How To Make Potato Vodka

Today we are going to take the humble tata from Brussels, you know, boil it, mash it, put it in the stew and we will turn it into

vodka

, regards, guys, how are you doing? I hope you're having an amazing week. I'm Jesse and this is still the case and today yes, today we are finally making

potato

vodka

, so let's not beat around the bush, we're going to jump right into this and the first thing I want to talk about is the selection of

potato

es because it turns out that this is something important. That potatoes aren't the biggest source of starch on the face of the planet, they're just not that dense, so you'll want to choose the most starch dense potato you can, now you can get more technical about this. and look up all the potatoes that are available to you, find out that you know the starch content, the percentage of starch and go from there, but a basic idea is that the flourier and fluffier the potato, the higher its starch content, so at least I want to go out and find a potato that is sold as a roast potato because roast potatoes are the ones that are crispy on the outside, fluffy in the middle, the higher the starch, I'm using potatoes okay, we're using 20 kilos, this is I'm going to do a 50 liter wash and about 2 liters of vodka 90.

Now you can peel the potatoes to prepare them, but it turns out that a lot of the flavor of the potatoes actually comes from the skin. I like the taste, so I'm not going to do it. Instead, I'll peel them, simply brush them, and throw them in the pot. Any potatoes that are really disgusting, I'll just destroy them. It's not worth keeping them. Things that have small imperfections. I simply cut out the imperfections and wax the rest. the pot once the 20 kilos of potatoes are prepared I put about four liters of water in the bottom of the pot I am not covering the potatoes I am just covering the bottom of the pot then we go out to the shed and we are turning on the gas to steam these potatoes.

Put the lid on and let them cook for about 45 minutes, making sure you don't run out of water. I just checked the potatoes and they are delicious and tender. I guess you would say that they break relatively easily, so the next job is of course to break these things and the reason I steamed them instead of just boiling them was because I only have this little tool to break, which which is obviously kind. unsuitable and I thought it would be easy to crush if there wasn't hot liquid everywhere. Once the potatoes are mashed, add another eight liters of water and begin mixing.

I found it easier to use a big old mash paddle. along with the masher to do the rest of the work now I have 20 kilos of potatoes, the starch has been gelatinized so it will be accessible to the enzymes once we do it and honestly you could use it, you know, you could use bottled enzymes. If you want, I'll use barley because I have some on hand and I feel like this is, I don't know, I feel like this is a recipe where I don't want to take things out of a Bottle and put it in.

I just want to do it naturally. I hate when people say that, but in this case, for some reason, it means something to me, so I have five and a half kilos of barley there and I'm going to add this very, very, very slowly and I'm going to stir it a lot so it doesn't mix. form grain balls, everything does not accumulate and everything is accessible to the liquid so that the enzymes can do their work. I'm going to push this pot to the limit. I hope I can fit it all in. We will soon find out.

Normally, when I'm mashing grain, I do it directly at mash temperature. Barley converts so well these days that the idea of ​​a stepped mash isn't necessary in my opinion, but since we're using potatoes today, we're going to do a pseudo step mash to help utilize different enzymes in the whole package. of enzymes that comes in barley, that's why we add cold water. before, so now we are sitting at about 40 degrees Celsius. I'm going to turn the gas back on, turn it down, and slowly bring the screen temperature to 63 degrees Celsius once we reach 63 degrees. Celsius we can put the lid back on the pot, insulate the pot and let it sit for a whole hour because we did this with potatoes and not just barley.

I decided I wanted to do a starch test to

make

sure everything turned into the mash during that hour, if you want to learn how to do a starch test click on the video in the top right corner. Once you've passed the starch test, let your wash cool to 25 degrees Celsius and pinch some liquid off the top to see its original gravity, then you can pitch in the yeast. I'm just using baker's yeast and I'm putting in three tablespoons of this. Plenty of yeast, cover the pot again and ferment, ideally at about 25 degrees Celsius if you can.

