Ok some of you know that I have a problem when it comes to testing the waters, either I jump in or I’m not interested. Years ago I made my own beer and wine but due to health concerns I thought it better to back off making 7 cases of beer at a time or thirty bottles of wine. But there is one thing that I have always wanted to get into and that was hard liquor. Unfortunately in Canada you can not run a still even for home use, not like New Zealand, those lucky dogs.

Well I had been doing some reading and there are some new products out there that will allow you to increase the alcohol level to some pretty interesting levels. For those of you who do not have a brewing history alcohol is a by-product of fermentation of sugar from yeast. Depending on your mash depends on what you get, potatoes make vodka, grains make whiskey and my favourite barley makes beer. Well the yeast eats the sugar and gives you gas and alcohol, yum. The problem at certain levels the alcohol will kill the yeast, (boooo) so there is a limit of what you can produce without distilling. To get any higher you need to heat the mash and extract the alcohol at a certain temperature. Too low of a temperature and you get methanol, this is the stuff that make you go blind. Distillers throw the "head" away to ensure the next stage is ethanol. However you do not want pure ethanol as that will give you alcohol poisoning if you consume too much. All of these issues, scare people away from what we refer to as moonshine.

Did I mention a new product that I found; it is what the industry refers to as super yeast. By using the typical beer making equipment and methods we can convert our mash to twenty-five litres of 20% alcohol. Hey thats liquor percentages… Liquor did I say, why yes. When adding extracts we were able to make a dozen or so different types of our favourite flavours.

   

We also decided to charcoal filter the base product so that we got an even smoother finish. Here’s the thing, the cost was $1.00 a litre for our alcohol and $5.00 a litre for our liquors. The most expensive thing was the bottles. 

We tried out the following; (from left to right)

40 Proof Alcohol
Jamacian Rum
Apricot Brandy
Peach Schnapps
Coconut Rum
Triple Sec
Swiss Chocolate Almond
Italiano
Orange Brandy
Sambuca
Mexican Coffee

I will passing these around for comments, but if it‘s anything like my thoughts Wha hooooo. I may have to look into this a little more.

Crap there goes my liver.....


Cheers from the Big Dog.... it's going to be a festive New Years