Make Bourbon Whiskey at Home Part I

then it won't kill the enzyme, but at this point when the conversion is already taking place, you won't get any more conversion from starch to sugar, so using hot water releases the sugar from the green

part

, it's a little sticky there and you can see that as you add more water it clears up and thins out a little so limit it a little quicker so I'll check this out later. tonight right now it's mid afternoon as I mentioned before if I was making this at night I just wait until morning and then put in the yeast but if it drains before bed then I'll show you how I chill this with a chiller and then we can add the yeast right away, okay, we're going to cover this just to take care of anything that keeps falling in there and it's not supposed to be there all week, so I've been leaving this bed green. drain now for about 3-4 hours like it's about four hours and I see it's pretty much all drain no you see we're about 18 19 wash leaders so that's awesome.

Wow, what am I going to do now? is to take the temperature of what I wash and see where we are, see if I need to chill it or not, I probably will, check the temperatures around 80 degrees Fahrenheit, which is perfect for putting my yeast in, so I'm very happy to that temperatures have already dropped. Now you can, if I were to relax. I'm this cold here and I'll see if I can show you. I know it works. I'm not going to connect it, obviously, because it's not necessary, but I have a copper coil that has some accessories, I don't really need these accessories.

I have the silicone tube here, so I just push one end in. I simply push a hand towards this cut garden. hose, push it in there and it stays there. I soak this in my wash and then this

part

just sticks in the wash tub and it only takes about ten minutes, five, 10 minutes, it will drop the temperature, you can control exactly what the temperature is. and you can cool it real quick so you can put the yeast in there obviously before you dip it in there I would clean it really good but the sterilizer is there but that's what works now if you want I get this. how you want to

make

one you just get some soft copper you pinch the ends if you don't have a bend to pinch the ends you pinch one end and then you fill it with table salt and then you pinch the open end and then you just wrap it around a cylindrical shape, something that's pretty sturdy, you mess around and then when you have the few coils on, you just cut the ends off, drain the salt, oh, I use table salt because it pours really well. and well, it will fill it with the idea behind that I put table salt or something so that it doesn't collapse when you fold it, then it will be easy to get rid of the table salt when you finish washing take it out or just shake it, it comes out very easy in compared to, say, sand or something, that's how you

make

a cooler, if you want, it's very simple, a couple of flexible hoses, connect it to the tap and that's it, but I don't.

I need it right now because it's already at 80 degrees, which is perfect, so I'm going to put this on the bench and then we'll do it. I will also check the specific gravity before putting in the yeast. I'm going to check the specific gravity. I have that idea, sample tube here and my thermometer to check for alcohol potential, so I'll use this turkey baster. Just pick it up at a hardware store and spend enough time washing the sample tube. Look what, yeah. I don't know what my potential is and if this professional mashing process has been successful and yeah, it looks pretty good, it looks like I have the same kind of potential that I would have with beer or with about six percent alcohol. potential, that's good, the temperature is good, the specific gravities are good and that's it.

I'm going to put some yeast in here, so I'm going to put the yeast in now, so there are different ways to do it, so some will prefer to activate the yeast. I poured it into a jar with warm water but it has sugar in it and then it started working. I'm not going to do that, so I'm going to put yeast in it, if it's normally used for wine, it's called EC 1118. I've had a lot of success with it. It's a low alcohol yeast it's not for the higher alcohol content because we'll only get five and that's it so now all I have to do is wait 72 hours after that for 72 hours and then I can pass it through the still. that means your times have to be taken into consideration if you can't run you're still in three days if you're busy don't start it right because if it lasts longer than 72 I've had some really bad results and I did some research and found out it's called secondary fermentation after Sweeney's brings in some components of the grain that don't taste good and you can't get rid of them, and that's what I say if you have to.

Work with your schedule here, make sure you can run your still within 72 hours so you don't get into that secondary fermentation situation where you'll really ruin the final product that you won't taste like. well, so I keep a log book. I write everything I do in my greedy response identity. I write down how I mash or the specific gravity when I put in the yeast so they keep good track of each batch I make if there is anything. It doesn't turn out as expected. I make an adjustment and then I can measure whether it made a difference or not and keep tweaking my recipe to improve it as I make each one, so see you in three days.

