The Secret To Distilling Just About Anything

by the end of this video you are going to be able to pick up any ingredient you want at the supermarket or out of your pantry have a quick look at it and decide if it is easily fermentable for the stilling and if it is what you have to do to it to make it fermentable and I even have a handy dandy downloadable PDF decision tree to help you out how's it going Chasers I hope you're having a kick ass week I'm Jesse this is still it and today I am giving you the tools to break free from the oppressive distilling recipe yeah that's wildly over dramatic I know but here's what I mean by that let's not fool ourselves here I'm distilling recipes are awesome I love them they give the scaffolding to new distillers to be able to get into the Hobby and figure out what they're doing for the pros for the people that have been doing this for a long time it gives the ability to be able to have repeatable results which is amazing but sometimes people stress a little bit too much about having a recipe and needing to know exactly what to do and today I want to give you the the the the tools the ability the knowledge to be able to break free of that and just pick something up off the shelf and say yeah I'm going to ferment this and distill it here is the decision tree that's going to help you out with this uh an essentially it boils down to six questions if you can answer these six questions you're going to know pretty much what to do with any ingredient that you want to eventually distill so let's go through the six questions first and then we'll do some examples of going through the actual decision tree so the first one is does this ingredient have most of its energy stored in carbohydrates pretty simple question that I think everyone is going to be able to answer intuitively most of the time a couple of little traps here number one is remember that when we say carbohydrates that's everything from super long chain complex starches all the way down to simple sugars our goal with any ingredient is to end up with simple sugars and as long as we have some carbohydrate we can get that that's what this whole decision tree is about and obviously just remember that at any point in time on one of these questions uh you can do a little bit of research and sometimes your intuition isn't entirely correct so when I first started doing this my intuition said that potatoes were full of starch turns out that's not true but it's also a question you can answer in two minutes on the on the Google machine so just keep that in mind for all the others the next question is pretty simple the first one it's just kind of the finding where exactly we fit on that scale of carbohydrates and that is on that scale from Super complex starches down to really simple sugars because most of the energy reside for any given product so bread [Applause] way up here complex carbohydrates sugar table sugar way down here I think you get the quest I think you get the idea here right once again uh the old Google machine can help you out a whole lot here let's move on to the next question which is is the starch gelatinized uh now I actually do have another video that is giving you pretty much exactly the same information as this one um I've just framed it in two very different ways the first video was the way that I kind of think about things and that was easy for me to understand but some people it didn't just quite gel with the way they think which is why I'm making this video I'm going to put a link to that video down below because I think it's got a really good description of how uh gelatinization Works in it but essentially all we're doing is taking a really crumpled up um kind of tight balled up long molecule and relaxing it out so that it can become soluble in water that's what we need from the starch for our enzymes to go to work on it later on and you do that by heating starch in the presence of water pretty simple so any starch that's been heated for a long period of time only about an hour makes everything safe in the presence of water or a moist environment the slash is probably gelatinized so baked goods bread Donuts uh croissants um most cereals remember also guys that anything that is malted so malted barley malted oats malted Rye whatever it happens to be is going to be gelatinized as well melted corn you get the idea anything that hasn't been through that process is going to be ungelatinized the next question is does it already contain enzymes because we need them and I'm hoping if you're watching this video you at least got some idea of how this is happening once again you can go watch the other video it's got a little bit more in depth on that but essentially the enzymes are just going to cut the really long chain carbohydrates down into much much smaller chunks which is what our yeast wants so if the enzymes are there they can't do their job now basically for distilling you're going to come across these in two main forms one is going to be malted barley some other types of grains some of the types of ingredients do have some enzymes malted barley is the PowerHouse in terms of getting a buttload of them and one go and the other option is just to buy bottled liquid or powdered enzymes that you can add in yourself and the last two questions kind of blend into being pretty much the same thing and that is once you have sugar so either we started with sugar or we Mash something that was uh more complex carbohydrates we're on the scale of fermentability do those sugars sit so this is pretty much 100 fermentable this being a black strap molasses uh I've put myself on the spot here off the top of my head I'm going to guess that blackstrap molasses depending on what black strap means and the specific molasses you're working with is probably uh 10 to 25 30 unfermentable sugars someone fact checked me and let me know in the comments whether I'm right on that or not or if I'm just talking at my ass but you get the idea right how much of the sugar that we've created all