How To Make Vodka EASY

hey how's it going guys it's Boo from my high of steing today we're actually just going to be fermenting a vodka now vodka is a really interesting spirit because depending on which way you go and which ingredients you use it can be a messy difficult Spirit to make or it can be very very simple which is why we usually recommend beginners start with vodka this way that we're going to be showing you a vodka keep in mind it's a neutral Spirit you want it to be as neutral as possible you want it to go down and just have it taste like nothing but iny face alcohol which makes bases sort of interesting on it think about something like sugar sugar is a very easy simple base to work with and it's as neutral as it gets there's really nothing imparting different flavors like you would get with grains or potatoes which are two other ways to make vodka so it's a great way to go it's not to say that it's the right way to go potato vodka is definitely for a certain person and there's definitely in that potato you can increase the body of the Vodka change it that way but if we're just going for a neutral Spirit why not just do it a real simple easy coste effective way we don't have to worry about cooking the starches in those potatoes or those grains we don't have to worry about big loads 20 pounds worth of grains or potatoes and straining that out we're simply going to be using water dumping sugar on top and dumping yeast on top of that and right there we have vodka so without further Ado let's begin so just for clarification before the recipe starts this recipe will be for a six gallon batch of vodka you can scale that up and down as you need and you're seeing that's what I'm doing we're going to repeat this recipe four times so I'm going to end up with a total of 24 gallons worth of this recipe and the reason for that is for future videos on this channel guys we have a ton planned for January and I'm going to need a lot of nice clean Spirit to do it all so we're going to have four buckets and all we're doing is we're going to repeat that same recipe that you're going to see here four times for me as many times as you need you can also scale back to a five gallon batch and I'll show you a little more how to do that as well but uh yeah why not get started so how we're initially going to start is we're going to be filling this bucket with about three gallons of hot water reason for that is we want that sugar to dissolve when it hits that hot water so it's important to have your hot water in here first we're going to bring that sugar in stir it around and get that Sugar dissolved and the reason I'm not going all the way up to six gallons with that hot water is because remember our water then has to be cooled down enough to where yeast can be pitched in this bucket without it dying off so three gallons hot water dissolve our sugar then top off with three gallons cold water and in that process is called cold crashing we're going to be bringing that temperature down hopefully enough to do things I might have to come back the next day when everything's fully cooled off but we'll pitch our yeast after that and we are done I mean this is going to be a short video guys you know what I think I need a shot for good luck before we begin our fermentation here right I got enough for four little sips one for each bucket good luck on each okay if you got a drink in your hand or if you want to pause this video and get one please have a sip with me thank you guys for watching on once we have our three gallons of water per bucket of hot water we're going to be adding our sugar the amount of sugar there's a few small things contributing to how much the best rule of thumb I can give you guys that can scale all the way from a one gallon steel to a 300 gallon steel is to use around two to three pounds of sugar per gallon of water that's a pretty straightforward figure it doesn't get too skewed different yeasts are going to operate a little bit differently and change those numbers numers you could be using an excessive amount of sugar um in most cases you wouldn't really use too uh too too little but you might be using too much if you use a maybe a lesser uh lesser energy yeast for the nature of this recipe what I'm doing is using a still spirits vodka yeast that's a yeast designed to work specifically with vodka and I'm using 14 pounds of cane sugar you can use dextrose you can use table sugar I like my cane sugar uh very here and I love that yeast so that's kind of what I'm doing but again 2 to three lounds of sugar per gallon of water and then your desired yeast will get you pretty good results regardless so we're going to be dumping these all in giving it a nice stir remember to stir and scrape at the bottom of your bucket that's going to help all that sugar that kind of fall is right to the bottom uh get out of there I guess and uh not cake in now you're going to see that your fermentation is going to probably change colors going to go from a clear because there's water in there to sort of a yellowish dull yellow and that's normal that's the sugar particulate that you're seeing now some people say that adding sugar the more sugar you add the more of a bite you get on your spirit and I think there's some truth to that but the thing with vodka is it's such a high proof and you're distilling it usually through a reflux