Temperature controls very well, if not, simply find a warm part in your house to keep it for about a week. This mashed potato washes that thing down. It's been fermenting for eight days and is a little bitter, which is great. Now the problem is. I'll be honest with you, if you are doing this at home, one of the biggest problems you will have is trying to separate the solids from the liquid if you don't have a still that can support the distillation in it. grain now, one tip I'll give you is you can get one of those mop buckets, you know, the ones with the big levers and a drink in a bag or even a pillowcase or something that you can put the mash on.

Put it in the bucket, squeeze it, scoop it up at the bottom, you know, scoop out the grains, go ahead, I'm not going to do that today, you know why? Because I'm a dirty cheater. I'm a dirty cheater. and I have an oil jacketed still, so I can dump everything right into the pot and not have to worry. I know this still seems a little crazy, but in essence it works as a simple still at this time, the only one. What I'm taking advantage of all of this is the fact that it has an oil jacket, which means I can throw everything in there without burning, so it's just a simple pot that's still down there, in the pot, the mash is boiling and steam comes out. the column through the line arm and into the condenser over here for those of you who are not used to this stuff or are new to the channel or new to distillation.

I'm running this as a pull test, I'm doing everything fine. Now it is the first distillation, as I said, it is a distillation test and we are doing it to collect the low wines. These things here, once we're done, I'll go and put them in another still, so give me some. I will eventually finish this tour and we will collect all the basses and place them in the next still. Now we are approaching the end of the tour and people always ask me how far the lines are. I go out stripping and honestly, guys, it's up to you, basically, how much time you have versus how thrifty you want to be with what's in the pot, what's in the still, I like to go down to at least 20. go down to 20 almost all the time and with something like this, because I'm trying to get as much alcohol as possible for the next race, I'm going to go down to, they would say, at least 10 percent. and we'll see where we go from there.

Yes, I could be using a parrot, but no, no. I know this is a vodka video and generally for vodka what you want to do is distill it to the max. abv, you can clean it up as much as you can, but I've been trying this stuff that comes out of the spout around here and I'm actually enjoying the flavor in it, there's a really interesting dirt to it, it's like the skin of a potato, funnily enough. enough and it's weak, it's not overpowering and it's not at all disgusting, I actually quite like it, so I'm going to run it through four plates in my still, so that'll be four plates of bubbles, eh, instead of running it at full reflux if you dont do it. you know the words I'm talking about, if you don't understand what I'm talking about, I understand, I don't want to go into it now because it's another whole 10 minutes of conversation, but I'll put some videos here. to help me understand it, if that doesn't

make

any sense ask some questions in the questions below.

I'll be sure to hit the comments after the first day of this video being posted and respond as many as possible. I can, there are also a ton of other people in this community who will help you with the questions below, so if you have any questions, feel free to ask guys who have been around forever, you know, be nice, be nice. So once these low winds have finished building up, I'm going to place them on my other still image and again, guys, I'm doing this to show you multiple different things. You don't have to use different still images like this, you can just use them.

Same thing yet, I'll have to try it for two reasons: one is that in the home distilling community we like to not put anything over 40 abv in the kettle, it's a safety issue, so I'm going to try it up to at least 40 but also I'm going to have a problem with the volume. I need enough volume to completely cover the elements in my still, so I use enough water to overcome those elements and then we can prepare for the next run. So we loaded the still, added some filtered water to get over the elements, uh, and now I've run the still for a while to balance all the plates, I slowly purged about four shots at the beginning and now.

I have adjusted the still to run a little faster and start collecting the main part of the race, so right now we are collecting heads, soon we will be in the hearts and money part of the race, now I understand. There's a lot going on here and, to be honest, we don't have time to explain exactly how to execute it. You know, if you want to know more about that, please watch this video up here. that talks about how I use my silver still and what happens inside the still. I will check back with you when we have solidly reached the hearts on the pointed end of the still that we are collecting from the spout and I am collecting in several small jars and the reason is that I want to be able to select later which parts of the race I keep and which I don't, so As they fill up, change them and place a new one. and it just means that once the run is done, I can go back and select exactly what I want.

