Make Bourbon Whiskey at Home Part I

[Music] we're gonna start on a Bourbon project so here I've got my ingredients as a look with any whiskey you can add sugar or any anything like that to bump up your alcohol technically you're only allowed to use grain and I'm doing this for a hobby and I want to do it right and so I'm gonna share some of the things that I've learned I've been doing this for a few years started out with some pretty nasty product don't know what happened to it I don't recall drinking it but over the years I've I've learned a lot about ingredients procedures and equipment and done some tweaks so now I'm gonna share what I've learned with you so bourbon has to be at least 51% corn so in my recipe I'm gonna use seven and a half liters of grain in total four and a half liters of corn one and a half liter of rye and one and a half liters of malted barley so this corn I get from a local feed store it's crack corn so it's halfway there I still have to grind it like in my hand grinder so I'll grind four and a half liters of that this cost about eleven bucks for fifty five pounds is pretty pretty reasonable price and this ride the ride card I got from from a local flour mill that that supplies all these different types of grains so that was handy and then the malted barley I got from a local beer and wine supplier this is to roll malted barley you need to use a malted barley when you're making whiskey because it contains the enzyme the amylase enzyme which converts the starch in the grains into sugar and then you'll be able to ferment that and then distill it afterwards so my next step is to grind this these grains up into a finer almost like a flower and then next step after that is is to to mash it so let's get on with that so I put the corn the cracked corn into my Victoria hand grind it is a fairly slow and tedious procedure I guess it takes me maybe 25 20 25 minutes to do all the grinding and [Music] so here basically is what the corn looks like after it went up to my grinder it's like a flour kind of a coarse flour now you can buy this already ground into flour you can buy corn a flake corn which is you can skip this whole process if you want I've just decided to go with a grinder do everything kind of naturally so I've got the corn done that's my just finishing off now the 4 and 1/2 liters of corn so now I'm gonna put the Rye in there and I'm gonna grind the Rye grain up so I've got the one and a half liters of the Rye grain in the hopper so just grind that up now and then I'll throw that in along with my ground-up corn a bit of work but I consider it a pretty good exercise the rifle hour here not quite as fine as the corn the rise a lot harder but it's flour just a little bit coarser than the corn so I'm just about wrapping up here I'm grinding up this the ride the ride so now I'm grinding up there early this is quite a bit softer than the Rye and even the corn smells real good too it's been malted so it's the process to the point where that one when I throw that in hot water the enzymes in will start converting the sugars they should the starch I should see from the corn the Rye and also from the barley they'll start converting those starches into sugar so once I've done grinding yes I'm gonna keep this separate because the barley I keep that separate from the corn the Ronnie cuz the corn the Rye as we'll see you're gonna I have to kind of cook that ahead of time they call that gelatinizing then when I bring the temperature down from 190 degrees Fahrenheit down to about 160 so 65 degrees Fahrenheit then I'll Chuck the there's barley in and then the body will get to work and convert the starch into sugar and that's that's what the mashing process is all of them so I guess the next step is to once I get this all ground up is to get some it's a hot water going and mash these grains okay so now I've got my about 17 18 litres of water boiling here ready to mash well I just use a kitchen thermometer here to verify a temperature nothing too fancy I like to keep things pretty simple nice thing about these thermometers is the battery never dies on it because they don't have a battery so just checking my my temperature here and it's running about 190 maybe a little more so I'm gonna introduce the grain to this hot water so I say for this Daniel clump a floating flower it gets all stuck together and it's pretty tough to stir this stuff up so I just use a power tool so I use a paint stirrer and a cordless drill and of course the paint stirrer we've been cleaned up real nice don't worry about that the nice thing about cordless drill is that it doesn't you can regulate the speed a lot better than you can't on a power drill power drills are well they gave too much power the ones that you plug in I use that once in it flew this stuff all over the kitchen I'm in trouble I'm just breaking this out and once we get it direction get that thing off that really slow speed on this otherwise like I said you can pitching up for a few hours of Gumi mess diversity and diversity Direct