Making Moonshine

[123Shadow123]

Well, I'm considering making my own moonshine. Reason being, I want a since of pride and something great tasting!

I only have a few questions:
1)Is it legal for me to make and consume moonshine with friends? If not, why is it illegal?
2)How does moonshine compare to other alcoholic drinks?
3)What's the best recipe you know of?


I'm considering starting off with a basic recipe I'm reading:

Ingrediants:
1)corn meal
2)sugar
3)water
4)yeast
5)malt

Process:
1)Mix all ingredients together in a large container. After mixing, move the mixture, called "mash," into a still and leave it to ferment. How quickly this process occurs depends on the warmth of the mash.

2)Heat the mash to the point of vaporization at 173 degrees. The mash will produce a clear liquid, often the color of dark beer. You must watch this process with careful attention.

3)Trap vapor using a tube or coil. The vapor will be transferred into a second, empty container. The resulting condensation is the moonshine.



Just to give this a try. Then I want to try a mixture called "Black Beards Rum." Which can be made like so:


"Two pounds of brown sugar per one gallon of water and one cup of honey for every ten gallon batch. Starting hydrometer reading of about 90. Do not exceed 100. Add 1 to 3 ozs of yeast per 10 gallons of mash.

Heat one fourth of your water to 120 or 130 degrees only hot enough to melt the sugar, then stir in your sugar and then the honey last. Pour it into your fermenter and finish filling with cool water to cool it down to 80 degrees. Take a hydrometer reading and adjust as needed. The add your yeast. 6 to 14 days to ferment.
Yields about 12% alcohol."

Reason for making this is because I like brown sugar and it sounds like it will be delicious!



So yeah, what do you guys think?

[Skelton]

Post your location, laws differ. But where I am it is legal to make, drink, but not sell without a proper license. If it is legal to make you can share it.

Well the still you described has no thumper barrel, when used properly with it the alcohol will yield just under 200 proof (100%). Since you are not using one, which is a little complicated with it, you will get around 100 proof (50%), but you can distill it again getting under 200 proof.

If you want more detail about the thump barrel post a question. And don't be an idiot using a radiator or lead connections. I heard you should strain it through a filter when it comes out.

Describe your still, I made one but didn't get the worm right so the alcohol came off in vapor. Something other than copper pipe would be helpful.

[Corporal Punishment]

alcohol forms an azeotrope with water at a certain concentration so you will need a specific type of setup to get the good stuff

goto the plumbing section of your local hardware store and get some large PVC fittings to make a barrel about a liter in size and some PVC tubing to make the coil and the inlet outlet tubes for the barrel.

this thread may help

Alcohol - APC Forum

[CyberWar]

To build a distilling machine, you will need:

Two containers with size ranging from a retort to an oil drum, depending on the amount you plan to make. One container should be tightly sealable and fireproof.

A copper or heat-resistant plastic tube about 3 to 4 metres (coiled or flexible enough to coil.

A filter of some kind (the more, the better)


The sealable container is where the fermented stuff will go. Punch a hole into the lid of the container and place the tube into it. Make sure to seal off any gaps tightly - we don't want to make any waste of precious booze, do we? This piece will serve as the boiling pot.

Coil the other end of the tube into a spiral so that it fits down into the other container. Punch a hole in the side of the other container near the bottom and pull out the other end of the coiled tube. Seal the hole in the container to be watertight. Place a filter on the final end of the tube. However, don't make it too tight - leave a space for surplus vapor to escape, or the pressure in the apparatus will build and eventually cause damage.

Place the first container on the heat source and fill it with whatever you are about to distill. Seal tightly. Then, fill up the other container where the coiled tube goes with iced water - the colder, the better. Then wait until the liquid inside the heated container boils and something starts dripping from the tube. In the beginning, it will be almost pure alcohol. You can check for drinkability by pouring it on a brick and setting on fire. When it starts getting hard to light it on fire, it's just fine.