I just thought I'd do it. I'll give you a quick tour, Charlotte, what the grain bed looks like after the liquid has been drained from it, so I just take this stuff and throw it in the backyard in the backyard. I throw them in the garden and they end up in good compost. Apparently the animals like it. eat it, but I don't have any animals, so I'm just going to put it in the compost pile, so this is the batch of attempts to make a

bourbon

here like we discussed, just open it up and just to show you what it should be.

This looks like it's been fermenting for about two and a half days. You see that nice frothy head there and you can almost hear it bubbling a little bit, so as I mentioned, this should ferment well for a pot for no more than three. days, so this is about two and a half days, so tomorrow around noon I'll run it through the still. You don't want it to ferment more than two days or should I say three days shouldn't allow it any longer. more than three days because it will bring some bad flavors and to your finished product in Canada, a quick little sniff of this here, wow, it smells good, don't you love the smell of this stuff, so anyway tomorrow I'll review it in the Still , we'll get back to you because this is the third day since I started fermenting the wash and I'm making my

bourbon

with it.

Yesterday I took a quick video of the second day and there was thick foam. on the top of the surface due to fermentation in a vigorous fermentation, but only one day later, that is quite scattered, it is because the initial fermentation is complete, so now we have to do the next step to distill it, so first nothing, I thought. I'm going to take a specific gravity reading just to determine what the potential alcohol is over the actual alcohol that's in my wash, so I'm going to do that now, so what I have here is my tube that I'm going to put my sample in. and my standard hygrometer to check the specific gravity of my wash, so I'm going to do that right now, so use that.

Go ahead, one of these oven B agitators, as we call it, and get some of that wash out of there until you've got enough. my tube will float longer floating now, so we're looking at our hydrometer, you know, let's focus on it and see where it's floating right around our, he said, let's see where the gyroscope says, that's zero percent, that's what potential is all about. one percent potential or we start at 6 percent potential, there's a math, that means we have about 5 percent alcohol and now we start at 6 percent and end up at 5.5 percent potential. alcohol, so we would have around 18 liters of puree. so 18 times point zero 5 do a little math and you end up with 0.9 so that's point 9 liters or 900 milliliters of pure alcohol in my mash so that's my maximum I'm going to get out of this a a little less than a liter of pure alcohol but then I'll say okay, let's put this on the steel now and see what happens next.

I'm just going to grab my big container here, a lot of mud here at the end, but the only story. The bad thing is that if you burn yourself, it starts to burn the bottom of the pot, but everything will be fine, there you have it. I'll clean up this set of leaders right now, take this and put it in the fire. I'll just show you here. how do I use to get the cooling water from the condenser, still, this is my laundry right under a stove, so I just ran some tech to increase and get to the x-tube step, one is the first supply and the another is successful for additional drainage. and I just plug it in, use some accessories, plug it right into my wash tub faucet and it goes behind the stove where I have mine an evaluation so I can control the water flow and I just have it on. and now it goes to a condenser that comes out through my drain line here, I'm just going to pick this up and give you a little bit of a bitter where they're just draining and these pipes just go up and boom, they go up into the kitchen and behind the stove my wife tells me let me get away with things like those three good guys and that's how I cool so you can wrap it because if your flounder is near your kitchen sink you can cook it in your kitchen sink but that was the case for me so it's how I create my cooling water for the condenser, so I put my still on the stove, it's on the flame and I just wait for it to come up to temperature and it will start to draw the distillate. and in my jar that I have rested on a pot upside down here I will just explain a few things about this still, so it is my 20 liters, the lid is still there, I actually made it up, it used to be a flat lid, but I wanted to have the goal of having a pot style, but I still have a silicone gasket here and it's crucial that if you decide to leave it still, it has to be absolutely tight, any steam that escapes you're just losing alcohol, so I have 2 inch copper column , it's about 2 feet long, run them through a reducer to 1 inch and then I have my temp gauge right near the top and then my lime arm goes down and right here I reduce this from an inch to 1/2 and then here inside we use this again, inside you took quarter inch soft copper and that quarter inch copper runs down into this 3/4 inch hard copper, so that's my capacitor, so that's what happens.