Connect so now I'm going to put the rest of the green she just still some pretty big pumps in there she's gonna grab a spoon break so [Music] [Applause] we got some big clumps floating around in here so yeah he's got to break them up and so that we can get all that grain exposed to the water and so like I said this is called jealousy so I'm just gonna let this stuff it's a pretty hot three high temperature 190 degrees Fahrenheit and this softens this up so that the starch is more readily available for the analyse the enzyme to work on so after I get this all mixed in real nice that I'm just gonna let it cover it over that's it until the temperature goes down to about 165 Fahrenheit then I'll be putting you have are pretty good there now I'm just gonna give it a bit stir [Music] [Music] okay that's good I'll try not to get this all over there stuff all over the place so just take a look at it it's a bit watery looking but after like the twenty minutes to half an hour I let it sit there maybe 40 minutes it'll completely tighten up and feel like a thick porridge it'll be awful looking and then I'll put the Barbie and at that point so this mash has been sitting here for about 40 minutes she's gonna check the temperature of it and as I predicted or have experienced in the past this has just gelled right up it's all em starches being released from the grain and I've got 160 actually it's still climbing 165 it's probably 170 degrees so it's a little bit warm to be putting the barley and at this point in time and this has been about 40 minutes later now I can cool this down if I want I could add a bit of a bit of cold water to it or just need a lid off and stir it up a bit more just to release some of that heat so yeah you can really see the difference I'll just show you yeah before it's a bit soupy and look at it now it's like boom so this is where it really comes in handy using a power mixer to get that barley in there really hard to get that mixed in and homogenized if you're not using so I'll just cool this down then we'll get right back to it okay so I've added a leader or so cold water to mash and stirred it up with my paw mixer and temperature right now is right about just below 160 so that's optimal you don't want it to be high in this 165 fahrenheit the amylase enzyme works from above 160 down to 140 there's a whole science behind that right up I'm just gonna mix that in and start out with this just to get it kind of integrated and you'll notice when you start mixing it in almost immediately that the mash in here starts to get a little more watery because the enzyme is converting starch and sugar okay if the isn't working out that good I'm gonna get that mixer going here stick that in here and skirt [Music] learning that [Applause] [Music] stuff back now you notice when you're doing this that already it's starting to be more liquid than it was before pretty amazing transformation happen so fast so now the next step is to let this sit and mash so it's the conversion now from starch to sugar now when I use just straight malted barley that only takes about 45 minutes we'll do an iodine test just to see how that's progressing but I find with the corn after that mash for like 3 hours and even then it doesn't really pass the iodine test that well but but it does produce sugar that's that's required so that's just my experience with this with corn I'm gonna let that sit here now for about three hours a bit more [Applause] amazing how quickly that starts turn off water you remember how Porgy that was before and I was gone watery that's amazing that's that start we need to burn sugar if you were to just take a little taste of it you you could taste how sweet that's giving so now as you see I just cover the pot up with a couple towels there's no heat on it it's running probably about 155 160 degrees right now so I let that sit for three hours then I'll conduct an iodine test on it and after that we're gonna we're gonna spurge it or rinse the sugar out of the greens and that can be pretty tough but I'll show you how I do that so now getting ready to sparge the grain that I've been mashing upstairs the corn ryan Barney and I'll just show you what I use for that I have my primary fermenter here it's about 30 liters so it's plenty large I always clean my equipment out real well I use it a sterilizing cleaner that I get from a wine and beer supply store like at home when you do homebrew and clean everything up I don't want any contamination to be to be in this in my containers of course I want nice and clean so so I do that and I used to even at first when I was trying to spur Joe and use a cheesecloth or these bags you can buy strainer bags I found the real awkward they don't really work a lot of hard work and it can't really get the product out of it so then I switched over to using this here's the five-gallon pail it's food-grade so if you're gonna get one check on the bottom I'm gonna have a little triangle and then underneath it should say HDPE high-density polyethylene and then the number two