Sweet Potato Vodka

[dragon9874]

I can remember playing with sweet taters.
But I don't remember how well it worked.

ha!! i get it... i'll continue my research and get back to you in a few months... gonna try both the canned sweet-tater first tho, just 'cause it's easier, that'll be my baseline.

[Squirrel_Ess_Gen]

I used some in a whiskey that has yet to be separated. Used canned and fresh....

I'm curious for an update.

[MihiT]

We have "kumara" here which are a native "sweet potato" (though not of the solanum species)
By themselves they'll ferment out to a 3-4% beer.

I did a "sunday roast" whiskey with corn and kumara and it ended up about 14% wash, where my calcs were only destined to yield 4-6%.
so there must have been some enzymactic conversion happening in there.
No idea how to replicate it though

[DasBeast007]

I love and hate this post. This one started my search for a sweet tater recipe. It led to reading research papers about the "diastase in sweet potato" and "Scarification & Fermentation of..." It caused me to buy 50 slips last year for planting and to spend the better part of November harvesting the resulting 50-ish + pounds of sweet taters. Thank this site for UJSSM to get me through those 7 months.

They sat for a month "sweetening". Evenings after work were spent slicing/dicing/shredding them for additional surface area; even managed to slice fingers at times. I fought off pie makers, Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays protecting those sweet spuds. Finally when it was time to make natural tater sugar, I held them at temp on the stove, tried dehydrating some slowly at low heat and even roasting in the oven at a lower heat. My experience required holding them in water between 145-150F in excess of 4-5 hours until they passed the iodine test. Some sat on simmer overnight with a remote meat thermometer in the bedroom to set off a high-temp alarm. Sadly the roasted flavor doesn't seem to have carried over.

When the day finally came to fill my 30 gal fermenter, I swore I didn't want to see another tater. In the end we stripped the fermenter and stored the low wines. I did break down and run an additional 6-gallon batch, stripped it just a few weeks ago and put everything back together for a spirit run. Cuts came out fairly good though I want to run it through once more to clean the flavor up...very floral if you dip to far in the tails. The jar of "hearts" I kept came out pretty tasty for a whisky, just not quite the tater vodka I'm after. Yet.