Moonshine Making 101

why you're always on the run and can't trust no one when you fake it back at all Mountain Dew life is a meal of up with you a when that moon is shining bright he'll be working on the match for you hey guys I've had a lot of questions asked to me as far as how exactly I make my moonshine I've decided to put together a little video for you to show you exactly how I do it some of the stuff that I use to make the shine the equipment that I use and also the process and how to do it so if you are interested and doing some home distilling this would be a very informative video for you everything I'm getting ready to show you it is completely researchable not a bit is secret so what we'll do is we'll first start off with all the things you're going to need in order to make the shine so first we're going to go over all the ingredients that you're good that you're going to need first you're going to need five gallons of distilled water okay you're going to need five pounds of pure grain sugar it's okay if you just use the normal generic stuff you're going to need a packet of yeast and this this yeast is actually made by red star it's a champagne yeast that will produce about 17 percent alcohol off of a five gallon batch and then you're going to need your grain and what I use is sweet feed it's a mixture of cracked corn it got some barley some oats some wheat and it also what makes it sweet is the molasses that they add to it so you can use sweet feet or you can just use just normal cracked corn and that's basically all your ingredients it's all the ingredients you're going to need so next we'll look at all the equipment that you're going to need the first thing I need is a big pot I believe this is either a 5 or a 6 gallon capacity pot this is what you're going to be boiling your mash up in you're also going to need a fermentation vessel and this can be either a culligan or a primo or any kind of you know plastic water water bottle then next you're going to need a 5 gallon mixing bucket you're going to need a flat strainer and you're going to need a spatula a couple other things is a thermostat and an airlock for your fermentation vessel and then there's a couple minor things you're going to need just like taking a a water jug and cutting off the bottom using this as a funnel I'll show you that a little bit later and also you're going to need a tape measure to measure out your grain so what that is basically everything that you're going to need in order to to make your own shine at least the first half of it in order to make your wash so next off is well we'll just start getting right into it alright guys so the very first step that we do is measuring out your grain and what you need to is you need to take your grain and put it into your five-gallon bucket now the amount that you want doesn't have to be exact but what you want is about four inches worth of grain and the bottom of your bucket so we're just going to keep dumping until we get roughly about four inches then we use the tape measure in order to measure out and make sure that we have roughly about four inches take your tape measure all the way down to the bottom and it looks like we have basically right around four inches okay now that we've got four inches of grain in our bucket we're going to go ahead and we're going to stick it into our larger cooking pot so now that you have your grain inside your pot you need to start adding your water and we're only going to add four gallons even though this is five gallons of water that we're going to use we're only going to add four gallons for making the mash all right we got our water into our into our mash bucket what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and crank on the heat and we're going to heat this to roughly about 150 degrees and once it gets to 150 degrees we're going to keep it there for roughly run around an hour it doesn't have to be exact you want to keep the temperature as close to 150 as you can and and just you know keep a timer for you know basically a right around an hour so we'll come back to this here a few minutes once it started warming up and give it a good stir and I'll see how it keeps going on all right check in later okay it's been a few minutes and as you can see I've put in the temperature or the thermostat into the bucket and let's just go ahead and take a little look-see well some of the grain has floated to the top but as it gets warmer and as this grain soaks up the water it will eventually sink down to the bottom so what we want to do is we just want to keep on giving it a good stir to make sure that the grain doesn't burn on the bottom of the bucket as we're heating this thing up so just give it a good stir make sure the grain is all mixed up make sure you take your temperature probe and just throw it on the top there and what we'll do is we'll cover this back up check our temperature right now we're reading 117 degrees and we'll just continue to let it heat up until we get 150 so we'll check in in just a few more minutes all right so let's check and see exactly how well this is going then give it a good stir make sure we get that grain all stirred around it's not burning on the bottom if you notice you see some of the grain has disappeared off the top it's starting to absorb that water starting to sink down to the bottom and the bottom grain actually looks a lot like oatmeal so but yep that's just the grain that we just want to keep on stirring around check our temperature and our temperature is reading see here says 153 and it's continuing to go down probably because we just stirred it up so what we'll do now is we will turn down our burner to where it's just a trickle because all we want to do is maintain the temperature now we don't want to make it rise anymore so yeah 150 153 like I said it doesn't have to be an exact science this as long as you keep it right around the 150 mark so what we're going to do this we're going to start our timer for one hour and we will come back in one hour and that will will basically turn off the heat at that point and go on with the rest of the process however in the meantime you need to make sure that you're continuously stirring about every 10-15 minutes make sure you're stirring your grain make sure that your grains not burning on the bottom and then now within an hour well we'll come back and do the rest of this process so we'll check back in in an hour