inside that a recycling symbol here so as you can see I just punched a whole set of walls in there with the drill and then after you do that then you got to clean up all of your holes with a countersink bit countersink bit I'll just show you how was doing that just on the little bit go around and just touch each one I'm doing siding on the outside cleans it up get nice easy surfaces drains easier and it's a lot easier to clean up afterwards - rather than having all these plastic I guess you'd be called tags sticking a sticking inside the bucket so anyway that's like that's what I use it so I suspend this over top of the primary fermenter and then pour my product in here and then start pouring the boiling water and I'll show you how to do that as soon as that mash is ready so now about to start to sparge as I mentioned before I I take my I have my 35 litre primary fermenter there and then my straining bucket just suspended over over top of just simple stuff I find around the house so now I get a pour the hot mash in a night and it's hot so you got to be careful you don't burn yourself didn't bring a pot holder down but I'll use this instead so now I'm gonna let that strain through a little bit in the meantime I've put to boil some water on excuse me so I'm gonna be rinsing this with about 11 or 12 liters of boiling on the water just to rinse all the sugar out of the grain Wow so I watering here is just like make sure you know what stuff out of it just looked up pretty good there wasn't anything stuck on the bottom of it so I had my stir stick here which I've already sterilized and ain't here to fight just stir around where the holes are in that bucket stuff for super you right now just kind of plug up the holes because three things and what I'm gonna do as soon as that water boiling I'm gonna pour that boiling water in there to rinse it out now some recipe called for fermenting on the green or you know the lake get back on fermenting on the green or even putting it in the still still under green but this recipe I use it by sparge it eventually got a deal with the the green I'd rather deal with it now before I start fermenting and so I'll just makes it easier you got to clean it up you got to get rid of that green and clean it up eventually yeah I don't really want to put all that and I still it's gonna be a real mess if I get a boil over and they're still it's gonna be a real tough clean that out so I just that's why I do this I'm sparging it now just to get rid of the grain I can just deal with the liquid afterwards it's a lot easier like I said you have to deal with it sooner or later and I've opted just to deal with it now so this is how I do it's pretty simple I'm gonna jump up run upstairs now let's see if the water's boiling and start to put the boiling water in here to rinse that in so now we have some boiling water and pour it in there now the level of fluid in this product mash you could say in this straining part that has already changed at all because that's still pretty thick in there so as I pour the boiling water in that'll start to it may be a little more watery but this will take up quite a few hours sometimes I do this last thing before I go to bed and then in the morning it's ready this is a little sort of mid-afternoon so tonight I'll be able to cool it down and what's these so I've just poured the last of my 12 liters of boiling hot water into the smash bit brain bed you can see at this point in time but it just show you how this works you see that pass this stir stick by it squirts out just helped it along but I do this as I'm adding boiling water just to give myself enough room to add more water I'm not gonna muster it anymore what I'm gonna do is just cover it up by the time I'm done I could expect about Oh 17 18 litres of wash but I can I can prevent so you might wonder why have you put boiling water and then it's not gonna kill the enzyme but at this point in time that conversion is already taking place you're not gonna get any more conversion from starch to sugar so using hot water releases the the sugar from the green bit it's kind of gooey in there and you can see as you add more water it lightens it up and get dilutes it a bit so constrain a little faster so I'll check this later on tonight right now it's about mid-afternoon like I mentioned before if I was doing this in the evening I just wait until morning and then put the yeast in but if it drains before bedtime then I'll show you how I cool this down with a chiller and then we can add the yeast to it right away okay there we go cover this thing up just to solve anything keep falling in there and it's not supposed to be in there and then all week so I've been letting this green bed drain now for about 3-4 hours like it's close to four hours and I see that it's pretty much it's all drain no you see we're up to about 18 19 leaders of wash so that's awesome Wow so what I'm gonna do now is take the temperature of that that my wash and see where we're at see if I have to chill that or not probably do so