Shining copper.
Moonshine, my lovely moonshine. A hobby that I started 20 years ago. Never finished. I still have about 80% of all the copper kettle parts in my cellar. About time to rejuvenate this hobby. All missing parts can now easily be purchased from the internet. Mind you, I studied three books. I call myself a home made expert (theoretically, kind of).
I was triggered by this Hillbilly movie. You just have to see the first few minutes to see what I mean.
Home made alcohol from the Apelaches has many names;
- Moonshine
- White Lightning
- Brown Mule
- Painters Piss
- Who Shot Sally
I already have a copper kettle of 80 liters. It's from an old boiler. All tubes and piping is there. Just solder them together. I still need a thermometer to distinguish between ethyl- and methyl alcohol. At first you get some poisonous methyl alcohol from the distilling process. It boils a few degrees sooner than the ethylalcohol that we want.
First you ferment corn, sugar, water, tasty fruits and yeast in a few jerrycans. It will have around 10% alcohol. You then fill the 80 litre kettle with max. 60 liters and slowly boil the brew. The alcohol vapors will cool down in the piping and it will drip in your jar. Theoretically you can get 6 liters of alcohol. That's 18 liters of Sally's, about 25 bottles.
Then you can repeat the distilling process. From the first pass you'll get about 70~80% of alcohol with a lot of tasty stuff from the fermented brew. In the second pass it will be over 90% with less tasty stuff. In Dutch we call that 'dubbel gestookt'.
Then you must put spices, herbs and fruits in the 90% alcohol and let it stay for a few days or so. There are many recepies. To make it drinkable you then have to dilute the alcohol with water, fruit juice or a mix of both. Maybe even some of Sally's Piss.
I'm not going to quote all the books that I've read, I'm just blogging this to re-dig myself into a hobby that I left 20 years ago. First I will finish my moped, then I will pick up Sally. There are still some to-do's in this project.
- make a kettle-column connection
- tin the inside of the column
- solder all piping together
- mount a thermometer on top
- make a heating stand under the kettle
Stay tuned, happy new-year and God bless you.
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