Anything containing sugar will do as the raw material as long as it can be fermented with yeast - grain, corn, sugar cane pulp, potatoes, most fruits and yes, even unprocessed milk. There is also no physical way of getting it wrong and have the end product toxic - the toxic methanol (which is sometimes added to moonshine by cheating dealers) is produced by a completely different reaction than the drinkable ethanol, so if you have used 100% natural material, there is no risk of killing yourself by alcohol poisoning.

Just remember - excessive consumption of alcoholic beverages may cause you to think you are smarter, prettier and tougher than that big, long-bearded biker who can hide a 0.5 litre can of beer in his palm.

[Bolderz]

lol u make life difficult im not sure if this works but my bro said just take bear turn it upside down and put it in ur freazer alchohol has a lower freezing temp so it will b at the bottom to where evthing else will freeze and b at the top so the u flip the can right side up and poor pure alchohol out try it and tell me if it works pretty sure it will since my bro is a bar tender but yea

[S7@1T3D]

We have a idea something like that. Pour a beer into a freezing metal cup and into the freezer with a stick in it. Freeze. Pull out when frozen an suck it till its clear and it starts to taste like water. Melbourne Bitter Or TEDS/Old wordks best.

I guess you can do this with "alcho-pops".

[CyberWar]

Sounds like a sad waste of good beer. I have drank the remnants of an accidentally-frozen beer, and honestly it tastes like shit.

To get the real moonshine, you have to use some form of the distilling machine that I described. Variations in construction and configuration are many, but the principle is the same - boiling booze out of the fermented something.

[S7@1T3D]

Nope. Dont mind the taste i enjoy it, its for those hot arse summer days mate.

[CyberWar]

Perhaps, but it still not a true moonshine.

[S7@1T3D]

Originally Posted by CyberWar

Perhaps, but it still not a true moonshine.

Umm never said it was mate.

[deadlyvenom]

a couple of questions for moonshining... i put together a still and in stead of using cornmalt i was going to substitute it with more sugar to make rum and i thought it would go faster because the yeast doesnt have to break down the starch into glucose would that be right

and my one freind is trying to use a glass cracker jar to distill his i told him it will crack from the heat am i right or do u think it will work

[ninefingers]

"The Foxfire Book" has a whole chapter on moonshine...forgot which volume.

And, yes, it recommends Never using an old radiator or house plumbing that may contain lead solder.

They also say to dump the first thing that comes over. (It will contain very volatile stuff, like Fusel Oil, Acetaldehyde, Methanol etc.) This , if not dumped, makes it "Red-Eye". Literally.

The Alcohol will be a 96% azeotrope at best. right. It is very hard to get 100%--live with it. 190-proof has no flavor, anyway. You may want to filter it through activated charcoal like the Vodka makers do.

[anarchy4life123]

where im from (location i will not tell) i sell 1oz of moonshine for 120 each.

[crazy white guy]

Originally Posted by anarchy4life123

where im from (location i will not tell) i sell 1oz of moonshine for 120 each.

120 of what currency?

In my area My market research says people will pay 10-15$ per liter (of 85-95%.) Canadian dollars.

[Misanthropy]

We are civilized people, are we not? We have such conveniences such as supermarkets & teh intardnet, no?

Well then, with that said, go find yourself some simple sugars, not starches. Here's why.

Starch veggies are used primarily in areas where they're plentiful & simple sugars are by comparison, either too expensive or far away to fuck with. The idea behind them is: You expose them to water & boil for hours & hours, the starches break down into sugars. The sugars are used as food by yeast & ethanol is made.

The problem with starch veggies is that starch is still always present. Go figure!

Starches contribute to yeast metabolic bullshit like methanol, fusel oils & other congeners. Oh, and bullshit like whiskey. Yuk, who wants that? Not me. I like my drugs pure, thank you.

So then, why the hell should we mess with that, at greater losses & impurities than just simply using sugar? Or even better, simple sugars, like glucose, fructose etc...

These I can find at winco in cheap, large amounts. If glucose & fructose are found for more than bulk saccharine, switch the bin tag numbers. What are they going to do, test each one?

Anyway, we don't ideally want saccharine because it's a longer, polymeric sugar. Harder for yeast to break down than the simpler sugars. So let's take glucose. Fructose I believe is found in corn syrup & that's fine also.

