Home Distiller

i am new to this and never made a mash before, ive read the home site but my ADD kicks in after a new min and well i didn't get much from it except the main points, well some of them . im building a reflux still so not looking for a lot of flavors just making a high proof natural sprite. where i'm at all i have places to buy stuff is super walmart and CVS. i just am looking for something simple and easy. I don't mind ordering some of the essentials off a site like DAP and stuff, but rather buy it at the store just cause its easer. I've looked at the tired and true recipes but most have stuff i've never heard of or i have no clue where to get them from. so if anyone could help me out some that would be great.

Use the Gerber or the All Bran recipe. They are in the "Tried and True" section.

The cereal has all the nutrients you need and can be purchased quite easily at nearly any grocer.

Generic substitutions work quite nicely also. If you do substitute with a cereal with a lesser amount of vitimins and such, just toss in a ground up multi vitimin or two.

These recipes work off rather quickly and rarely have issues. I have never had any issues.
You can push to 14% abv with very little (if any) negative impact on the (dry active) yeast.

I think most folks shoot for 10% to 12%

thanks for the info, i don't know how i missed that one on here. just got a question would i be okay to have the mash in a 5 gal plastic bucket or do i have to have it in a glass/ss pot?

Food safe plastic is fine.

Check out the Brewhouse site for supplies.

Upper right hand corner

Ideally you would want to ferment whatever your doing in a 5 gallon bucket, a glass carboy, or something like a food grade trash can. I would use a 5 gallon bucket to start out with, be sure to leave some head space,( head space is the space between the wash and the top of the fermentation vessel).

So you want to cook every thing up in a stainless pot and then dump it into a bucket for the ferment.

I haven't done the recipes LWTCS stated but I have heard good things about them. I hear the death wish recipe makes a good neutral but I haven't done it as such.

What ingredient and terms are you having trouble with? I understand this stuff can be a little confusing and overwhelming.

RD

well i live in an area where i don't have any brew shops or anywhere where i can go for help or buy a lot of things that yall are using to cook with. i got an idea of how it work and stuff but then when i look on here at some of yalls recipes i'm lost. i know you have to have water,a grain(for starch), sugar, yeast(many different types but i rather stick with the bakers stuff from what i read it takes longer to ferment but the sprite will have a better taste in the end), and last the vitamins( which the yeast need to have in order to reproduce) and thats where i need advice and help. I only have a walmart and like CVS types of stores so i don't have access to a lot of the types of stuff yall use so it makes it difficult for me to make and figure this stuff out.

if you use cereal,grains you wont need vitamins, but if needed B complex , the same as you take just crush it and feed it to the yeast.

I don't even have a walmart, the closest on is a 4 hour round trip, and I get by just fine. With a lot of these recipes you can get every thing you need at a convenience store.

Water, sugar, yeast, some form of nutrient ie bran, gerber, corn, commercial powdered, and so on. That's all you need to get it done.

It's not as hard as it sounds. You might mess it up a couple of times but that's ok, you will lean a lot from just doing it.

ya im planning on making a batch tonight of the gerber one just to mess around and see how to do it before i get the still put together, just to learn how to make the mash first and mess around with it some and get an idea of the the basics ) then make the still and learn the basics of that from mistakes and advise from here.

I would wait to start a wash. Get your still built start a wash and then distill it. The gerber wash looks like it would be pretty hard to screw up. That's just me.

Fermenting is easy the yeast does all the work. It works like this, we put bugs in sugar water, the bugs eat the sugar and poop, we drink the poop. That's alcohol production and fermentation in a nut shell.

drinking their poop never though of it that way.what type of nutrients are the best that you can buy at like the grocery store and can you put to much in the mash? also people say they let their mash settle before they distill a natural sprite. so when they do this they just leave it in the container that its been fermenting in for a few days after its done right? but i heard that if you leave it to long it will spoil and give a bad taste in the end.

most of the cereals are fortified with most all the nutrients yeast need.very little if any thing else is needed.
and yes just leave your wash sit, it will settle to the bottom, then siphon off the top.it wont spoil for several weeks
so if leaving longer than that siphon off into a clean container and close .

Sorry if I spoiled your appetite, I just like to break things down to their lowest common denominator.

rubber duck i was laughing at that one when i read it. thanks for the help guys. ill have pics of my reflux still build on the site when i get the parts in to build it in a week or so. long time waiting but itll be worth it

RD -- Like the "breakdown"

You musta had one hell-uv-a math teacher.

WW

rubber duck wrote:Fermenting is easy the yeast does all the work. It works like this, we put bugs in sugar water, the bugs eat the sugar and poop, we drink the poop. That's alcohol production and fermentation in a nut shell.

Took me back 35 years with that comment Duck. My dad would tell me to run down the back forty and see if the lil crappers had stopped farting yet.

I wish I could take credit for that comment but it's been rolling around in one form or another for as long as I can remember.

Funny when you think about it though, who would of thought poop could taste so good. I guess it's not really poop but it's a funny analogy.

well poop is one way to look at it. it just cough me off guard. But it is actually true from what ive read and understand.