check the temperatures right around 80 degrees Fahrenheit which is re perfect for for putting my yeast in so I'm I'm pretty happy that that temperatures dropped already now you can if I did have to chill out down I have this chill in here and see if I can show you I know that works I'm not gonna hook it up obviously because I don't need to but have a copper coil that's some fittings on it don't really need these fittings on it here's I have the silicone tubing and so one end I just shove it I just shove the one hand right up into this chopped up garden hose shove it up in there it stays there I immerse this into my wash and then this part just sticks into the laundry tub and it only takes about ten minutes five 10 minutes it will drop the temperature right down you can monitor exactly what the temperature is at and you can chill it real quick so you can get your yeast in there obviously before I immerse that in there I would clean it real good but the sterilizer on it but that's how much other works now if you want to I happen to get this because you want to make one you just get some soft copper you pinch the ends if you don't have a bending to a pinch the ends pinch the one end and then you fill it up with table salt and then you pinch the open end and then you just wrap it around some cylindrical shape something that's a pretty sturdy mind you meddle and then when you got the few coils going then you you just cut the ends off you drain the salt oh I use table salt because it's it pours real nice nice and fine it'll fill it up the idea behind that I putting table salt or something in there so that it doesn't collapse when you're bending it then then it's easy to get rid of the table salt when you're done flushes out or just shake it up it comes out really easy compared to say sand or something like that so that's how you make a chiller if you want it's real simple couple of flexible hoses hook it into your tap and there you go but I don't need it right now because this is already at 80 degrees which is perfect so I'm just gonna put this up on the bench and then we'll do that I'll check the specific gravity too before I put the yeast in I'm gonna check the specific gravity I have that idea sample tube here and my thermometer to check the potential for alcohol so I'll use this turkey baster just pick that up at a hardware store and put enough time wash into the sample tube see what yeah I don't know what my potential is and if this mashing pro process has been successful and yes it looks pretty good it looks like I have the same sort of the same kind of potential as I would for beer or running around around six percent of alcohol potential so that's good so the temperature is good specific gravities good and it's all I'm gonna put some yeast in here so I'm gonna put the yeast in now so there's different ways of doing that so some would prefer to activate the yeast put it into a jar warm water but there's sugar in it and then it started working I'm not gonna do that so I'm putting in yeast if you typically used for wine it's called EC 1118 I've had good success with it it's a low alcohol yeast it's not for the higher alcohol thing because all we're gonna get five and that's it that's it so now all I have to do is wait for 72 hours left after that for 72 hours then I can run it through the still so that means your timings gotta be taken into consideration if you can't run you're still in three days from now if you're busy don't start it okay because if it runs longer than 72 I've had some really bad results and I did some research found out that it called the secondary fermentation after Sweeney's brings in some some components of the grain that do not taste good and you can't get rid of them and so that's what I'm saying if you you have to work with your schedule here make sure that you're going to be able to run your still in 72 hours so that you don't get into that secondary fermentation type of situation where or it's gonna actually ruin the end product it won't taste good so I keep a log book I write everything down that I do that right down my greedy answer identity I write down how I mash or specific gravity when I put the yeast in so they keep good track of it so every batch I do if something doesn't quite turn out the way expected to them I make an adjustment then I can measure if it made a difference or not and keep tweaking my recipe to improve it as I do each one so see you in three days just thought I'd give you a quick trip Charlotte what the grain bed looks like after the fluid has been drained out of it so I just take this stuff and throw it in the backyard on the backyard I throw in the garden they get ends a good compost apparently animals like to eat it but I don't have any animals so I'll just be putting that at the compost pile so this is that batch of trying to make a bourbon here as we discussed just open that up and just to show you what that should look like this has been fermenting now for about two and a half days see that nice foamy head on there and you