Get yourself some super yeast or brewer's yeast online or at a brew supply shop. While you're there, get yourself a pound or so of A3 molecular sieves. Also called "Zeolyte". This are micro porous silica beads that let molecules the size of water in, trap it there, but not much else.

That is what you use if you want anhydrous ethanol for dirt cheap & please note, the sieves are reusable. Bake in an oven until dry & seal in an air tight container after cooling. Now they are ready to be added to a reasonably pure distillate to absorb water again. Mmkay?

You might also want to grab a cheap hygrometer (measures %acohol vs water mix.)

Now, you might want to charge a bottle of sugar water with your yeast to get them growing like mad. This seed stock can be used to inoculate much larger containers of your boiled/sterilized sugar water mix. Shake the hell out this one often over a few days to oxygenate the mix. This is to keep the yeast in a reproductive, not feeding state, where they convert sugar into alcohol & CO2.

Find ratios, still designs & so on anywhere on the net, but this is a good place to start.
Mother Earth Alcohol Fuel: Table of Contents

[crazy white guy]

Im in the process of building a new distiller. This is my third attempt. The first I scrapped because the pot didn't seal and the open-air cooler didnt condense all of the distillate.

My second attempt was another open air. Same problems. The seals held up a lot better this time though. If I had used this one outside in cold weather it would have worked wonderfully well.

Third attempt. This time I'm putting a lot of effort and money into it. It will be a pressure cooker as the boiler and copper tube coil inside a PVC condenser. I don't want to pay an extra 30-50$ to have it automatically cool itself. So my idea is that I will have the top end of the PVC condenser body open, To cool it I would fill the midde of the coil with ice and water. The bottom of the condenser would slowly flow out into a water reservoir. I would replace the ice as it melts and fill the condenser with cold water to keep the ice cooling the coil.


What does BS think?

[Timm]

I know you don't want to use an aluminum pressure cooker.. I guess alcohol and other fermentation products will attack it at still temps, possibly making bad and/or poisonous by-products.. best to modify a beer keg into a cooker.

And actually, I bet a milk bucket or creamery pail, whatever the hell they call them, would be about ideal.. big lid, quality stainless, built to last, easy to weld on, ect.

And you'll want to strain out the corn or whatever before you ferment, or at least before you run it, cause the fiber and lignins and shit will ferment to methanol and the like, = huge headaches.

[Misanthropy]

Why don't you want to use aluminum? The only salt that I could see being formed would be aluminum oxide & if you're distilling, none of that should be a problem in any case...

Aren't kegs aluminum?

[crazy white guy]

Yeah, all kegs here are aluminum unless its a permanent bar fixture, then its stainless steel and quite a bit more expensive.

If its only maxing out at 100 degrees celsius, I dont see why there would be a problem. If you can cook any other food at upwards of 300 degrees C for 4 hours, 100 degrees for less than two hours shouldn't be a problem.

[Timm]

Thats just something i read somewhere i think, might have been the bootlegger's bible i'll dig it out and check. And really, aluminum kegs? I think i've seen a few but they usually seem to be stainless around here. The big 15.5 gallon Coors and whatnot ones? The aluminum ones i've seen usually seem to be like barrel-shaped, some with the bung on the side, cornelius kegs maybe, F,idk. I just thought copper or stainless were the only 100% safe metals to use.

I know that methanol will atttack aluminum, but even then i'm not sure about volatile by-products. I don't think it was the ethanol that was the issue as much as other things present in the wash that were a concern with aluminum.. as you know there are many more products of a fermentation besides alcohol and co2, especially if allowed to run at a warmer temperature (~> 74 ish deg F)

Stainless just seems superior and safer but if aluminum works and you can still see the keyboard then fuck it, right?


And oh yeah money's not an issue when you're shopping around back of a restaurant that you don't mind fucking out of a few bucks! Actually that is kinda shady. The way to go is to get a nice keg of brew, throw a party, get sloshed with your buddies, and just never return it. The deposit here for a nice stainless keg is about $50, small price to pay. If they call you looking for it just say it got stolen, what the hell can they say to that?