I can make the cuts the way I want to make the cuts and keep what we want to keep, leave the other things out because it just doesn't taste good and since I know there are people out there they'll want to know what's coming out right now. The alca meter says 90, it's probably a little cold, so maybe 91 92 something like that, but I'm happy with the result. We are now far enough along in the race where we are starting to hit colas, the alcohol is going down slightly, the taste has become horrible, it tastes like nasty ass, wet cardboard, wet dog, nasty, earthy, nasty, which we don't want in the race, but I'm going. keep picking it up because I can save this stuff and put it in the fainting jar and use it again later, once I'm done, we'll jump on the bench, mix it up and, uh, I'll try, you know, let's try it next to the tomato paste wash and we'll see how it adds up.

I've spent the last 15 minutes going over them and having a nice little evaluation of each of them. Basically this is At the beginning and end of the run, it started out smelling fruity and almost oily, which is pretty interesting, but it's super patchy on the top end here, next to this bottle, it's clean and almost identical up to this point here where the tail started coming in, yeah, down there it's a wet, itchy, super moldy dog, but a little more grassy than that, so we're definitely not going to keep this one, we're going to get rid of it. it's interesting to me, it's heading towards that flavor but it's not there yet and it has a lot of potato flavour, it reminds me of the flavors I look for in a whisky, funnily enough, so we're going to get rid of these two, we'll definitely stick with these four, so I'm going to throw them right in now and what I like to do when I can't decide on something like this is make some tincture, so what I want to do is basically put four parts of the which I have, half of this because that's the approximate ratio that the test will be, go back down to about 40, interesting, okay, I like it, but I don't like it that much.

So what I'm going to do is put in half of this. If you were trying to make a super clean, you know, heading towards a much more neutral flavor profile, you would want to add things like this, but the beauty. of this hobby is that you do what you want, you do things how you want. I like the flavor. I'm always looking for flavor. We're going to try some of this and we'll have it along with some tpw for those of you who I don't know, tbw means tomato paste wash, it's a vodka that I made a while ago, once again, video card up here, if I There's something left, my word, I've used this video a lot, but I thought it would be really interesting to try them side by side and I'm sure you guys at home would be interested too.

The TPW smells like sugar. I feel like I could taste this blind and tell you it comes from sugar that potato vodka doesn't have. Although it is quite curious, what it does have is an interesting earthy aroma of potato skin on the nose. I admitwhich probably won't be everyone's cup of tea, but I actually quite like it. I'd be very interested to see what we could do with this. I have to say the first thing that comes to mind is some sort of strange, extravagant gin, what makes me think? How about a roast lamb gin? I don't know, literally, rosemary.

A little lamb fat and then gin stuff. I don't know, it makes me want to do weird things, so the biggest difference for me is the mouthfeel. It has a slippery but penetrating mouthfeel. It has a smooth, almost oily but very light mouthfeel when you put this in your mouth. it feels like it soaks your tongue and it kind of attacks your tongue when you put this in your mouth, it feels like it coats your tongue, it's velvety on your tongue, but then, um, it evaporates and you feel it more in your sinuses . I want to talk about a couple other interesting things about this stuff, but before I do I need to give a big shout out to the patreons.

Thank you so much guys, I can't do this without you, uh, I'm so screwed. I was lucky in 2020 to be able to play with this stuff in my shed and it's my job. I don't know, I don't know how I got this lucky, but thank you guys so much, a big part of that is because of you patreons. Thanks, the last thing I wanted to talk about is efficient potatoes, you might assume that they are a very dense source of starch, but hey, I did, I must admit that before I heard about these things, it turns out that they are actually not that , from 20 kilos. of potatoes and there were five kilos of grain, they gave me two liters and that's not horrible, but imagine if it were 25 kilos of grain, that volume would be much larger, it's a lot of effort, it's complicated, it takes more time than other types of vodka, but it produces a different result, so if that's what you guys like, I have to say I really have to say it would be fun for you to try it at home.

If you have tried it at home, please send a message. comment in the comments section below, tell me if you got a similar result to what I have here, tell me if you did it differently for those who haven't tried it, make sure to come down and check out those comments because you're going to get some tips and ideas interesting there too. I hope you found it interesting. If so, please guys give it the thumbs up. That helps me enormously if you are not yet a subscriber and do want to dedicate yourself to the art of home distilling.

Make sure you hit the subscribe button below the video and have an amazing week guys, I'll see you next time, keep pursuing the craft, see you around.