Home Distiller

I've done it plenty of times, with good results all around. I've done a few nut brown ales that turned out great. I even did 60 cans of PBR that came out surprisingly good, with a slight pear flavor to it. I brought it to a BBQ that weekend and it was not only gone almost instantly, I still get aske...

In my meager experience, I've discovered that if you really want to test the flavor of the wood you don't want to char it. Give it a nice toast, but the char flavor tends to overpower the subtle nuances of the wood - at least in the short term.

I've done it before - soak oak sticks in sherry, port, and rum so that I could simulate aging in those barrels. What I found is that it wasn't really giving me enough control over the flavors. If you're simulating on aging in port casks then why not simulate the port-soaked oak? Instead I just oak t...

I've tried red oak, plum, maple, and pecan (in addition to the regulars: french oak, white oak, etc). As a really fun experiment to get the taste of just the wood, I filled a bunch of jars with neutral liquor at 35%, then stuck a stave of each (one toasted heavy, one light) into different jars. Then...

I make a Strawberry Cheesecake with equal parts cranberry juice and vanilla vodka.

I guess I over looked the peated barley. The honey had me to cornfused. I would highly suggest you do take a look around about using honey. It isn't gona give you what you think. And its a very slow fermenter. Very slow. Yeah, honey is super slow. I make mead and it can take months to fully ferment...

I would also dump the turbo yeast. I used it in the beginning, and even neutral liquor was horrible from it. The only thing Turbo saves you is a couple days of waiting. If you want to do a run on Saturday, then instead of dumping Turbo on Thursday dump baker's yeast on Monday. You'll get MUCH better...

Out of curiosity I tried this, just to see how it would filter. I smashed up 3 bananas and let them sit in a couple mason jars with some neutral for a week. The colander/paper towel trick worked beautifully. It filtered it out to a nice, clear, slightly yellow liquid with no pulp or fibers. I even p...

You're wrong bub. It did explode and it boomed loud enough to scare the shit out of the dogs in the next room. Try this, fill a pint mason jar with 185 proof straight from the still. Put it in a 1200 watt microwave for 2 minutes then shake it a little and tell me how ridiculous it is. :roll: Well, ...

The very first stuff I aged on wood I put WAY too much in, and I didn't toast it long enough. Tasted like what drinking a campfire through a wood straw must have tasted like. With oaking it's best not to get into a rush. A little less for a longer period is the trick. The excitement comes in seeing ...

A little rude don't you think? It's not a stupid question. And the reason its dry is not because it has a little less water in it. Duh. :roll: I would try dropping the ABV for aging. And see what that does for you. I like mine aged at 55%. Better the 65%. I think he meant his own question was stupi...

Before I started nuking it I used an old microwave I had in storage and microwaved a 55 proof rye in a mason jar for 15 minutes non-stop, just to see what kind of danger we were looking at. I did it 3 times in a row until the microwave overheated and shut down for about 10 minutes. The first round t...

Out of curiosity I took maple planks and toasted them in the oven (400 degrees uncovered for 2 hours), then tossed them in some white rye whiskey. I did 3 rounds of nuking/freezing. It came out pretty good. Definitely has a distinct maple background flavor, but doesn't taste like alcoholic syrup lik...

I use cotton rounds sitting in a filter. Works great on thick liquors like Limoncello. The other thing I do is to put a strainer over a bowl, line it with a paper towel, then let it drain through that. The extra surface area makes it really fast. http://homedistiller.org/forum/download/file.php?id=2...

This has become my new standard. I have 10 gallons of a whiskey blend I made up that was a little young with only about 3 months on oak. I pulled half of it and did 3 runs through the microwave (spent about a day doing it). Then poured it back into the carboys with the rest. I let it sit for a few d...

After all that work it seems a waste to use Turbo Yeast. I used it in the beginning too after having read a lot of great reviews on it. Then, after running it, I couldn't figure out why I was getting such a horrible taste. Tried again, same thing. Finally I followed the same recipe but used bread ye...

The limoncello was so popular that I decided to try lime and orange. Following the same process I made a big batch of each. They turned out great, and the orange muffins were phenomenal. Incidentally, the wife liked the flavor but not the texture. So I decided to filter it out for her, but wanted a ...

Y'all are nicer than me. :lol: Even if it's for something innocent I usually don't explain why I'm buying stuff. Cashiers always seem to want to make conversation about what I have in my cart. I usually start with a polite head nod and smile, but making a point that I'm ignoring the question. If the...

Does that article scare the shit out of anyone but me? "The scientists aim to redesign parts of the yeast genome so that it can perform functions that are not possible naturally." No thanks. "There are fears that synthetic life forms could escape into the wild and spread uncontrollab...

I've soldered brass and copper together successfully plenty of times now, but the surfaces have to be clean. Here's what I'd recommend: 1. Clean, clean, clean, clean. If it isn't as clean as you can get it you're likely to end up with it falling apart. 2. Be liberal with the flux, and heat it up for...

How much time did you give it? I've had plenty of bottles cloud up as I'm diluting and bottling, but then by the next day they're not cloudy at all. Any that are usually clear up after oaking and filtering.

When I needed 4l jugs I bought a ton (15 gallons worth) of Carlos Rossi wine, then distilled their wine into brandy. I'm jealous you have access to all that free wine! For the first run I just ran the wine as-is, without diluting. For the spirit run I just did the normal around here of diluting it d...

All I get at my job is a gut and office chair ass.

I made some of this, then adapted it to make a Jamaican rum cream recipe that also turned out amazing. Both of these were helped quite a bit by adding about 1/4 cup of milk to the recipe. It not only thinned it out a bit so it wasn't like straight cream, but it also helped bring out quite a bit of f...

Straining this out was rough. Got a little of the curds in the cheesecloth, and instead ended up using paper towels. I basically filled up the funnel with the paper towel in it, let it drain, then squeezed the curd out into a bowl. Then repeated until I was done. When I got to the very end I poured ...

Andy Capp wrote:http://allrecipes.com/recipe/fresh-orange-juice/

Then add shot of vodka, ice is optional

haha, zymotk, what goose is getting at is this.... Sweet yellow corn is 6% sugar. So thats 0.24lbs sugar in 4 lbs. In 2 gallons of water that will make an SG of 1.0055 or an ABV of 0.71% If you distill that out fully, and take 50% after cuts you will collect 0.91 ounces of proof alc, or about 2 oz ...

That's a beautiful color! May go pick up some red oak myself and try it out.

I agree with what y'all are saying. I also think it'd be pointless only because you can't control what/how much you're putting into the coil. I think it might fill up too much if it was flat on its side. Tilting it might make it work, but I agree you'd probably be smearing like crazy.

Reading through this thread made me think about low spots in a worm. Basically a thumper is one really big low spot (in some cases with 1 - 2 liters of fluid providing resistance). Not that I'm planning on doing this, but for curiosity's sake could you just turn your worm horizontal instead of verti...