How to Make Moonshine. Wise Bread Picks. It has been legal to make wine at home since the end of prohibition, and legal to make beer since 1. Thats too bad, because homemade moonshine is incredibly frugal. See also 2. 1 Great Uses for BeerMaking moonshine is easy. All my dishes and flatware have a funky sort of odor after they are clean, sort of a fishy smell, no matter what was eaten off of them. I use Costcos Kirkland powder. How to Make Vodka. Vodka is a neutral spirit that is without distinctive character, aroma, taste, or color. Vodka-with-filter-2-400x400.jpg' alt='Filtering Vodka With Brita' title='Filtering Vodka With Brita' />Does Vinegar Disinfect as Well as Bleach Some people are afraid of bleach and prefer to use vinegar as a disinfectant but is it as effective Understeer is the enemy of any driver, with the front of the car simply refusing to turn no matter how much you angrily saw at the wheel. Many people think its. Making moonshine is especially easy because running it through a still makes all the delicate balancing of flavors that mark a great beer or wine irrelevant. In one sense, making any alcoholic beverage is easy, because the yeast do all the work. But moonshine is especially easy because running it through a still makes all the delicate balancing of flavors that mark a great beer or wine irrelevant. I learned most of what I know about moonshine from the classic book Possum living How to live well without a job and with almost no money by Dolly Freed. A great book and well worth reading. Updated 2. Ive just learned that Tin House books has reissued Possum LivingIts wonderful to see this classic once again available a reasonable price. Alcoholic beverages all start with yeast and with sugar for the yeast to eat. The sugar for wine usually comes from grapes although other fruits are used, especially for homemade wine. The sugar for beer usually comes from malted barley although other grains are also used. The sugar for commercially produced spirits can come from almost anything corn for bourbon, barley for scotch, rye for rye, sugar cane for rum, and so on. For moonshine, what you want is the cheapest sugar you can find. Dolly Freed found that the cheapest sugar she could find was white granulated sugar. Nowadays, corn syrup might be cheaper. Let me take a moment here to praise yeast. Im a huge fan of yeast. They work tirelessly to make our bread and our booze, then uncomplainingly give up their lives that we may eat and drink. If there were an American Yeast Council, Id want to be their spokesman. The main difference between brewers yeast and bakers yeast is that brewers yeast has been bred to survive a higher alcohol content. That lets wine makers work with natural fruit juices that have a high concentration of sugar and get a higher concentration of alcohol before the yeast die of alcohol poisoning. If youre going to make your own sugar solution to grow the yeast in, though, you can just make the sugar solutions strength match what the yeast can convert before they die. It all comes out even with no waste. According to Dolly Freed, it is a happy coincidence that 5 pounds of sugar in 3 gallons of water works out just right for ordinary bakers yeast. Updated 2. A lot of people have asked how much yeast to add. I answered that in comment 1. Im copying what I said up here. Id add one packet. Since the yeast reproduce, it almost doesnt matter how much you add after 2. All you need to do is add enough that your yeast overwhelms any wild yeast that happen to get in. There are wild yeast in the air everywhere, so you really cant avoid them. Spiralized Sweet Potato there. There are lots of good books on making beer and making wine. Any of them will describe the fermentation process, but very briefly you just add sugar to the waterbring to a boil to kill any wild yeast in it and make it easy to dissolve the sugarwait until the temperature comes down to 1. F so you dont kill your own yeastadd yeastwait. The fermenting liquid is called the must. You want to leave it loosely covered to keep other things from getting into it wild yeasts, mold spores, etc., but the yeast produce carbon dioxide as well as alcohol and you want to make sure the carbon dioxide can easily escape. If you seal it up tightly, it could explode. Give it 1. 0 to 2. Youll know its done when it quits bubblingbegins to turn clearno longer tastes sweet. Now, if you were making beer or wine youd have several more steps bottling, aging, etc. Making moonshine, though, all you need to do is distill the stuff. For that, you need a still. You can buy a still, but you probably dont want to. They cost money, and the federal government which scarcely polices this activity at all probably does keep tabs on people who buy stills from commercial outlets. A still, though, is just a pot with a lid with a hole in ita tube, closely fit to that hole, running to a jarsomething to cool that tube. You bring the pot to a boil, the alcohol evaporates, the vapor goes out the hole, into the tube, and the condenses back into liquid alcohol. Conveniently, an old fashioned pressure cooker is a pot with a hole in the lid. Modern pressure cookers wont work as well, because they have a fancy valve to release the pressure, but with an old fashioned one you just remove the weight and then fit the tube to the valve. If youve got some room, you can just make the tube long enough and you dont need to do anything extra to condense the alcohol. Using a tube that coils some can save space. Alternatively, you can run your tube through a sleeve and run cold tap water through the sleeve. Dolly Freed has a diagram of just such a setup. The things to be sure of here are that your entire set up needs to be of food quality materials copper, aluminum, stainless steel are all fine. Plastics are iffy as some may leach stuff into the alcohol. Lead is right out, as is putting the pieces together with solder that includes lead. Make sure the hole cant get plugged up, which could lead to your still exploding. Set up your still and bring it to a light boil. Pretty soon youll have almost pure alcohol dripping into your jar. The water content of the distillate will gradually increase. At some point a sample taken from the tube will no longer taste of alcohol, and youre done. As I said, its too bad its illegal. Otherwise you could make some pretty good booze well, lets say barely drinkable booze for the price of a few pounds of sugar. Additional Information.