Can you make whisky at home ?
Any tips would be great as I cannot afford to buy Bells anymore and will shortly be reduced to buying Tesco's own.
I need to make it in vast quantities, and have a convenient basement, though don't wish to drown in the stuff, but seek your advice.
I've never home brewed, and am also curious as to if I'll get taxed if I drink all the prophets.
Any advice on Coke would also go down well, as once again, I'm fed up with the cheap rubbish, and now use my credit card wisely.
LOL.
Best Answer - Chosen by Asker
The simple answer is yes you can make it at home, however, to do so is very illegal. It is a fairly simple process and the equipment needed is easily bought.
Most home distillers buy a still (either a pot still or a reflux still), which cost about $500 and are legal to own. That’s because they also serve legal functions, such as purifying water and making essential oils and essences from plants for perfume. Both types of stills work on the same principle: First
the “mash,” or your alcoholic base—for example, fermented apple mush for Calvados or fermented corn for corn whiskey—is heated in a pot. When the ethanol (the “good” alcohol you’re trying to isolate) reaches its boiling point of 78°C (172°F), it turns into vapor that collects in another part of the still. As the ethanol vapor cools, it returns to a liquid state. That liquid is your homemade spirit.
On average, five gallons of mash produce about a gallon of 150-proof liquor, which, using the type of small pot still favored by urban enthusiasts, can take as long as three hours.
How Dangerous Is It?
Hootch hobbyists insist that distilling’s dangerous reputation is based on misinformation, or on unsafe backwoods practices they know better than to employ. The common perception is that stills often blow up, or that it’s easy to accidentally produce poisonous liquor that can make you go blind.
“I got my start distilling in my garage at home, and I had these fears,” says Lance Winters, now head distiller at the commercial artisanal distillery Hangar One, in Emeryville, California. “But if you have a lick of common sense, you’re not risking life and limb.”
Methanol, or wood alcohol, a byproduct of distillation along with ethanol, can cause blindness if drunk in massive quantities. But, as Winters and other commercial distillers point out, methanol boils at a lower temperature than ethanol does. This means that home distillers can easily cut a lot of methanol from their end product simply by monitoring the temperature of the mash and dumping the still’s first flush of booze (known in spirits-making parlance as “the heads”), which contains mostly methanol.
“When you buy moonshine from some guy in the mountains, he’s not cutting out the heads,” speculates Erenzo. “The legendary blindness, if it even exists, is the result of drinking impure alcohol.”
Most stills are not highly pressurized pieces of equipment. The hazard is mainly in using a gas burner or other open flame as the heat source (as did backwoods distillers during Prohibition). Like smoking a cigarette at a gas station, exposing an open flame to ethanol creates the risk of explosion. (When touring the Woodford Reserve bourbon distillery in Kentucky, visitors are asked not to use flash, in the unlikely case it could ignite alcohol fumes.) But many popular stills these days plug into an electrical outlet.
“The way most stills blew up in the old days was, the revenuers would cram sticks of dynamite under them,” says Winters.
The biggest risk to high-end home distillers is getting caught. Although busting moonshiners isn’t the concern of local and federal authorities that it once was, there are still serious ramifications if you do get caught: Illegal distilling carries a potential 10-year prison sentence, and if the accused used his house as home base for the crime, it can be subject to civil forfeiture. Last year, there were three federal indictments for illegal liquor production. A spokesperson for the Tax and Trade Bureau refused to discuss details of the cases pending trial. But a Department of Justice press release revealed that one indictment was the result of an undercover sting of a father-son duo allegedly producing and selling whiskey illegally in Missouri. The other two cases were also in the South.
Still, for many hobbyists, these cases belong to a world that feels far removed.
“I know it’s illegal, but so is smoking pot, and people do that all the time and don’t get busted,” says Cameron Black, 26, from Reno, Nevada. Black works in the mortgage industry and has been making rum for the past five years, which he brings to Burning Man and drinks with his campmates at sunset. “I worry about it, but I don’t let it get in the way.”
Many high-end home distillers stress the fact that they’re not out to make money, but rather to further the culinary arts. This appears to make them feel they are standing on higher moral ground—and a safer higher ground.
“You’re allowed to do all sorts of crazy things in this country. I’m allowed to smoke a cigarette before I get on a plane and go bungee jump,” says Andrews, the brandy maker from Manhattan. But it’s illegal for him to make a little glass of brandy with notes of peach and cherry. “There are a huge raft of people who just want to make something delicious. Is that a crime?”
As for Coke, I am hoping you are referring to the soft drink, as to if you can make it at home, you could if you had the recipe as well as the proper ingredients, but the recipe is a tightly held company secret, all you know is it is a blend of citric flavors and sugar, coloring and carbonated water. Without the proprietary recipe, forget getting to make anything like it at home.
