SWEET POTATO VODKA PART 1

sweet potato vodka need i say anymore [Music] well welcome back brewers hobbyist distillers of all types uh i'm george this is the channel that dares to unlock the mysteries of home distilling yes um we're here again today and now we're going to do a sweet potato vodka it's that simple and that's straightforward now when you walk into your grocery store and of course most of the time in most grocery stores i don't know that i've been to anyway you know you always start off with flowers there's really there's a marketing reason for that but then you move right into the produce aisle and when you walk into the produce aisle i'm not sure what you're thinking about but of course you know visions of salads and starch-based side dishes and all these things come to mind but me i see a smorgasbord of fermentable products and yes all of them have a different value in our fermenting process and the potential to create something unique from each and every one of them and i also do that but of course with the potatoes now we've had a lot of write-ins about you know potatoes potato vodka um you know how do you make it believe it or not it's relatively simple and straightforward now in order to try to dispel some of the questions up front yes sweet potato vodka is better than regular potato vodka in my opinion okay and i'm going to explain to you why and show you well george if that's the case then why didn't the russians make sweet potato vodka well by golly they didn't have sweet potatoes okay that's not a region of the earth that sweet potatoes naturally grow in okay so but yeah you could use potatoes oh my goodness you already know that there's i'm not going to say there's ver it's there is a virtual unending list of things that you can actually convert the starch present into fermentable sugars and in fermented and of course then distill it and then but some just don't work out as well as others okay sweet potato happens to be one of the good ones all right let me share this with you now the the nutritional value between the two are pretty striking okay and a lot of people love sweet potatoes and we're gonna explain a little bit more about sweet potatoes and other people just love the regular potato and that's quite alright too both of them will work okay i like the sweet potato better for the following reasons okay number one a sweet potato this is a 100 gram section and this is a 100 gram section i just want to compare apples to apples actually potatoes to potatoes here so i got the two pieces all right in a sweet potato there's about four oh almost four and a quarter grams of sugar there is less than a gram of sugar in a potato okay uh in a sweet potato there's about 20 to 22 grams depending on which chart you look at of carbohydrates um and then in a potatoes about 17. so what's that tell us right up front uh carbohydrates you know oh yeah the complex things that starch all those things those those energy providing things that you try to avoid when you're on a diet uh especially the bad ones but so sweet potatoes are loaded a little bit larger they have a little bit more of that stuff that we need as opposed to potatoes what's what is also interesting is that the mineral content in value in a sweet potato outshines the potato by not a whole lot but by enough to where you don't necessarily need to add any kind of nutrients for your yeast because this thing is packed with all your b vitamins b one two three five and six uh and uh the regular potatoes kind of short in that area the minerals inside a sweet potato are also pretty packed or packed pretty tight and it's fairly robust so the necessity to add additional nutrients into your mash when you're making sweet potato vodka is not there you can add more nutrients if you like but it's not necessary now last but not least this is probably the most important part and for those of you who have who have already shut off see you yep and of course the guy in the back who's fallen asleep please wake up or punch him wake him up sweet potatoes have alpha and beta amylase for those of us who understand that we know what that means that's very very important and a potato does not okay so we already have the resident enzymes in the sweet potato which will convert the starches to fermentable sugars which in turn helps us to create our unique elixir so see that's why if you ever wondered what makes a sweet potato sweet it the alpha and beta amylase is already in the potato and there's plenty of it too and oh by the way just keep this in mind if you're making if you're gonna bake a sweet potato the slower you bake it the sweeter it is okay um and then the same thing with boiling if you're going to boil the potato the slower you boil it you don't actually bring it up to a boil and we'll get to that but the slower you increase that temperature and allow those enzymes to go into action at the right time the better off the potato becomes now but at some point at some point of course there's only so much sugars that are available so you're left with one or two options at that point yes you could always add sugar but i i don't want to do that on this one in this one we're going to use straight sweet potatoes and that is it i have an option i could use two row barley uh take advantage of the additional alpha amylase in that uh but i won't really need that um but the additional sugars that are there residing in the grain i could but i'm not going to or at the very end i could just pump up the alcohol by volume by throwing in a couple of pounds of sugar but i don't want to do that i want to have a pure sweet potato vodka that is virgin meaning nothing else has been added to it okay and understanding that there are only so many fermentable sugars that i'm able to extract from this if my efficiency is high enough i anticipate probably about an eight percent alcohol by volume and that's at the high end okay that's at the high end if i can wind up with one point a gravity in my mash of like 1.075 ish in that seven zero seven five into that area i'll be extremely happy uh all that means is that i don't have to make a few extra gallons of it and run it multiple times that's all that means okay i'm still going to get some great vodka out of it so i won't be at looking i will not be