finding in each jar and you know i gotta say i am ridiculously proud of my wife she is not a spirit drinker she doesn't like them at all but she was able to go through each of the jars and pick out the transitions she found the cuts and not only that she found the interesting flavors in the heads and tails that we were able to use for the blend so this blend is 100 a mrs board creation i don't think she's ever gonna put that on her resume but i i just find it fascinating that she was able to do that little nail polish some licorice and something pretty that's actually jar two and three that's all heads this is when i went maple leaf liqueur that kind of thick sweet okay looks syrupy all right this is light not as thick this is but still some sweetness but still some sweetness but it's lighter in my nose that's good this is the first jar of hearts and uh so we're getting a light sweetness there hey i've done something right she's doing great so first impression on jar number 12 which is cresting into tails is aloe vera let's try this out and see what she thinks that's jar number 25 i just gave her that's like locker room yeah yeah yeah yeah that's supposed to be locker roomy that's that's the tails what do you get on this one a lighter stink lighter stink any other aloe vera maybe maybe a touch that's jar 14 treating a burn next to a garbage can is why i married her we're going to just stick with the alphabet or just the aloe vera so we're going to go from 5 to 12 and keep all of that jar 4 of the heads we're going to do a little splash because i'm getting some sugars yes in that and she got some sugars in that one of the things that i was trying to capture was some of the the roasty toasty sugars that you would get from like vapes i said over here somewhere in one of these three there's like a maple leaf yeah and that's that it's a thicker so that that's jar number four so i think we've got our mix we're gonna go ahead and blend that together and see what we got so luckily my medicine finally kind of kicked in and i my my sinuses cleared up and i was able to start doing the tasting after we got the blend all together i have to say that despite the fiddling that this recipe needs that this ingredient needs in order to be successfully fermented i'm really happy with the result and this is uh 52 it's got a little bit of a fruit character that while it was fermenting i got hit in the face with like cherry kool-aid the cool thing is there's a little bit of a cherry note and not fake cherry that i was smelling before but more of a rounded actual fruit flavor the predominant flavor is kind of like a two clean tequila it's it's a good spirit in its own right and i will be doing it again but i'm probably not going to use this stuff from the store that's really good even at 52 it's got sweetness it's got kind of a soft mouth feel to it definitely got a little bit of jagginess to it on the back end as you breathe that kind of cherry flavor is right in there and it's i think it's fascinating like where did that come from so i think it's probably the esters created by the lactobacillus but i have no idea since i've never worked with agave before you can really taste the agave in here you can smell it in here to me it tastes more like fresh agave syrup than those kind of roasty darker kind of grungier flavors that you can get with tequilas and mezcal would i do this again absolutely i'm really proud of how it turned out there's even a little bit of a darker sugar note and i think that's from the boucher so if you wanted to bump that up go ahead and do twice this much do 48 ounces this is another project that i never would have been able to do without my patrons it was not an expensive project but more than anything you guys are motivating me to push myself and to try new things and to learn new things and man did i learn a lot during this process and i hope that i was able to convey everything in this video so that if you guys try it that you're successful thank you guys i really appreciate it here's the thing the patrons got to know what i was doing before i ever did it and they got all my research notes ahead of time so that they could go ahead and get started if they wanted to so if you'd like to be involved in stuff like that go ahead and check out the link to my patreon site down below so what's next for this for this tequila am i going to age it am i going to leave it white i'm going to save one little sample for my distillers library and then i'm gonna do something really bonkers with it next week so stay tuned for that if you're not already subscribed to my channel i highly recommend that you do hit the little subscribe button down in this area here and hit the little bell icon right next to it so you get notified when i post my next very strange video i'm not kidding it's going to be weird i'm excited and scared all at the same time and if you are one of my patrons then you know exactly what i'm talking about so if you have any questions or comments about this if you have some advice if you have a hookup for some real agave that i can harvest or buy let me know down in the comments section so if you enjoyed this video do me a favor and hit the like button because it tells youtube that you value this kind of content and it makes me feel better as a person all right thanks for watching talk at you later so you

Channel: Bearded & Bored

Views: 101,266

Keywords: Bearded and Bored, how to make tequila at home, how to make tequila with agave syrup, agave nectar, agave syrup, agave spirit, mezcal, tequila, como hacer tequila en casa, como hacer tequila de agave, como hacer mezcal casero, agave fermentation, agave mead recipe, agave bochet, sourdough tequila, how to distill tequila, can you make tequila with agave nectar, how to make tequila, stalled fermentation, distilling tequila, distilling tequila at home

Id: 4Wl9GzZmKkM

Length: 19min 41sec (1181 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 22 2020