can almost hear it bubbling a bit so as I mentioned this should should ferment for a boat well for not about from no more than three days so this is like two and a half days so tomorrow around noon hour I'll be running that through the still you don't want it to ferment any longer than the two days or I should say three days shouldn't permit any longer than three days because it'll bring some bad flavors and to your finished product in Canada a little quick sniff of this here wow that smells good you don't love the smell of this stuff so anyway tomorrow I'll be running that through the still and we'll get back to you on that this is day three since I've started fermenting the wash that I'm making my bourbon out of it I took a quick video yesterday of day two and it was a heavy head of foam on the top of the surface because of the fermentation at vigorous fermentation but you see just a day later that's pretty much dispersed it's because the initial fermentation is complete so now we have to do the next step up to distill it so first of all though I'm going to taking a specific gravity reading just to determine what the potential alcohol is over the actual alcohol is in my wash so I'll just do that now so what I have here is my my tube that I'll put my sample in and my your standard hygrometer to check the specific gravity of my wash so I'm gonna do that right now so just use it oops one of these oven B stirs we call it and draw some of that wash out of there until I have enough in my tube to float that longer floating now so we're looking at our hydrometer you know let's get that in focus and we see where it's floating right about our it said see where it says the gyro that's zero percent that's what the potential so it's about one percent potential or we started out at 6 percent potential there's a math so that means we have about 5 percent alcohol and now we started out at 6 ended up at one potential of 5 5 percent alcohol so we'd have about 18 litres of mash so 18 times point zero 5 do a bit of math there you end up with 0.9 so that's point 9 liter or 900 milliliters of pure alcohol in my mash so that's my that's what my max of am I going to get out of this is a little less than one liter of pure alcohol but then I'll give well let's put this in the steel now and see what happens next I'm just going to grab the my big container here a lot of sludge here at the end but the only history bad is if you get a burn start burning the bottom of the pot but it'll be okay there you go I'll clean this set of leaders in it right now take this up and put it on the fire here I'll just demonstrate how I wear get my cooling water from for the condenser still this is my laundry rose right below a kitchen so I just ran some tech spiking up and to the to to like step x-pipe one is first supply and one is successful for added drain and I just hook it right up use some fittings hook it right up to my to the tap on my laundry tub and up goes in behind the stove where I have mine an eval so I can control the flow of water and I just have it open and now the it's going to a condenser it's coming out through my drain line here I'll just pick this up and give you a little bitter shard where they're just draining and these pipes just go right up and boom they go up into the kitchen and behind the stove my wife lets me get away with stuff like that three good boy and that's how I do my cooling so sub you can just wrap up because if your sole happens to be right near your kitchen sink you can just cook it in your kitchen sink but that was my case so so that's how I create my cooling water for the condenser so I got the my still on the stove it's on the flame and just waiting for it to reach temperature and it'll start bringing the distillate out and into my jar which I have propped up on a upside-down pot here I'll just explain a few things about this still so that's my 20 litres still the lid sits on there actually fabricated this up it used to be a flat top but I wanted to have a goal to have a bit of a pot style still got a silicone gasket here and it's crucial that when if you decide to make it still it has to be absolutely tight any vapors escaping you're just losing alcohol so I got 2 inch copper column it's about 2 feet long give them to a reducer to 1 inch and then I have my temperature gauge right near the top and then my lime arm goes down and right about here reduce this from one inch around 1/2 and then inside here we use this again inside you took quarter-inch soft copper and that quarter inch copper runs down inside this 3/4 inch hard copper so that's my condenser so it runs through you can see how now if I got a series of adapters so that it runs out of here quarter-inch and then the I just the way it runs right into this into the jar and so I condenser I explained you earlier how I was getting the the cooling water from down underneath this kitchen is a laundry I have these two PEX lines today that I brought up and just a standard shutoff valve you find underneath the lavatory or behind