shooting for my own personal goal which normally would be 1.090 i'm looking more towards one point zero seven zero seven five somewhere in that neighborhood uh of course i did i cut two slices off to show you yes i put a a dotted iodine on each one obviously yeah you know iodine reacts instantly with the sugar with uh yeah with the starches uh and therefore we got these two big black dots so that really indicates uh they are laden with starch and starch is what we are going to convert to fermentable sugars by way of the use of the alpha and beta amylase inside the sweet potato now it's important at this point um before i get to that very very important point um i want to show you these notice that all these sweet potatoes this is probably this is 15 pounds i'm going to use the four or five for about a five to six gallon batch you need 25 pounds of of potatoes so you need a lot of potatoes all right um i've got 42 pounds of potatoes yeah what i'm trying to do is i'm trying to make about eight gallon mash uh so that means i'm gonna have to run through this i've only got a pot so large uh some of you may have that same challenge so i know i got to go through this about three times and this is going to be a long process all day long today so for those of you who don't think that i work i do i work hard for you just just trying to get this done the right way there's no right way to do the wrong thing so a sweet potato you'll notice this one has a root growing out of it of course remove all those roots but what's that root tell us well that root tells us that some of that enzymatic action is already taking place inside the sweet potato but at a much slower pace yes those enzymes have to convert those starches to fermentable sugars to create the energy necessary for it to sprout a root as opposed to a potato which normally just sprouts a bud and then starts to leaf off and it there's a different process utilized in order to create the energy necessary so oh yes these are already starting just ever so slightly which means we know they're good all right i will slice these up i've got a whole bunch of these to slice up before i add them to my pot now i'm going to use here's there's two ways well really there's one way the right way to do this but there's two stages that i need to go through okay i need to go through a a beta amylase rest or cook and then the alpha amylase and uh 60 degrees celsius which is about 149 degrees at the top end is the preferred temperature for the most uh beta amylase activity all right now you're gonna use up all that beta uh amylase and i'll show you why uh but that's gonna happen relatively quick probably within about 30 to 40 minutes and then we're going to raise the temperature to about 155 degrees boom that should ring a bell okay because we've always said that your alpha amylase actually works its best at 155 degrees now what's unique about the mlas in a sweet potato is that it can withstand a little bit more heat than the mlas that you find in a green or mlas that you purchase from a brew shop so we can move that temperature up ever so slightly but i will not go higher than 170 degrees and the only purpose of doing that is to soften the potato but that's after i hold it there i've got 40 minutes and i've got two hours at 155 and then i'll go to 170 and what i'm trying to do there is i'm trying to break it down a little bit more so that i can mash it oh oh oh this it's a beautiful thing when it all comes together but again it's going to take an extremely long time for me to do this today so please set aside a whole day uh but you'll have a lot of fun doing it now uh this is going to be the of course the colander and i've got these legs offset and that will set inside there i will turn that on here shortly and then once i get all those cut up of course i'll come back and show you how i dump the potatoes in the water because somebody's going to want to know how to do that it's relatively simple you just kind of dump them in there yeah now that took a while okay so the heads up it's going to take you a little while to get these things all cut up now but i've cut them up into these small cubes or you know not cubes as much as just chopped up fine um yes there's probably there's probably a hundred ways to do that okay i used a knife um it's a lot of work okay so could you use a food processor yeah i mean you could use a whole bunch of different ways to get it what you want to try to do is break it down as small as you can or at least within reason uh so that the breaking down process is much more efficient now i want to show you this too is if you look at this and you'll see that and you can tell on yep you can tell on yep you can tell on this one you'll see here that around the i didn't skin these and the reason that you don't skin them is because most of your minerals and vitamins are located in the skin and right here underneath the skin you'll see there's a layer there and that layer is where the majority of your alpha amylase is located is in that outside layer and then on the inside is where your beta amylase is normally locate is primarily located okay that's a sort of like the anatomy of a sweet potato and it's already pretty sweet slightly anyway but i've got all of these in here now in this pot i've got three and a half gallons close to four gallons of water right now my strike temperature is of 160. so at 160 degrees i'm going to insert this colander of potatoes in there and i should drop it dramatically and then i'll bring that temperature back up as it settles and what am i going to bring it up to yeah 149 and i'm going to let it sit there for 40 minutes and then we're going to bring it up to 155 and allow that to sit there for about two hours and then of course after that i'll go to 170 because i'm going to try to break it down so that it's nice and mushy and i can mash it all up so let's do that i'll insert that temperature probe back in there and then place the lid on it and what we'll do is we will now begin to track the temperature my temperature dropped dramatically from 160 it's now 140 it was one now it's 143. so it dropped dramatically so what i'm gonna do is i'm allow that to sit there as all those potatoes soak up all that thermal energy and then but once it balances out i'll know