Home Distiller

Get a pack of certo and read the recipes for the type of fruit you have. That should give you a ball park figure of the amount of sugar. When I make jelly from grapes, its 7 cups of sugar to 4 cups of juice. Lots of pectin in jelly... I would probably water it down, boil it, let it cool, and add som...

I had a turkey fryer pot that I left outside in the carport after cooking a turkey. Of course, then comes thanksgiving and xmass and I forgot about the pot. Sometime around April I noticed a ring of grease around the pot's base. I picked it up and there was a small puddle of turkey grease under the ...

I was on here a while back under another name but screwed something up with an email change. I decided to let it go as that user name I have used other places, and wanted a "home distillers only" name. admin edit all posts have been changed to new name I started getting interested in disti...

My first still was a 6 quart modified pressure cooker with a 1/4" copper worm. I know, i know...pressure cookers=bad. I learned the hard way before I found this board. It took a LOT of stripping runs before I had enough to do a small spirit run. My second was a 16 quart pressure cooker running ...

I have plenty more grapes.... Im going to try again. I saw another post on these forums mentioning holding back some wine, doing the strip run, then adding the wine back to the still for the spirit run to add flavor. Muscadines smell so good and have such good flavor, I really want that to come thro...

My first still test was with wine. I just bought a gallon bottle of the cheapest stuff I could find and ran it. It was horrible, the smell would curl your nose hairs and it tasted worse. We poured it down the drain, but it was proof of concept. I've read that the grapes that make good cognac are alm...

Well here's how it went: I let the muscadine juice sit on the skins for five days. I strained out the juice and put it in a carboy for a week, and it was still going at a decent rate. I noticed some of the grapes didn't get crushed before, so I stomped them out again. I added 4 gallons of water and ...

I tried apple cider last year from some leftover Arkansas blacks and granny smiths. Fermented for a week and ran it. Didn't have much apple flavor in the end. I wound up at around 130 proof after making cuts, and decided just to use apple juice to proof down to around 80. Still not much apple flavor...

Thanks.. I'll do a search. Muscadines seem so easy but I keep messing up fruits. I've done a pretty decent sugar run, and some scotch that I really was pretty proud of, but these damn grapes I'm seem to take issues with.

Coming from a wine background I've tried muscadine brandy once, the wrong way. Previously: I made wine with added sugar to increase the alcohol to around 12%, and added sulphites as per the winemaking recipe. Later when I didn't like the wine I uncorked it, poured into the still and ran it. Not much...

Ahhhhh thanks. Now I need some copper salts...

Was using my wine making experience as a starting point. Essentially I'm just making peach wine... Then distilling it, right? I had learned the tablets were for killing wild yeast, so that only your chosen variety of yeast survives and thrives. Hope I didn't screw it up! At this point I have $15 in ...

Okay I froze my peaches and thawed them. Pits removed and had daughter stomp on them much like squashing grapes. Finished with a mixer. I've got approximately 5% potential alcohol in a 6 gallon bucket. Seems a little small to me, maybe the peaches weren't as ripe as I thought. Added Campden tablets ...

I made a single malt using store bought two row malted barley and peated malt. I think I used too much peated barley, I used 50/50 peated to non, and it has a strong smokey taste. It's only about three months old. I wasn't that happy with the quantity, for what I paid for all that barley I got a rea...

My first try at anything was a sweet feed mash. Smelled great in the bucket. I found the feed at tractor supply co. Mashed for a week and threw in still. Didn't know about the whole two runs thing at the time so we cut out the heads and just kept the middle of the run. Tasted fine and smelled like c...

I did a seven gallon sugar wash a while back. I agree, the heads and tails were much harder to cut than scotch, for example. I went much wider with the cuts than with my scotch. The sugar was very productive, too. I started at around 16% potential alcohol instead of around 10% with grapes or apples....

Went to the peach farm today. I have a big box of peaches in the corner now. They're "seconds" which means they are bruised or scraped or over/under ripe. I want to turn them into brandy. I've made wine before so I know about the fermentation of fruits... I've done apple brandy from apples...

I wound a 1/4" tubing coil around a 1 gallon paint can, using about 15 feet of tubing. If you go slow and easy and bend it around a form like another can, it's less likely to kink. I built three wood slats with holes in them to hold the spacing right. The whole thing sits in a five gallon plast...

So here's the deal, I'm going on a cruise pretty soon. They prohibit you bringing alcohol on board except for a bottle of wine. I have a corker, some used store bought wine bottles, and a lovely batch of strawberry panty dropper that's a pretty red wine color. Does anyone see a problem here? I can g...

Of all the potential world ending disasters that's the only one I find really scary. Asteroids? Meh, climate change? We can adapt, disease? We could use a new plague or two, but the Supervolcano? Holy crap... If that thing goes the Midwest will be covered in ash, there will even be ash close to an i...

I would love to try this... There's a local peach farm that sells the culls cheaply. I don't think I'd have any problem filling up my 7 gallon fermenter with peaches, water and sugar.

Sounds like a good experiment for when the peaches come in!

Hell, if I wanted to do that, I'll stick jars in the attic during the summer. 150 degrees seems about right!

I used to build electronics in my youth. Holding solder (the good old fashioned lead based stuff for circuits) in my mouth was nothing. I even would cut off lengths by biting it. Being near sighted I would hover right over it while soldering, breathing in those fumes. I'm not worried about what may ...

Got a jar of SPD ready to go. After filtering out the strawberry bits and such and diluting with distilled water, it's some mighty tasty and pretty stuff. I have muscadine panty dropper too. It's color is nicer but it's not as tasty. They didn't give up as much sugar syrup. Great recipe! Added a lit...

I make wine in the house. At peak I had two five gallon car boys and a 7 gallon bucket bubbling away. Not dead yet. I wouldn't worry about the CO2. I'd be more worried about the funky smell and pissing off the wife (although when I fermented apples for wine the house smelled like apple pie for a wee...

Wouldn't whatever is in the plumbing aisle at lowes be fine? I mean if it's safe for use soldering copper water pipes, why would anything be harmful in there?

I guess the real risk would be exploding stills or leaks putting alcohol vapors in the air. My friend runs his still on the electric stove. It's a stock pot still with a worm in a five gallon bucket. He doesn't have a garage and has neighbors, so it's inside or nothing. He has run it many times with...

Working on my own... His works well but is a pain. He's got a big pot and lid. The gasket has worn out once already and he uses these screw clamp things that are tough to get on and off. I'm looking at pressure cookers. Put lid on and turn.

I had some grape juice do the same thing. I tried flavoring and proofing down some 130 proof spirit with grape juice I made from muscadines. When the juice hit the jar, within seconds the juice formed a jelly like mass. My theory was unfiltered grape proteins were clumping together, after all I was ...

Should have started here. I got into this distilling thing almost by accident. I have lots of grapes available to me and decided to make wine. About the same time a friend of mine made a stovetop pot still just to see if he could get it to work. He tried the sweet feed recipe and was telling me abou...