okay so some of you may be wondering why we're actually doing this and what we're doing is we are tricking the grain into thinking that this is spring when you heat up the grain the grain thinks it's spring and the enzymes inside the grain start to convert the starches and sugars so that's what we want is the sugar because later on the is going to eat that sugar to create alcohol so we are right now we're probably about halfway through cook in the cooking the mash and yeah just to give you a little theory behind why we're actually doing this process so we'll check in here in about 20-30 minutes and see how it's going all right it's been an hour and let's see how we're doing looks like a good majority of the grain has gone down to the bottom let's go ahead and give this a good stir all right let's turn our heat off we no longer need to cook this any longer take our thermostat out all right now what we need to do is we need to strain the grain down into our bucket so as you can see I have got the bucket laid out on some paper bags that you can use newspaper if you want if you can't find any paper bags and that is also why we have our strengths and our spatula now this can be kind of a messy process hence why we have the paper bags on try to keep the mess down to a minimum so warm hot Oh okay so as you see I did spill just a little bit but not too much and what we're going to just go spread the grain out and remember that last gallon of water that we did not use well this is where we're going to use it because we're going to use this last gallon of water to rinse all the grain what you do is you just take the water sprinkle a little on and give the granny good press what you're trying to do is squeeze as much of the water out of the grain as you can because the because the grain is still holding a lot of water and a lot of sugar that is trapped in there and once you got it squeezed dump the grain anything else turn all over same process all the way until you have no more grain left in your bucket or in your pot laughs buzzy no big city off the land and don't need Uncle Sam to help you turn shiners life is a feel of long for his boom you'll be breaking love all right now as you can see we have all of our grain has been separated out and this is now instead of mash it's now called wash because all we have is just the liquid that we were cooking up so we have all the all the sugars that came from the grain as well as the sugar from the molasses that was in the grain hence why it has kind of like a brownish color to it so now what we're going to do is we are going to let this cool because right now this water or this wash is roughly right around a hundred and probably forty degrees and it needs to cool down to about ninety degrees before we can add our our yeast however in the meantime though we can add our sugar so that will be the next step in our process okay now we're going to open up our sugar the best way I found to dissolve the sugar into your wash is just to get this give it a really good stir make sure you have almost like a little vortex going on and then just start pouring in at a moderate pace so that's roughly about half the bag and we'll just give this a pretty good stir make sure you get all that sugar dissolved well the moonshiners why it's a damn good laugh no big city he don't will flame the hell shiners life is a feel of life long for a food love okay so as you can see you know got all over sugar in there and now it's just a waiting game we got to wait for it to cool so what we're going to do is we're going to take this put it over to the side throw our thermometer back into it and just wait for it to get down to 90 degrees and once we get down to 90 degrees that's when we're going to put in the east so we'll come back when it's 90 degrees in a bit okay so our wash is now up to or down to the right temperature so now it's time to add the east and all we're going to do is just take this we're going to add the east in the almost the same fashion that we did the sugar all we're going to do is we're just going to give it a good stir and once you put all the east and just want to give it a real good stir make sure all the yeast is dissolved and also you want to try and aerate it as much as you can try and get a lot of a lot of air a lot of oxygen into it before you put it into your fermentation vessel all right so now got our yeast in there except the right temperature now it's time to put it into the fermentation vessel and you'll notice that there's a strip here that has different temperatures on it this is to make sure that you can maintain the right temperature for when it's actually firming the fermentation is going so you want to keep it roughly at about room temperature and this next part Sanders had that funnel for with with the milk jug well this is where we're going to use that and this next part can get a little messy but we'll see how it goes yep so as you can see it got messy and yeah I got quite the mess I got a pickup but anyway your washes now into your fermentation vessel and all you gotta do is just put the cap on and let it sit okay so now you see I've cleaned up my little booboo and I have in my hand right here this is what's called an airlock and you see that inside this airlock there is water okay and this prevents anything from going inside but will allow the carbon dioxide that's created to escape so all we got to do is just cap this off and then let this sit in your corner in your laundry room where wherever it can stay roughly room temperature 75 77 degrees right in there stay in that temperature for seven to ten days once the airlock stops bubbling that you know that there's no more carbon dioxide being made there's nothing else that's being released you know it's basically done so at that point in time you can take it into the distillation phase but for right now we're just going to let this sit in the corner for about a week or so and we'll get back to you in about a week all right guys I just want to show you this is the day after we added the yeast what's happening is that I could say you can see the bubbling that's happening and what's happening is the yeast is eating all that sugar in there and creating alcohol and one of the byproducts is carbon dioxide which is now being released so these things will bubble for about a week and when it's done bubbling that's when you know it's it's good to go so we'll come back in