SWEET POTATO VODKA PART 2

yes sweet potato vodka part two [Music] we welcome you back brewers hobbyists wine makers home distillers uh this is a channel that dares to unlock the mysteries of home distilling we say that all the time and we're on our quest to create a virgin sweet potato vodka now if you watched the first video right there uh you'll notice that in in that video we laid out why we selected the sweet potato what the nutritional values were what the benefits were of using a sweet potato versus a regular potato and a lot of other information that will help you throughout your brewing hobby where we're at right now is we're picking up where we actually left off which is where we put them in the pot and remember i have 42 pounds of potatoes sweet potatoes and of these 42 pounds of sweet potatoes i am i intend to make about eight gallons or so of a sweet potato mash my anticipated alcohol by volume will be about eight percent and that to me is going to be on the high side um and the reason for that is because it's going to be a virgin sweet potato vodka without no other additional ingredients i'm not going to use sugar to boost the alcohol by volume i'm not going to use any grain i don't need anything additional to provide the amylase enzyme because the sweet potato has amylase has alpha and beta amylase amylase already resident in the sweet potato so we're trying to take advantage in trying to make sure that we reach an efficiency level to extract as much of the fermentable sugars as we possibly can from a sweet potato so having said that remember we chopped them up we diced them um and did different sizes and you know different geometric figures and all that we didn't we didn't get real scientific about that and but we put about 15 pounds in almost four gallons of water okay and i brought it up to 149 degrees for the beta amylase and then we brought it up to one for about 40 minutes then we brought the 155 and we let it sit there for two hours and then i heated it up to 170 to try to soften them and then and i may have i don't know maybe i led you a stray but yes you're gonna have to bring it up to close to a boil uh in order to soften them up to make a mush and so i did that uh and that's where we're at right now i just turned these off it's been about three and a half hours uh since we started this process and uh so this is only iteration one i've got two more to get through so uh of course unfortunately you won't be with me but uh i'll be here doing it just as regular and on the next video we'll do the of course the fermentation and all the other stuff but i want to show you what we do from here into our fermentation bucket now there's one thing in particular that is critical that you understand okay uh what is critical when you're using sweet potatoes as opposed to regular potatoes okay first of all the sweet potato is not a potato but don't make me go down that road all right we we've given it the name sweet potato for a lot of different reasons okay and of course it's not a yam uh but we'll use the yam as a descriptive term to identify sweet potatoes uh it's just the way americans do things so that's just the way it is okay so now that we've got them all prepared the biggest difference is is that once i put once i mash these and i'm going to use just a regular potato masher in this case a sweet potato masher and i'm going to mash them up and try to create a puree just just a mush just like you would with mashed potatoes i'm going to transfer them from here into this bucket to allow it to cool what will go into the bucket with it is all the water now remember we've done the majority we've done all of the conversion at those temperatures uh to create the fermentable sugars and i can tell you that by looking in here already i saw this you can see the foam on top and what does the foam indicate yeah those branched chain saccharides those sugars so i know we've already done all of that so all i i've got all i'm going to get out of these potatoes so the major difference is is that this is complete so the water goes with the potatoes and the reason the water goes with the potatoes is because that water is full of sugars hmm think about that yeah the water is full of all the sugars to include the potatoes themselves and we're going to ferment the potatoes and the water together now if we were using a regular white potato what would we have in here think about that there's no amylase in a white potato or a regular a true potato so really what you've done in that case is you've hydrolyzed it and you've broken down all the starches so all you have are starches and starches in the water you see there's one more step that must take place if you're using just regular potatoes now you have to cool it down and use amylase which would be a grain or you could use the chemical itself uh you know you purchase it from your local brew shop alpha amylase and you could break down the starches into fermentable sugars that's already happened we don't have to do any of that so therefore all of this will wind up in here and guess what yeah i gotta start all over again so let me show you what i've got now just take a look at that see now that is the sweet potatoes that are already starting to break down um and they're really you know they were clumpy but all i've got to do now is start to mash those and add those to my fermenter now in mashing them this is going to be a difficult task because you see it's not that hard i'll spend the next several minutes mashing these and the benefit of having this colander in here that has that has those legs on the bottom of it is it's a standoff from the bottom which means that it heats a whole lot more efficiently um i i i'm sorry i don't know where i got this uh this colander came with i believe this pot and i probably bought it as some kind of a kitchen outlet somewhere because i wanted a large stainless steel pot for this um and the benefit is is that the stainless steel pot is magnetic so it works excellently very good on my induction cooktop you don't have to have one of these you can you can do it many many many different ways but you can see how i'm starting to make a slurry out of that and i'll continue to do this and mash these up and then i'll show you we'll transfer it into the bucket now if you see that that is a really really good sweet potato mash and i'm just mashing up all those potatoes and then i'll just turn it over and dump those into the bucket because we want to reserve this we want to keep this in the fermenter until we're finished fermenting and then we'll separate this from the mash and we'll pull off the clear liquid pot holders come in handy now i've got my second batch um and again for those of you who have a really really large pot you're able to do this all at once good on you um some of you may have a smaller pot you may have to do this more than three times um but remember it's about 25 pounds for a five gallon batch um and i'm i'm shooting for an eight gallon so i'm using 42 pounds which means it's going to take me three iterations to get through this and right now i'm at oh about 135 degrees or so i'm just gonna go ahead and drop these potatoes in there and then bring that temperature up uh to the appropriate temperature what is that i know you watched the first video 149. for how long uh-huh yeah 40 minutes all right i'll drop those in there tell you what that colander is a lifesaver oh then let me place my lid back on it and i've got my other slurry in the fermenter and that's going to take a while to uh to cool down and i'm in no hurry because i've got this to go through so i've got plenty of time i'm in no hurry i'm not going to use like a wart chiller or ice or anything else to try to chill i'm just gonna let that naturally cool on its own it'll take overnight so and i'm not gonna pour i'm not gonna bore you and uh force you to watch me do this for the third iteration how's that when we come back we'll have another video and this will be all about fermentation and preparing that mash for the ultimate sweet potato vodka happy distilling

Channel: Barley and Hops Brewing

Views: 35,381

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, SWEET POTATO VODKA, VODKA, POTATO VODKA, MAKING VODKA AT HOME

Id: lZ66Pyehh0c

Length: 10min 33sec (633 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 19 2020