that we've found and put into solution is going to famine and then to follow up from that how much about that do you actually care uh are you stressing out about getting as much yield as you can from the ingredients that went in or are you happy uh to kind of play around with unfermentable sugars in other ways later on if you can answer those questions about the ingredient you have you can figure out exactly how to make this fermentable and get to the point where you're up to fermentation going into distillation so let's run an example through this thing shall we and let's start with something super freaking basic just so you can kind of get an idea on how this you know this flow Works let's start with table sugar I think you guys all know exactly what to do with this but let's run through the example anyway first of all doesn't have carbs yes it's got a boatload of carbs that's all it is number two are they starches or simple sugars simple sugars uh so we mix it with water uh and we aim for eight to fourteen percent potential alcohol and you can use the calculator on chasercraft.com to do that there's a sugar calculator there you can translate that into you know things like this relatively easy too with a little bit of work on your part if you want to and then we need to ask the question is that solution that we've created highly fermentable and the answer is yeah yeah it really is that's like 99 fermentable um and it's going to fermentate easily so let's ferment it obviously guys there's going to be like little tweaks here and there that there's there's a thousand other things that you need to do in distilling that don't fall into this I'm not going to tell you that you need like nutrients in here I'm not going to tell you what you used to use and what temperature to fermented at and so on and so forth this is just the flowchart is just for thinking about how to deal with the fermentable side of things okay so you just know there is other knowledge you need but this is going to get you through the hard part all right so that's sorted by the way team I should have told you this already that was a little silly of me but this entire flowchart uh is available on chasercraft.com there is a link down below it's a downloadable PDF if you want to print it out and stick it on the wall on the shed or whatever works for you that is fine by me and while you're there you can have a think about picking up some of these the new chase the craft maturation sticks perfect if you're making whiskey rum or even just wanting to you know age gin or vodka or something like that so let's do another example that is also well I mean it's completely standard if you're making whiskey and that is malted barley this malted barley happens to be the Monica smoked stuff from gladfields which is freaking delicious but anyway let's go through the flowchart shall we yeah it's got about a lot of energy in the form of carbs those carbs are mostly complex starches uh has it been gelatinized it's been malted so we know that yes these starches are gelatinized and does it have enough enzymes yep diastetic power of this stuff is off the charts compared to most other things it's got all the diastetic power that you will need to convert Itself by the way guys diastatic Paris just a measure of the amount of enzymes in it and there's a second page to the flowchart that has a few of these little cheat sheets in it to help you you know figure out what some of these things are answer some questions for you and um if they don't answer the question so I'll at least tell you exactly what to Google so you can carry on through the chart anyway yes it's gelatinized yes it has enough enzymes so we mash it and then at the end of the mesh we ask ourselves is this highly fermentable and because we use the full natural enzyme package in The Barley yeah it's going to be pretty freaking fermentable especially if we matched at 64 degrees Celsius so we can ferment this stuff now let's do something that's a little bit off the wall flower straight up flower this is actually um self-raising flour but imagine it's just wheat flour so yes got a back load of carbs in there yes those carbs are in fact complex starches is it gelatinized no it's not that's the first time we've run into this right so what do we have to do we have to gelatinize the starch once again there's a little thing on this on the cheat sheet but basically gelatinizing means that we're going to take the really tight like screwed up starch molecule open it up and make it soluble in water so the enzymes can do their job later on and the way we do that is by cooking starch so we're going to cook it in water for about an hour one part starch four parts water and leave yourself enough room to top it up if you can bonus points if you want to do this without dealing with the goop use some sacrificial enzymes this isn't a video about the specific process for all these things everyone says oh why don't you just tell me because if I did this video would be six hours long like just trust it's a complex issue we're dealing with the fermentable stuff yeah but sacrificial enzymes will save the uh the goop for you anyway so we boil it for uh one hour now the starch is gelatinized and we asked the question does uh does it have enough enzymes and even if it did have enzymes we just boiled the snot out of it for an hour even if we add sacrificial enzymes we just boil the snot out of it so no it doesn't have enough enzymes we need to add enzymes in so what do we do well we could use the barley again because we know that this is the point in the chart where the valley comes back in to this flowchart right so from this point on the Barley's going to look after itself and it's going to look after the flower so we can carry on cool or you could use a bottled enzymes liquid enzymes and the stuff that you'll be looking for here would be Alpha amylase okay so we mash it with either Alpha amylase or with some more barley and we have a word or a wash at the end which we need to ask