Ok, anyone ever wanted to make your own whisky ? Or moonshine ? I’ll take you through the process

First we start off with cracked grain. For moonshine this would be corn, for whisky it’s usually wheat, barley and or sometimes some rye

A great place to learn is at the occasional brewer if you are near Wellington. Did I mention this is illegal in most places in the world? Luckily for you (and me) it’s allowed in New Zealand

They ( @occasionalbrewr) have an amazing setup - highly recommended

The first step is called mashing in. You basically stir the grain into 70 degree (Celsius) water and let it steep for ½ hour

While the mash is soaking for ½ hr, we do “recirculation” where we drain off a couple litres at a time from the bottom of the container and pour gently on top... this lets us extract as much sugar as possible from the grain

Once the recirculation/ sparging is done we heat the mash up to 95-100 and boil for an hour

In typical beer brewing we add hops at this point but for whisky mash the hops is pretty irrelevant

Now while we let the mash boil we clean up the spent grains. I think they sell the used grains for animal food

Next it’s time to enjoy a nice @occasionalbrewr hazy ipa while waiting for the boil to finish, and the brewmasters showed us the distilling process / parts of the still. I will be taking a still home to do the next part of the process after the fermentation

Now the boil is done, we drain the mash into a fermentation bucket. This cool setup has the mash flow through a heat exchanger to cool it from 100c to 20.
At this point we pitch in the yeast and rack it onto a heat pad... this whisky yeast is super strong to make higher alcohol

Did I mention Holly is a good girl?
Also shown here is an oak spiral I will age the whisky with

After a week, the mash has finished fermenting - so I unrack it, siphoning it into a sterile jerry can

I picked up the still and my mash and brought home to distill

Shown here is the assembled still and my cat mittens - who doesn’t care about whisky

Fist step is to dump the mash into the still, seal it and start boiling it. Once it reaches about 90, the alcohol starts to drip out of the end of the condenser. The condenser is a copper tube that has cold water cycling through it to keep it cold

We basically just heat it up hot enough to evaporate alcohol but not hot enough to boil water. We extract all the alcohol into a demijohn

This first run is what they call the “stripping run” - we will distill it a second time to get rid of bad stuff and adjust the flavours

Now we empty the leftover mash - I had about a gallon of beer looking stuff that had no alcohol left in it, and then cleaned out the still

So now we distill a second time, and this time we pay attention to the temperatures - the first 200ml is thrown away, it’s methanol which is not good to drink. This evaporated at a lower temp than ethanol (whichbwe do want)
I have a series of glasses lined up that I will fill

As I boil at increasing temperatures I store 150ml of each subsequent bit, these are the “heads” until I get to the good stuff

Once we get to distillate that is the best part (called the “heart”) we put that straight into our demijohn as we are definitely keeping this part

The alcohol is about 75% at this point (150 proof) as showing on the alcohol meter

After the temp starts to get too high, we again start separating out into 150ml containers - these are the “tails” - it’s ethanol but can be a bit bitter

Now is the tricky part. Each of these heads and tails glasses tastes a bit different, some good and some bad. I mixed in a bit from each, a lot less on the ones from the extremes. Then I added a bit of water to bring the proof down closer to 55 so it’s a bit smother

After all of this i added a charred oak spiral which will give it colour and additional flavour

I then cleaned up the still and stored the heads and tails that I didn’t use - that liquid is about 750ml of 40 proof, so I can do that to my next mash

A very fun process - go see the @occasionalbrewr if you are a whisky lover in NZ
(Or if you are not in NZ you will have to find an illegal still and dodge the law)
Good luck and shoot me your questions