List of Partners vendors. Moonshine, the formerly hush-hush, home-distilled liquor of backwoods Appalachia, is still around. In fact, it's now legit. The first legal moonshine distillery in Tennessee opened its doors in , and others followed in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. There are some estimates that more than a million illegal moonshine stills are in operation in the United States, making the production of the clear, high-potency brew more prevalent and widespread now than it has ever been in history.
And, it's potentially very dangerous to make at home due to its ingredients, byproducts, and flammability. Moonshine, also known as "hooch" or "homebrew," is made by fermenting a sugar source to produce ethanol. Traditionally, moonshine is made from a mash of corn and sugar.
The alcohol is separated from the mash by a distillation process. One big difference between moonshine and other liquors like whiskey or bourbon is that moonshine is not aged. Moonshine may conjure up stereotypical images of "country-folk" distilling and transporting their potent potables in jugs branded "XXX" during the middle of the night to avoid detection.
What has changed is that now, the ability to buy commercially produced, all-copper moonshine stills on the internet has taken some of the danger out of the moonshine distilling process. Despite this improvement, that does not mean that all moonshine is safe to drink. Plenty of moonshine continues to be brewed in stills made from automobile radiator parts and other dangerous materials. Moonshine was once an important financial aspect of the Appalachian economy, providing a source of income in bad economic times and in areas where poverty was rampant.
Like any good produced in the U. Moonshine experienced a deep lull when the U. In recent years, moonshine seems to have had a resurgence. Now with the trend for higher prices at the liquor store, especially for imported spirits, moonshining has hit the spotlight again. In , a BBC investigation into moonshining in the United States found that as many as a million Americans were breaking the law by making moonshine.
In the same year, Tennessee started selling legal hooch in big box stores like Walmart and Sam's Club. On the internet, several websites offer stills made of all copper for sale, ranging from 1-gallon personal models to gallon commercial outfits. One seller claimed the demand for his copper stills doubled in recent years and that he had shipped stills to every state in the U.
Illegal moonshine remains dangerous because it is mostly brewed in makeshift stills. It can be dangerous on two levels, both during the distilling process and when consuming it. The distilling process itself produces alcohol vapors, which are highly flammable. Because the production of alcohol without a license is illegal, a moonshine still would commonly be hidden deep within a mountainous region.
Ideally, the moonshine still would be set up near a flowing creek, which would serve as a primitive cooler for the copper tubing. The moonshiner would first mix together a slurry of corn meal, sugar, water and yeast in a large container, then transfer the mixture to the moonshine distiller itself. Once the corn mash has had time to ferment, heat is added to the bottom of the moonshine still. This could be a gas burner or even firewood, but it must be controllable.
The corn mash is carefully heated to the point of vaporization, around degrees Fahrenheit approximately 78 degrees Celsius. The mash is never supposed to reach the boiling point at any time. The vapors from the mash are drawn into the narrow cone at the top of the moonshine still and eventually through the coiled copper tubing. If you add packing to your column, this is the time. Pack your column with the amount of copper packing that is appropriate for your setup.
Again, you can use a cheesecloth or auto-siphon to transfer the mash water into your still without including solid material. The name of the game here is reducing the sediment in your mash water to as close to zero as possible.
Now for the fun part! Distillation is an incredible process. Distillation is the process of separating different chemicals by taking advantage of different evaporation temperatures between the chemicals. This process is not creating alcohol, it is separating it from all of the other substances in your mash water.
You created all of the alcohol during fermentation well, the yeast did. Next, dial up your heat source to high until your still starts producing. Time your drips as they speed up until you reach 3 to 5 drips per second.
Congratulations, you went from researching How to Make Moonshine to making your own moonshine! Never use plastic containers as this can lace your product with BPA among causing other issues. These contain the earliest-evaporating alcohols in your mash water and should never be ingested. Foreshots can contain methanol and should never ever be consumed. Methanol can make you blind among causing other problems.
Collect the foreshots in their own container and throw them out. The heads also contain volatile alcohols like the foreshots. However, rather than causing blindness, the effects are less extreme — like one hell of a hangover.
Like the foreshots, collect your heads in their own containers and throw them out. This is the good stuff, mostly ethanol. At this point you should start losing the harsh, solvent smell present during the heads. The flavor of corn mash moonshine should now be smooth and sweet. This is the stage where skill and experience come most into play.
Isolating your hearts well, while maximizing production of them is a bit of an art. As you reach the end of the ethanol and move into the final stage of your production you hit the tails.
The tails will taste very different from the hearts. The product will begin to feel slippery between your fingers. So, how does a commercial distiller like Ole Smoky make moonshine? They complete the following steps:. Make a mash using grains such as corn or sugar. The specific type of alcohol that commercial distillers seek is called ethyl alcohol. Ethanol is able to be separated from water in a wash because ethanol boils at a lower temperature than water pure ethanol boils at degrees Fahrenheit, while water does not boil until degrees.
In a nutshell, wash is heated up in a still to a temperature above degrees, but below degrees. Ethanol starts to boil and turns into a vapor, separating from the wash water. The vapor is then condensed turned back into a liquid and drips out of the still into a mason jar or some other collection vessel. The overall process of distillation is pretty cut and dry, but it is complicated slightly by the fact that there are several different types of alcohol as well as many additional chemical compounds that will be extracted during the distilling process.
These are known as congeners remember this word, it will come up again and some are desirable in small quantities, while others such as the foreshots are not.
Like ethanol and water, these compounds have different boiling temperatures. How does Absolut make vodka? When making vodka, as many congers are removed as possible because it is supposed to be a very pure, flavorless spirit.
When making whiskey, the congeners are desirable because they add flavor and complexity. However, with the good congeners come some of the bad. One of the reasons that whiskey, like Jack Daniel's, is aged is to smooth out the flavorful, but somewhat harsh congeners present in the final product. Because the various alcohols and chemical compounds in a wash separate at different boiling temperatures, there are several phases of each distillation run: foreshots, heads, hearts, and tails.
During the different phases of a run, a commercial distiller will notice that the taste and smell may vary considerably. Generally, only the "hearts" portion is kept for commercial distribution. The tails are set aside to be distilled again in the future. The foreshots are the first vapors to boil off during distillation.
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