You can see how now I have a series of adapters. that comes out of here a quarter of an inch and then the way it runs right into this into the jar and then the condenser. I explained to you before how I was getting the cooling water from under this kitchen, it's a laundry room that I have. These two PEX lines that I mentioned today and just a standard shut-off valve found under the sink or behind the toilet goes up in supplies cold water to death, the condenser fills up. I must say that the cooling needs a condenser and it just goes up and out. here and then I go out in the rain back to the grass, whatever the basement is, that's how it works, this is what we call a stripping race.

I'm just cutting out all the alcohol a little bit. I'm not worried about cuts or injuries. a particular about separating the good from the bad, the ugly, etc. I'll do it later when I do a spirit run, once I've finished all my batches, four or five batches use all the grain I bought and then We'll do a spirit run, so I'll take another video in a minute and we'll see what it looks like. when it starts to come out distally, so now we see the product here. I just delete it, it's coming out of my still out of the capacitor has a pretty good velocity.

Just if you look at that retention, you can see that there's not a lot of water going through there and then up here with the temperature gauge running at about eighty degrees, so I'm going to run this right away. with a knife and eventually I'll get it right past about 95 degrees. You don't want to do that on a skewer, but I'm removing it, you just want to get all the alcohol out of it, so that's it. I will continue running. By the way, this takes about two hours to get up to temperature until finally the distillates start coming out, it takes about two hours and then it will run for about another two hours, maybe, so make sure you have something to do in the kitchen, so otherwise.

I'm going to get bored so I've been using this for a while yet making my distillate and I have about 1/2 jar of distal 8 here. I'm going to check how much alcohol my pickling distillate has. plant, so what I have here is my sample tube and as they call it, kilometers, this is different than the device that measures specific gravity, it measures the actual alcohol by volume in a liquid, so that's the alcohol ABV of my body, so here we use a funnel so as not to spill anything because we certainly don't want to miss a single drop.

The dropper is a precious thing so we can float. The crews have it good, so I'm looking at this and good.about 40% I'll see if I can get this a little closer. I don't have the cameraman I still have to do this on my own, I'll zoom in and then yeah, that's good, there I see, you see the The water level is just below the water, although yeah, just the last one, about 40%, okay, so back.to the inch here, so Oh, in a little bit, so on the dismount, that's what you're going to get, you're going to get 40 at first and then eventually the naval drop will drop you like between a 15 and 20 percent, we're just trying to get all the alcohol out of our mash and we'll probably end up with about two liters of spirits later, when we make the muscle liquor, you could get a much higher alcohol content, it'll hit 80 proof, low 90 initially, a big difference, this stuff you couldn't taste if I want it to not taste very good, it's got a lot of crap in it, so just once we'll try a little bit of the distillate just to check where Brad is and as the temperature of the still increases, the alcohol percentage and the distal will decrease.

I'll see that as it goes, so you can almost tell by the temperature in the head of this step, and even more so from us, how much alcohol per tentative alcohol is in the distillate, okay, so I finished my extraction analysis of that 18 liter batch. of wash that I had and you can see that I have four full jars of 500 milliliters each, so that's 2 liters and then this last one is approximately 200 milliliters. Now the first jar came out at 40% and gradually reduced the alcohol by volume as the extraction process progressed and finally in the end the last 200 milliliters are running at about 12% so what I do next is throw everything away in a jug, let it mix a little bit and then I taste to see what my average is, so that's what I'm going to do now, so I poured that 2.2 liters of distillation from my stripping directly into this 3 liter jug, I stirred it up a bit, now I'm going to go swimming, my average alcohol was for this stripping session, so I have my commoner here, be careful, it's pretty heavy, I don't want to spill anything and put that in my sample too, we're floating, like this here it goes, what do we die?

I expect about 25 30% that's easy, but there it is about 25% so we have two and a half liters of 2.2 liters at 25% that's what we get from a 18 liter wash and 18 liters so I'm going to put this in with the rest of my extraction rounds. Now I have several. let me take about five or six draw rolls to use a grain sack and then we can do a spirit roll which is a little different. I have to modify my still if you change it to make it new and better. Purer and the product tastes better, yes, so that's the pickling.