what to do which is turn the heat on and bring it up to 149 and hold it there we'll be back well now for those who have decided for whatever reason that yep i'm done i'm going i'm out of here we'll see you later i know you'll be back uh but for those who stuck around here's a little bit of information that will believe it or not lend itself to any and all of your brewing processes keep this in mind hear me ask the question what are the low-hanging what is the low-hanging fruit that your yeast just love to devour that is glucose okay and it will always eat that glucose always the more you give it the better off you're gonna be okay and the happier you're gonna be these are the other two sugars that we have that are we find normally in most of our saccharides remember saccharide is nothing more than a good technical term for sugars now these are monosaccharides means they are this is a sugar composed of two molecules this one is a glucose and this one is a fructose and you'll be familiar with that fructose is normally those sugars that are in normally fruits but are in a lot of plants as well but if you connect a glucose and a fructose together you get a sucrose that's about the size of that okay now amaltose and you'll notice that this looks just like this and this is nothing more than a a handwritten depiction of a molecule okay this is a sugar molecule a monosaccharide means one one molecule uh well when you put them together they become a disaccharide two then this one is a glucose and this one is a glucose you put two of those together you get a maltose now see before you think that you're all confused let's really really simplify this okay because what are we looking for in the end all right we're trying to break down as many glucose molecules by themselves as we possibly can within reason of course okay and now you've heard this before you know the there's a 1 4 connection and then there's the 1 6 connection between the carbons let me show you what that really means in this particular case two glucose molecules between yep and i missed i've got it there should be another hydrogen right there yep there you go see i already made a mistake that's okay i just happen to know that uh between between this point and this point is known as the 1-4 chain that's the connection of the 1-4 chain unfortunately between this point and this point is the 1-2 chain so amylase doesn't help you there sorry it's just the way it works now what does amylase do amylase breaks down the 1 4 chain it cleaves it cuts it okay and that's the alpha amylase the beta amylase breaks apart the 1 6 chain now what is the 1 6 chain oh i'm glad you asked that question because it's relatively simple in itself okay now remember we've got monosaccharides okay we want uh we've got disaccharides we want monosaccharides if at all possible all right so we want to break these 1-4 chains by using alpha amylase but in order to break those 1-4 chains you have the polysaccharides which are multiple multiple multiple connections of these chains of sugars and when it hap about about every 10 of these about every 10 gluco glucose molecules you'll have the 1 6 connection okay and that is instead of from here to here the 1 4 chain it would go from here to here or if we want to use the same two molecules together we could say it connects from here to here and then starts another chain all by itself okay so but we want to we want to break those connections because we want to first we want to get a bunch of these if at all possible and then from there we want to break it down and get a bunch of these the more of these you have the more alcohol you can create see that's it when it comes to sugars in a nutshell so additionally when you have these it's considered an amilose stay with me stay with me when you have them with the 1 6 connection that additional chain that branches off about every 10 molecules and it branches off and then branches off it just makes this really really complex chain of molecules then you have amylopectin it should be all coming to you now amylose versus amylase amylase breaks those 1-4 chains amylopectin versus pectinase another enzyme used to help convert starches to fermentable sugars alpha and beta amylase all one big happy picture i'm telling you this is a sweet potato on steroids having a good time creating your sweet potato vodka stay with us and we're going to get through these potatoes i've got some mashing to do as in physically mashing uh to get myself a puree uh remember i've got about 15 pounds of potatoes almost four gallons of water uh i've cut all those potatoes up i've left the skins on them uh i'm going to keep it at 149 for about 40 minutes i'm at 141 i'm balanced now uh that there's no harm in that leave it set there until you're ready and then we're going to bring it to see we'll have the beta amylase work and we'll have the alpha amylase work and then we're going to bring up to about 170 and that's just to break down the fibers the fibrous portions of that potato so we can mash it really good give us a puree oh my goodness and then i've got to do this two more times so i've got a full day ahead of me and on the next video we'll get right into separating settling and then checking the hydrometer then going through the fermentation process and then we'll do a follow-up video from that where we will actually run this through a still and make some fine delectable sweet potato vodka for those of you who are already subscribed thank you very much if you haven't yet please just subscribe below it costs you absolutely nothing uh it gives us bragging rights uh please like the video comment share this with your friends of all those things until next time yes oh it's going to take me a full day for this so we'll be back happy distilling

Channel: Barley and Hops Brewing

Views: 55,918

Keywords: neutral spirit, sugar wash, barlerandhops, hops, home, Sugar (Ingredient), sugar mash, distilling, barley, corn sugar vs cane sugar, corn sugar mash recipe, making a wash for distilling, running a still for the first time, first distillation, using yeast, mooshine, whiskey, making rum, making vodka, bourbon, baby step bourbon, making bourbon at home

Id: RxNbU976JtE

Length: 23min 45sec (1425 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 18 2020