your toilet runs up in supplies cold water to death condenser fills up I should say the cooling wants a condenser and it just runs up and comes out here and then back out through my rain back down to the lawn whatever the basement so that's how that works this is what we call a stripping run I'm just stripping all the alcohol a little bit I'm not concerned about cuts or getting a particular about separating the good from the bad the ugly and so on I'll do that later on when I do a spirit run once I've done all my batches four or five batches use up all the grain that I bought and then then we'll do a spirit run so I'll take another video in a minute which we'll see how this looks when the distally starts coming out so now we see the product here I just delete it's coming out of the my still out of the condenser pretty good rate I'll just if you look at that hold as you can see it's not a whole lot of water going through there and then up here at the temperature gauge running at about eighty so I'm gonna run this right up to about a knife and eventually will run it right after about 95 degrees you don't want to do that on a skewer but I stripping around you just want to get all the alcohol out of it so that's about it I'll just keep running this incidentally this stuff about two hours to get up to temperature until finally the distillates started coming out takes about two hours and then it's gonna run for about another two hours maybe so make sure you've got something to do around the kitchen otherwise you're gonna get bored so now I've been running this still for a while doing my stripping run and I have a about 1/2 of a jar of distal 8 here I'm gonna check to see how much alcohol my distillate has a stripping plant so what I have here is a my sample tube and what they call it I'll kilometer this is different than the device that measures the specific gravity this measures the actual alcohol by volume in a liquid so that's the ABV alcohol my body so that in here we use a funnel so that we don't spill any because we certainly wouldn't want to miss a drop the dropper just stuff precious so that we can float that crews over good have it so I'm looking at this and right around 40% I'll see if I can bring this up a little closer to you I don't have the cameraman still have that do this on my own I'll zoom in it and then yeah that's good right there see you see the water level is right under the water though yeah just the latest right around 40% okay so well back to the inch here then Oh in a bit so in the stripping around that's about what you're gonna get you get 40 at the beginning and eventually naval drop drop drop you down like 15-20 percent we're just trying to strip all the alcohol out of our mash and probably end up with about two liters of distillates later when we do the spirit brawny well might get much higher alcoholic content will get in the high 80s low 90s initially big difference this stuff you couldn't you taste if you want it doesn't taste very good there's a lot of junk in it and so just once right well test some of the distillate just to verify where Brad and as a temperature of the still rises the percentage of alcohol and the distal a will lower you'll see that as it goes along so you can almost tell by the temperature on the head of this step of I still more of us how much alcohol per tentative alcohol he's in the distillate okay so I finished my stripping run from that 18 litre batch of wash that I had and you can see I have four full jars 500 millilitres each so that's 2 litres and then this here final one it's about 200 milliliters in there now the first jar came out at 40% gradually reduced the alcoholic alcohol by volume as the stripping run progressed and finally at the very end that last 200 milliliters is running about 12% so what I do next is I just throw everything in a jug let it mix up a bit and then I test to see what my average is so that's what I'll do now so I poured that 2.2 liters of distillation of my stripping right into this 3 litre jug stirred it up a little bit now I'm gonna swim my average alcohol was for this stripping run so i have my i'll commoner here that be careful is it's pretty heavy don't want to spill anything and put that in my sample too we're floating so there you go what do we die I expect around 25 30 % that's easy yet there you go right around 25% so we have two and a half 2.2 liters at 25% so that's what we get out of an 18 litre 18 litre wash and so I'm gonna just put this in with the rest of my stripping rounds I have a number of them now let me take about five or six stripping runs to use up a sack of grain and then we'll be able to do a spirit run which is a little different I have to modify my still if you changes to it to make it new a better more pure and product it tastes better yeah so that's the stripping

Channel: Mark Tompkins

Views: 46,949

Rating: 4.8645163 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 2R3YoWPykDQ

Length: 48min 14sec (2894 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 31 2020