a week and check on them okay it's been ten days and as you can see that the airlocks have stopped bubbling and the actual liquid the actual wash so it has started to separate out some of those flying particles from the grain has settled down to the bottom so that pretty much tells me that the fermentation is done and we are ready to distill so that will be our next step is the distillation process and I will show you exactly how to set up your still and do the distilling so once I get to still set up we'll we'll check back in okay guys so I now have this still set up this is what you call a typical pot still there's different types of stills out there but this one is called a pot still obviously you have your pot this is where we're going to be putting our wash into to distill up you have a copper tubing most all stills are made out of stainless steel and copper - or copper some have some brass but majority is stainless steel or copper so I've kind of copper tubing going from the top of my pot down into this is what's called the condenser you might find on certain shows like shiners or whatever it's called the worm but it's really a condenser and all this is just the copper tubing wound up into a coil this bucket will hold ice water and it will condense the alcohol that is going to come down from you tube and take your dead trips could condense down it's going to come out this spigot right here that goes down into a collection jar so you're going to need your collection jars and and that's basically it it's a real simple system here I'll give you a little bit closer view of it okay well like I said what we have we have the pot right here there's a temperature thermometer at the very top right here that tells you what the temperature is you have your your copper tube that goes down into the condenser and like I said this will be filled up with ice water and then all your alcohol will come out through your tube right there into a collection jar okay so like I said this is a very easy system to build a very easy system to use this size of pot is perfect size for doing a five gallon batch so usually the first step is just to take your watch throw it into your pot now what I like to do is I like to put a screen over the pot and this is going to keep any of those particles that at the bottom of our of our watch time it's going to keep any of those particles from going down in and settling at the bottom of the still and burning yes as you can see all we've got left and the bottom is just all that sedimentary stuff from the grain and we don't really want that in our still so that sighs take your screen off okay now there's three different parts to distilling when you first start distilling you're going to the very first part of it that's going to be called the heads and that is pretty toxic you don't want to be drinking that in a five gallon batch you're you get usually going to separate out the first 50 milliliters that is the methanol acetone a whole bunch of other really bad stuff you can actually keep it to for some cleaning if you want but you do not want to drink that the middle part is called the body and that is basically where you're going to be getting all your ethanol from you want to collect that and at the end is your the tails and the tails is where a lot of your fossil fuels come and oils are at now you can keep those those tails and throw them into your next batch so what we've done we've already added you know our wash to our still I now have a jar of tails that I collected from my last run I'm going to add that to it we're going to seal off the still and then turn it on and get to speed cranking all right I've got this still all sealed up and now we're just waiting for the temperature to start rising the thermostats going to measure the actual temperature of the steam inside the pot and the temperature the magic temperature that we're looking for is 173 that's the point which alcohol will start to boil out however this particular still will not start producing till roughly about 175 178 it probably has to do something with the altitude that I'm at something like that I don't know but I do know that right about 175 78 is where this still will start producing and then we'll start collecting so we'll just wait for the temperature to start rising and get to get to the right temperature and we'll check by Keg check back in alright so it looks like we're at about a 160 165 so we need to go ahead and start adding our ice into our condenser coil and start pulling it down now if you feel your your copper tubing it actually should feel warm and the reason why it's feeling warm is because the steam that's starting to boil off that alcohol is starting to boil off is actually starting to travel down your tube so what we need to do is we need to start cooling this tube down so that steam can condense back down into a liquid and come out the end in our big bag of ice here and start adding it into our bucket you we got we got our ice down in our bucket and this should start cooling off and pretty soon we should have some liquid come out of the end of our tube here but in the meantime we'll just continue watching the temperature and and hopefully we'll start producing here pretty soon okay so it looks like our temperature has climbed up to roughly about 178 180 and we've gone ahead and we've turned down the heat because we don't want it to get any hotter we just want to maintain that temperature and as you can see we have started to produce so as you can see we've started produced and what we're going to do is we're going to collect the first 50 milliliters and on this jar that I have right here it does have milliliters on the side so once we get up to 50 milliliters we'll take that we'll toss it and everything else after that we will keep okay as we're looking down I see we have roughly about 60 milliliters so that's way more than what we needed to collect in the first bit so what we're going to do is we are going to grab one of our jars here and we're just going to swap this out so now all we do with this is we're just going to take this we're going to point this down the drain or like I said you can keep it use it to you know clean but it should smell a lot like fingernail polish yep which it does and so there's really no point in keeping this now what we're doing is we're collecting the the body of our just black just distillation and this will run for probably