THE BASICS OF MAKING MOONSHINE & WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
HOW TO MAKE MOONSHINE & MOONSHINE INSTRUCTIONS: Ingredients:
1) Corn meal
2) Sugar
3) Water
4) Yeast
5) Malt extract
Now you also need the following for you to be able to know how to make moonshine:
1) A Mash Tub, or Fermenter
2) A Still
3) A Condenser
Now, not everyone has copper stills lying around in their own backyards. However, most kitchens have a pressure cooker, a kitchen sink and a stove. And of course you will need a 20 gallon drum. However, a new, metal garbage bin will do the trick, if you can't find anything else. Note I said
new!!!With a few other minor adaptions, you have yourself a homemade moonshine still and.
So, you will need:
1 x 5lb bag of cornmeal
1 x 5lb back of white, granulated sugar
10 gallons of hot water - at 120 degrees F.
1 cake of yeast
1 pint of malt extract
HOW TO MAKE MOONSHINE & MOONSHINE INSTRUCTIONS: Method
1) Fill your 20 gallon container with 10 gallons of water. Make sure that it is at 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
2) You now need to scald the meal by adding it to the water, a little at at time, followed by the sugar. Stir well.
3) You will now need to set the drum or garbage can on a very slow fire. Make sure that you do not scorch your mash and the temperature must be kept below 145 degrees F. else the heat will prevent the starch from being converted into sugar. Leave for about half an hour.
4) When your mash is a very thin gruel like consistency, take it off the heat and cook it down by cooling the outside of the container with water. You can do this by placing the container in the sink or the like, and filling up the sink with water to bring the temperature down.
5) When your mash is cool enough to stir your finger through it without being burned, we need to check that there has been enough conversion from starch to sugar. To do this we need to do the iodine test.
6) Take a small amount of mash and place a drop of iodine on the top of it. If it turns a dark purple we know that there are still starches present that haven't been totally converted into sugar. If this is the result, put the mash back on a low heat for another half an hour. If there is only a light purple, then we can continue to the next stage of learning how to make moonshine.
7) We now add about a pint of malt extract and a cake of yeast that has been well crumbled and mixed in a little cup of warm water to dissolve first.
You may find that your mash is very thick at this stage. It is fine to add some warm water to the mash to thin it out. Don't add hot water as this will kill of the yeast.
9) Place your drum of mash in a warm place - about 65 degrees and leave it for 3 days. At this stage you may cover it with a cloth if you have a danger of rats or insects falling into your mash. However, if you don't have these dangers, leaving it open will encourage wild yeast to enter your mash, giving it a distinct flavour.
10) You will see your mash rising in the drum with a foamy head to it. This is normal. When the froth stops growing, your mash is ready. Too much acid in your mash while it is fermenting will result in vinegar. Therefore, you will need to check your mash with litmus paper to see if your mash is still safe. If you find that the litmus paper turns blue on contact with your mash, or only a slight tinge of pink, it is fine.
11) So, in the next process of learning how to make moonshine you will want to build your still, while your mash is fermenting. Take the old pressure cooker and drill a 1/4 inch hole into the lid of the pressure cooker / pressure canner. Now take your copper tubing and get it through the hole, making sure that it is projecting no more than an inch into your pot. The tubing should fit in very tight, without the possibility of it coming out under pressure from the gases.
12) Now we need to run the copper tubing from the pressure cooker on the stove to the sink. At least 3 feet of the copper piping should be left in the sink.
13) To condense the vapor into moonshine, we now need to convert a thermos jug for this purpose. Take a 1 gallon thermos jug with a tap / faucet and remove the tap. Now take the excess copper wire beyond the three feet that is sitting in the sink and coil it by wrapping it around an object multiple times so that it will fit snuggly into the jug. Have an extension of copper wire coming out from where the faucet used to be.
14) During the distilling process the thermos jug will be placed under an open cold tap where the jug will always be filled with cold water, and excess water will flow through the space where the faucet used to be, flowing over the copper extension through this gap.
15) In learning how to make moonshine you will soon notice that after 3 or 4 days the foam on the mash has stopped frothing and being active and you are left with a light golden-brown liquid called still-beer. We will use this to fill up our pressure cooker.
16) Fill the pressure cooker up to only 4/5ths of its capacity, but make sure that you strain it first using either a clean, open-weave tea towel or some cheesecloth.
17) Place the lid on the pressure cooker and heat up the still-beer over a very low heat. Make sure, that at this point you have the water running through your thermos jug and you have a receptacle below the end of the copper tubing to catch the alcohol vapor.
1 Allow at least 1/2 cup of moonshine to accumulate in the cup and then throw it away down the drain. This is a vital step when learning how to make moonshine. NEVER drink this first distill. It is not just paint stripper to your insides, but his highly toxic to your system and you are putting your life in danger by drinking this liquid. People have lost their sight, damaged their organs and worse, even died, from drinking this first distill.
19) After each lot of still-beer in the pressure cooker has been distilled you will be left with about a gallon and a half to two gallons of alcohol known as 'low wines'.
20) What you need to do now, is to re-distill this liquid as it contains too much water. The pressure cooker needs to be rinsed out and dried before we add our low wines back in to the pressure cooker.
21) Again, place over a very low heat and wait for the vapor to emerge. Again we have to throw the first lot of vapor away. About 1/2 cup again. When the first appearance of a white liquid emerges then we know that we are the path to having made our first batch of hopefully, drinkable moonshine!!!
22) However, before we get too excited, what we have made is probably rocket fuel, as it is about 140% proof. What we need to do is to find a hygrometer, and mix enough water with the whiskey to get it down to a more drinkable 100% proof. If you don't have a hygrometer, do it the old fashioned way. Take a quart jar and fill it half with moonshine. Now shake it gently and sit it on a flat surface. If there are bubbles half above and half below the liquid, then you have the right proof.
A final word about learning how to make moonshine, don't be tempted to use plastic tubing to replace the copper tubing as the heat and activities of the distillation process will cause chemicals from the plastic to be leached into your moonshine. Lastly, use your common sense when making this stuff, and adopt safety procedures at all times, knowing that what you are working with is a volatile substance, that needs attention and concentration at all times.
Another trick is to see what coler it burns at, if its green through it out if its blue your good to go