Moonshine, with the mods permission.

[BCAC]

In France certain families were allowed legally to distill. Only a few (one person in each family) in each county, and this right was passed down the family as each 'allowed' person died. It is very regulated and controlled regularly.

Unfortunately, the law has been changed and it is no longer hereditary. I'm sure that it will continue under the counter though.

[AKScott]

I ran an alcohol fuel comapny for a few months in 2007. I still make my own homebrewed beer. Honestly, if it was legal in my jurisdiction I wouldn't bother with distillation.

I tried some "white dog" when I toured the Maker's Mark plant in Kentucky. White dog is the stuff that came out of the still today and still needs to be aged - for years- before it is bottled. There is a good reason they have to age that stuff for years before they can sell it, and the reason is it tastes horrible at day one.

[ohiopiper]

McClef and other mods, I'll be very vague as to the actual process. While it is available in one form or another, I agree that it would be unwise to seem to promote illegal activity.

And as stated very well by O'Searcaigh and AKScott, inexpensive and legal whiskey is so widely available that even if it were legal, it really wouldn't be worth the hassle.

Having said the mandatory disclaimer (and if you're really thinking about doing this you need your head examined), you use the copper to make your still and cap arm. That's the hollow tube that carries alcohol vapor from the still to the worm. The worm is the coiled copper tube that sits inside a bucket with a constant flow of cold creek water to condense it.

Find an out of the way spot where you have:
running water
no neighbors
wood for fires
clay and river rock to build your furnace.

Right way:
dig a shallow wide hole to house your still and furnace. Put it all together.
Malt "X" percent of your corn. Ain't sayin' how much or how.
get the corn and malt ground. Taking malted corn in to a miller is likely going to get you busted before you ever fill your still. Build your still and furnace while the miller is working.

Take the ground corn and malt to the woods and make your mash, using the still as a boiling pot.
The next day, thin out the mash if needed and add a certain amount of raw rye to each barrel of mash.
The following day, add ground malt to each barrel.
Go stir your mash every day for several days until it's ready. Depends on temperature. Cover them well, if it gets rained in, it's ruined.

Wrong way:

Connect the top of the oil tank to the bottom of the fifty-five gallon drum. Connect the top of the drum to the car radiator sitting inside the other drum. Put a propane burner direectly under the oil tank. Who cares if you burn your mash? You're not going to be the one drinking this junk, anyway. Throw a few bags of sugar in each barrel of mash to increase yield substantially (and lower the quality).

Finished mash is now called beer.

More to come tomorrow. Or the next day. And if you think it'd be a hoot to try this at home, you're nuts. Honestly. Go find a hobby or something. One of my aims in this thread is to give an idea of how hard and expensive it really is to make quality moonshine. The stuff for sale today is made by people trying to beat the tax man and make a buck, so they cut corners. Coming from a family littered with moonshiners (retired. Or whatever you call it when you go straight.) and other miscreants, I'd like to see ALL the current crop of bootleggers put under a jail and the key lost. They're hurting people with their dangerous concoction masquerading as corn whiskey.

[ohiopiper]

Eh, I'm working off the last cup of coffee from work anyway.

If you've been following this, there are three parts to a "right way" still. The still itself, the cap arm and the worm. There are four to a "wrong way" still. The still itself (oil tank) cap arm (plastic pipe) a thump barrel (first fifty-five gallon drum and then the worm (old car radiator sitting inside the second barrel).

Right way:

When your beer is ready, pour the first barrel into the still, light the furnace and stir constantly until it comes to a rolling boil, then seal everything well with rye paste. As soon as the still is sealed, wash the empty barrel out well and put it near the worm.

Some steam will make it's way out of the worm. This will be followed by a short gush of liquid. Drink this at your own peril. The dirt is a good place for this stuff. More steam for a bit, then a constant flow of liquid.

You did build a filter into the five gallon bucket from my "must have" list. right? As it comes out of the worm, let it fall through the bucket/filter and out the hole drilled in the bottom. Catch it and put it into the cleaned out barrel the beer came from.

Nope, no whiskey yet. This stuff is called "singles". Needs to be doubled. Once you've run every barrel of beer, wash out the still and put everything you distilled back into the still and repeat the process.