the next few hours and collecting all this and then you'll you'll be able to tell just by the taste should taste actually pretty good and you'll be able to tell when you start running into the tails another another thing to point out is your temperature will very slowly start to creep as the more and more alcohol you pull out of your wash the higher and higher the temperature is going to get even though your heat is that a is that a steady a steady state so usually I like to cut mine off right about 190 degrees or so 190 hundred ninety two and about that time is basically when your distillation is done and you can go ahead and start turning on yourself so what we'll do is we'll just check in on this here in about an hour and see how much we get all right guys as you can see we have gotten almost a full jar and we're still producing the temperature has risen just a tick we're sitting at about 184 right now so yeah what we're going to do is going to go ahead and change out this jar and we're going to do it this test so going to take this jar out put a new jar in and that right there my friends is good old-fashioned moonshine and in order to test the proof of it what we're going to do is we're going to take a little bit throw it in here and what this is this is called a hydrometer and this is designed to tell you what proof your liquid is tells you exactly how much alcohol is in there and we are sitting right at what looks to be about 65% which is a hundred and thirty proof let's get this right there you go 130 proof as no mistake in some good shine so what you can do is you can when you take when you have your shine this is final product right here what you can do is you can either leave it in this 130 proof or yeah 130 proof state and just drink it as is or you can add some distilled water and bring this down to 80 proof like you would normally buy in in a store but as of right now this is good liquor this is good to go so we'll go ahead and store that and we'll see how this Nook how long it takes this next one to fill up but yeah we're dripping along didn't ready to fill the next one all right we have now filled up our second jar and as you can see it's still producing real well and our temperature has gone up just another tick about 185 186 ish somewhere right in there so and as you can see I've had to add some more ice but now we're still producing real well and I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna switch out jars again we've got two jars good liquor and usually off of a five gallon five gallon batch and get about three to four of those jars with about another jar of tails that you'll add into your your next batch so yeah we'll just keep on collecting and we'll come back in check in on it again now one thing I meant to mention is your drip rate if you can get a good drip rate of about one to two drops per second that's a probably a really good drip rate anything faster you're probably going to be looking at getting more water than alcohol anything slower you're just wasting your time so yeah roughly about one to two drops per second will be a good drip rate for you well as you can see we have started to fill up I believe this jar three so let's see what our temperature is temperature is right at about 188 so as you can see it's creeped up a little bit more and what we're going to do is run go ahead and change this one out and put in another one we'll just let this go ahead and keep on collected and as you can see we've got three jars that shine ready to go and we're probably coming probably fairly close to the end we'll probably get one more jar before we start running into the tails so well this will be a full jar batch and we'll well this will probably be the last jar that we get before we run into the tails and then we'll probably collect another jar tails and that'll be it all right we're on jar number floor and jar number four is pretty much full and let me just take a little taste or tester here that is actually still some pretty damn good liquor so I think what I'm gonna do is I'm on just keep on collecting until I start running into the tails you can usually tell when the tail you start getting into the tail end of your run because it'll the taste will definitely change on you and your your the shine will start to get a little cloudy so you know you're getting a lot of water let's just check our temperature temperature says 190 so that tells me that I'm getting pretty close to the end but right now I'm still getting good looking up so I'm just going to change out the jar here I probably get about another half jar out of it before before I start running into the tails there we go we'll hopefully get another half jar and then start collecting the tail as you can see we got four good jars of liquor out of just this one batch hopefully get about four and a half and yeah so we'll check back in when I start running into the tails and show you guys that all right this is now our fifth jar and I'm pretty much going to go ahead and stop collecting at this point that I can tell that the taste is just starting to turn so we're starting to get into our tails and all my ice is melted so yeah all I'm going to do is I'm just going to let this still just continue to run so here temperatures at one ninety two so we're just going to you know continue to let the still run and I'll collect whatever comes out and that will get thrown in into the next batch so yeah that we are pretty much done with the actual distilling process as far as the stuff we're going to keep and in actually drink okay guys so that right there that's how you make moonshine I hope this video has been informative for you please if you have any questions leave a comment and I will get back to you and try to answer it as best as I can yeah so have a good one you the balloon you

Channel: Dan Pylate

Views: 3,627,196

Rating: 4.8226733 out of 5

Keywords: How, to, make, moonshine, distil, Distillation (Invention), Making, Fun, whiskey, Drink, Wasted, Drinks, Mash, Wash, Mountain, Dew, White, Lightning, Popcorn, Sutton, Beer, pot, still, cook, Whisky (Beverage), Educational

Id: P-nGbAf81Zs

Length: 45min 50sec (2750 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 18 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/Sailohio]

Just make sure you post a lot about it on the Internet...

[u/morikazu]

I am considering doing some distilling. i love the history behind it.