column which uh removes a lot of those volatiles so I really don't notice it when I'm doing neutral Spirit like vodka very much that's why I like sugar so much for my neutral spirit because it doesn't impart any flavors from grains no crustiness earthiness you know nothing like that and then you're not really getting anything if if you're to use like potatoes well potatoes don't really have a lot of flavor anyway so be a pretty good base but um they're so messy and you're taking all that difficulty out when you're when you're doing sugar so sugar is my go-to for vodkas and a lot of my Gins as well because again those Gins are you want to start as a neutral base and then you add your Botanical uh in the process right so how having a base that's as neutral as possible is only going to enforce the flavors from your J even more so as long as you have a column that can take away a lot of those impurities you're getting the Best of Both Worlds you're getting that neutral spirit and then it's eliminating a lot of those vola tools that you'd expect from overloads of sugar so don't be too afraid but at the same time play around maybe you like your gin and your vodka is better with a wheat base or a rye or a a malted barley base and maybe you want to try your hand at cooking a bunch of potatoes in a big stock pot and straining them all out and mashing them up and you know just getting the liquid out you're welcome to just giving you a real easy solution to create a vodka you're going to see my gravity did increase just by adding that Sugar we started with three gallons worth of water and we're close to about four gallons actually I think we're right on four so that added a full gallon just in adding that Sugar We're Going to top off with two gallons of cold water cold crash a little bit it's so late in my day that um I'm just going to let it stay overnight regardless but um we're going to see what temperature and what ABV we're at after we add that cold water stay tuned fermentation one and we're sitting at a a gravity of 1.10 now that's going to translate to about 14% um you can get up to 20 with vodka usually and be safe we're going to keep it where it's at and uh proceed from there and seeing as my other fermentations are hitting all about the same I think it's fair to say that we we are ready to pitch our yeast as soon as temperature will allow let's check our temperature and then I'm going to repeat that process to all these buckets just make sure everything is consistent consistency is key in recipes and it looks like I'm a little too hot to even get an accurate reading to be honest I know this thing isn't 200° fahr because I'm not burning myself on it so one thing we can do here is since my floating thermometer isn't really giving me a good reading I can put a little stick on digital thermometer on here and maybe that'll help me a little bit or I have a a really nice calibrated dial thermometer and I can stick that in here and I think we'll do that now so we're going to go ahead and take a temperature reading with our dial thermometer fun fact I did have this done yesterday you might notice some new change close it's a new day uh had this done and realized that you know this beauty shot this little close-up shot I had of the hydrometer a little bit ago I kind of kept my camera like that so you were just kind of listening to a testar talk for a while uh pretty embarrassing stuff but and everything else is really done with the recipe all that's left to do is add yeast and close our lid get our lid on get our airlock on so as we sprinkle our yeast on we're going to come back here with our spoon and we're just going to get a few things so the main thing that I'm trying to do is when you pour that yeast on top it's sprinkled on top like a layer and I'm just going to work that into the bucket I'm going to get my rule of thumb is is I want all that yeast particulate that I see right now in top of that bucket I want it inside I don't want to see any clumps it's okay if I see a few Speckles here and there but I want most of it gone and another thing is when we finish that and it's worked in there you want to give it a nice vigorous stir okay before right before you put your lid on and that's going to give it a really nice oxygen flow that's going to keep that yeast feeling happy and healthy so we'll snap our bucket on so guys it's really as simple as that we used minimal amounts of ingredients cheap ingredients and we just made six gallons of vodka now I've got a little more work to do here I've got to do this for the rest of these buckets but I just wanted to show you how easy distilling can actually be and make a pretty good spirit at that thank you guys so very much for watching please be sure to like And subscribe if you enjoyed this video remember we've got to also distill this we've got a video coming out where you're going to watch this being distilled we're even probably going to infuse it give it like a little bit of a a nice little maybe lemon vodka Citrus vodka we'll play around we'll discover some things and I hope you guys are along for the journey so wanted to thank you so much for watching see you guys

Channel: Mile Hi Distilling

Views: 17,290

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Id: yF1DWCY5Kes

Length: 11min 33sec (693 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 29 2023