Now you've got whiskey. A whole eight or ten gallons of it. And probably only cost you a thousand bucks in material (you seen copper prices lately?!) and a week or more of your life. And ten years, if you got caught doing something this dumb.

Wrong way:

Fill the oil tank up with beer. Fill your thump barrel about half full of beer. Run as before, but only that first barrel.

Now take the singles from the first run and put them in the thump barrel instead of beer. Your next run of beer, instead of producing more singles, will now produce whiskey. There is an alternation sequence to singles and whiskey, but I'm not overly familiar with it and since it's the easiest method and possibly most tempting, I'll skip it.

[ohiopiper]

Almost forgot. You'll need a "proof vial". That's a small glass vial that you check the proof of the whiskey. Close to 200 proof wil have a bead (bubble) half in liquid, half on the side of the vial that holds for a few seconds until disappearing.

Catch about half a vial full, hold your thumb over the mouth of the vial and whack the bottom against your other hand a few times. Look at the bead. When it no longer holds a bead, the proof is dropping. Time to empty the still and begin the next barrel of beer. If you're running singles, keep collecting it if it holds any bead at all.

Cut the final product, which is very nearly 200 proof alcohol, with clean water until it just holds a bead after three to four solid thumps on your palm in the proof vial. Not cut enough it is hardly drinkeable, cut too much it can bubble up and spill when it's shaken in transport. The bead turns to many small bubbles, not just one large one.

[AKScott]

I ran continuous process on my fuel still.

Making good quality beer (or wine) to feed the still is a major pain in the hind parts. If you want such and such hops with so and so grain bill, you can go dough in of dry grain into the mash tun to finished carbonated beer in a drinking glass in about six weeks.

In the USA you can make 100 gallons of beer each year, no taxes owed. Thats about 40 cases ( 24 twelve ounce bottles in each case). If your married, your household can double that amount, tax free.

If you are making or importing beverage alcohol to the USA, the excise tax (in 2007) was $27 per proof gallon. A "proof gallon" is one gallon of 100 proof (50% alcohol) whatever, rum, bourbon, Scotch, doesn't matter. US$54 for one gallon of 200 proof ethanol, due from the producer at the still head on the day of production, not the day seven years later when the bourbon gets loaded on the truck to be shipped to the wholesaler.

If you are a fuel maker, you have to put up a cash bond to cover 90 days of production. Say you are making ten gallons of vehicle fuel, 200 proof, every day. Ten gallons of 200 proof is 20 "proof gallons" each day at $27 per, times 90 days; 20*27*90= $48,600 in 2007. I haven't checked the rate lately.

So number one, when you read on the news that ethanol fuel subsidies cost the taxpayers xyz millions of dollars last year, bear in mind the ethanol fuel producer eventually gets that $27 per proof gallon refunded. Eventually. If all the paperwork is done correctly, in triplicate. The alternative is to pay $27 per proof gallon excise tax on all the ethanol that was ever in your car's gas tank. That would be about an extra $54 on every 20 gallons of gas you bought in the last twenty years.

Second, if you get busted with a still in the USA and BATF decides to explore your nether orifice with a microscope, they will find the credit card transaction where you bought a piece of 2" copper pipe at Home Depot however many years ago. They will assume you assembled a working still in about ten minutes. They will assume you have been running the thing 24/7 ever since. They will calculate how many gallons you might possibly have made every day. They will put interest on that number at a rate higher than any credit card you have. Then they will assess penalties. Lots of them. When they are done, that is the number that will be published in the newspaper next to your name. Innocent until proven guilty, sure. After you sign your house over to your lawyer. And your 401k. And your business. You will still be filing backruptcy when it is over.

It just isn't worth it here. If you really really really want to make whiskey, expatriate to somewhere where it is legal. In the long run it will be the cheaper choice.

The first US president to come down hard on folks skipping the excise tax on ethanol production was George Washington. He didn't just 'send troops'. He lead them personally. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_rebellion

Homebrewing, it is a legal hobby. And I got no problem paying 25-30 bucks for a 22 ounce bomber of something from out of towm. If it is really good, I can make two cases of it for about 35 dollars.

