My Introduction to Homemade Whiskey

I've spent a fair amount of time pulling together as much data as I can on how to make homemade Whiskey in the privacy of your own home.

The basics

Distillation is simply the collection of the ethanol (alcohol) that was made during fermentation.

It is the process of heating up the liquid so that it becomes a vapour, then condensing the vapour on a cold surface & collecting it. This works due to the fact that the vapour will contain more alcohol than the liquid it is boil off, because of the different physical properties of water and ethanol.

We can then make the vapour more pure by letting it be "stripped" of its water content by passing it up through a packed column which has some condensed vapour running back down through it as liquid.

When the two pass each other, the vapour will absorb alcohol from the falling liquid, and the liquid will take some of the water from the vapour. Distilling doesn't "make" the alcohol, nor turn some of it "bad" into something that will blind you; its only collecting the alcohol that was made during fermentation.

The following pages will guide you on how to prepare the feedstock, distill it, then dilute, age & flavour it. They also cover how to make a still and where to buy them.

Introduction

There's two ways to go with home distillation;

Use a wash of just sugar, water, nutrients & yeast to distill a tasteless & odourless vodka, using a REFLUX still. This is then flavoured using either essences or fruits (see the links about Liqueurs). Many of the commercially available flavourings are near spot-on, and hard to tell from the real thing. Real easy.

Get a little fancier, and use grains (corn, rye, barley, wheat ..) to try and duplicate your favourite whiskey, bourbon ...etc, using either a POT or REFLUX still. Ferment these up like you do home-made beer, then pass it through a still to collect the alcohol, and you're ready to party.