the question is this highly fermentable if we matched it with this at around 64 65 degrees Celsius yeah it's gonna be pretty pretty fermentable but if we matched it with just Alpha amylase not so much so we probably want to add some gluco amylase in before we actually ferment now at this point in time you're probably starting to think if you're new to this whoa um a little bit more complex uh I don't know about using enzymes I don't know about adding barley into it I don't know what's going to be fermentable or not I get you I understand this is a kind of a complex but very simple topic if you take it step by step and that's why I've put it into a flowchart at least if you're following this flowchart and you get to a point where you don't know the answer you have a very specific question that you can go and Google right rather than having this amorphous blob of nothingness as a question how do I ferment flour does that make sense so it's going to take you through all of the steps and if you run into an issue do a little bit of research and you'll get the answer to a very specific question a lot quicker than trying to figure out all of it cool all right let's do another weird one shall we something that might come up kind of often uh bread as soon as I've got it here my word leftover bread there's always a little bit to this laying around is it worth saving has it got a whole lot of energy in carbohydrates yeah that's pretty much what it is so yeah we can save up all the little leftovers throw them into the freezer and once we have enough we ask the question what kind of carbohydrates are they mostly starch all right has it been gelatinized yes it has been gelatinized because this was quite moist when it went into the oven and went into the oven for a decent amount of time so those those starches are gallipolised perfectly for us excellent we don't have to boil it doesn't have enough enzymes nope so now we're at the point that we were before right we can either add this or we can add our own enzymes in we mash it and then we decide how fermentable it is do we need the gluco amylase or do we not need the gluco amylase either at it or you don't and you move on to fermenting it so I hope I hope that this is starting to set in with you a little bit now like like I said before you're going to run into weird questions that you don't know the answer to they're easy to answer and you can keep moving and the other cool thing about it is that if you come across stuff like this it's pretty easy to answer the question as well so um does it have a buttload of energy in the form of carbs yeah are those carbs starches or sugars for the boys aren't they because there's cereal in here and there's just straight up sugar in here what that means is that you can do the pathway for both of them and figure out what the minimum needed process is to get everything fermentable does that make sense I hope it makes sense so first of all let's go with the sugary side of things right like all of this all of the frosting and just the charms themselves they're simple sugars we add them into water are they fermentable um debatable but I would say they're pretty highly fermentable so that's what we need to do but we also know that there's going to be some carbohydrates in here let's go through that process shall we all right well those carbs are gelatinized I'm going to guess because they would have been cooked so they're gelatinized do they have enzymes no uh so we're going to add enzymes in once again barley or um out of a bottle we're going to mash them and then we're going to ask ourselves are they fermentable that depends on once again how you mash them and what you mash them with whether it was barley or enzymes and then we're going to ask do we need to add the gluco amylase depending on how you mashed it you can decide either way you can add gluco amylase to completely dry it out and now you know that you've utilized both the starch and the cereal and also the simple sugar all right I need to say a huge huge thank you to the patreons whoa I'm whacking things stop and disturbing the spiders anyway uh thank you patreons I very very much appreciate uh all that you do for me uh apologies for being a little bit uh vacant at the moment we've been having some time off over Christmas but I'm back I'm back now and I will be getting in touch with you guys over on the patreon platform and of course this uh this PDF I'll make available on patreon as well so thank you for everything you do guys I thoroughly appreciate it anyway I really hope that either the information of this video or the diagram and the cheat sheet helped you get your head around this stuff there's going to be a lot of you that have watched through this far that say uh dude it's easy uh thank you for watching the video this far if you're one of those but remember what it was like when you and you and you're trying to get your head around this and for the people that are new do they get it trust me I remember how uh inept I felt trying to work this out initially so I hope it helped and let me know there's this video and the one that I told you about earlier on there's a link in the description down below for it which one of those two videos or these two videos I should say helped you out the most uh because I'm trying to figure out where people are and you know like what ways I can convey information to help you out the most does that make sense all right so drop a comment down there let me know what you think let me know if there's gaps on this that you think people should know obviously there's always going to be like little um you know nuances this is more about the rule not the exception but anyway let me know if there's something you think I need to add to it and and have a kick-ass week and I'll catch you next time see you later guys

Channel: Still It

Views: 26,233

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Id: XXLcxtJikqM

Length: 18min 1sec (1081 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 27 2023