Whiskey making, it takes generations to get a recipe dialed in. Not years, generations. Jack Daniels, been making the same recipre for a couple weeks now. Glen Livet, they have had a good thing doing for about six months. GlenKinchie, kind of an upstart in the last four months...

Some days I wish I lived in New Zealand.

[Geoff Withnell]

My grandmother told me they had a somewhat simpler method for making applejack out of hard cider. This was of course in upstate New York, and would not work in more Southern climes. Put the hard cider in a large barrel out side on the (unheated, uncovered) porch. Make sure you have a lid on the barrel. Each morning, before the sun rises, go out on the porch and break the ice from the top of the barrel. Make sure to let the liquid drain off it back into the barrel and then throw the ice away. It's almost pure water, he alcohol and other flavorings don't freeze. When you get only a thin scum of ice, or slush mixed in with the rest of the liquid, that's as strong as it's likely to get. This will only take you to 40-50 proof, depending on how cold a winter you're having, but for very little effort and equipment, that's ok.

[AKScott]

My grandmother told me they had a somewhat simpler method for making applejack out of hard cider. This was of course in upstate New York, and would not work in more Southern climes. Put the hard cider in a large barrel out side on the (unheated, uncovered) porch. Make sure you have a lid on the barrel. Each morning, before the sun rises, go out on the porch and break the ice from the top of the barrel. Make sure to let the liquid drain off it back into the barrel and then throw the ice away. It's almost pure water, he alcohol and other flavorings don't freeze. When you get only a thin scum of ice, or slush mixed in with the rest of the liquid, that's as strong as it's likely to get. This will only take you to 40-50 proof, depending on how cold a winter you're having, but for very little effort and equipment, that's ok.

Under current US law this practice is still considered "concentrating alcohol", same as using a still to distill concentrated spirits from legally home produced beer, wine or hard cider.

I did put a bottle of hard cider I had made in the freezer once upon a time. I meant to open it in 20-30 minutes but something came up. When I did pour it about four hours later, most of the liquid stayed inside the bottle in the form of ice, buit that litttle bit I got out sure was tasty.

The grey zone there for BATF is intent.

If you have a 200 gallon tank of hard cider in the loft of your unheated barn, in Vermont, kind of looks intentional. If you got a piece of re-rod leaning on it for breaking up ice chunks, and some kind of basket on a stick to fish out the ice chunks, well, lemme tell you a little about your new cell mate...

If you have one bottle of hard cider in the freezer and have a receipt to show you just now got home from taking a kid to the ER four hours ago...

[MT4Runner]

I tried some "white dog" when I toured the Maker's Mark plant in Kentucky. White dog is the stuff that came out of the still today and still needs to be aged - for years- before it is bottled. There is a good reason they have to age that stuff for years before they can sell it, and the reason is it tastes horrible at day one.

Legal way to make good tasting bourbon:

buy that nasty Georgia Moon "Pure Corn Whiskey" and age it yourself in charred oak.

Under current US law this practice is still considered "concentrating alcohol", same as using a still to distill concentrated spirits from legally home produced beer, wine or hard cider.

I did put a bottle of hard cider I had made in the freezer once upon a time. I meant to open it in 20-30 minutes but something came up. When I did pour it about four hours later, most of the liquid stayed inside the bottle in the form of ice, buit that litttle bit I got out sure was tasty.

Just keep it under wraps.
They're going to go after the guy bragging about his still decades before they're going to worry about a guy who put a bottle of cider in his freezer.

Pay your money and take your chances. Or choose not to take your chances!

[AKScott]

Legal way to make good tasting bourbon:

buy that nasty Georgia Moon "Pure Corn Whiskey" and age it yourself in charred oak.

I hadn't thought of that. I think it would be legal. The excise tax is paid at the still head and then recouped by the manufacturer when you bought it over the counter.

If you choose to store legally acquired excise tax paid whiskey in your house in the original glass bottle, in the original glass bottle with some wood chips dropped in, in a stainless steel flask with come wood chunks or even in a wooden barrel it should be fine. I think.

Just don't try to resell it after you age it, that could be a problem. Retail liquor licensing is generally handled at either the state or county level in the US.

Neat idea.