The easy way of distilling whiskey at home

Distilling whiskey can be extremely easy if you understand the whole process. All you need is water, grain and yeast. Take around a 100 kgs of grain that will make you 600 liters of mash to produce almost 85 liters of a good whiskey at home. The next stage is the mashing or grinding. The grain should be ground coarsely and then mixed with water in the “mash tun”. This will help to convert the existing starch into sugar. The resulting mixture is called “wort”. The size of your tank and the mash amount will determine the time process of the fermentation.

In order to separate “wort” you can sieve the mash through a screen plate placed at the tank bottom. Liquid can be thus drained into a fermentation bin and the wet grain that is left behind can be gotten rid of or used as feed for animals. Use new baker’s yeast or even yeast that you have cultivated yourself for every batch of wort you want to ferment.

Every time you run your alcohol through the still, will increase its purity! It all depends on what taste and flavor you need. If a pot still is being used note that only half the water is removed. Scotch is always distilled two times and Irish whiskey thrice, making the whiskey really smooth and pure. It is important to remember the undesirable runoffs while going through the whole distillation process. These “heads” are not needed and are in fact poisonous and has to be discarded. In the same way, the “tails” should also be discarded because they will bring down the quality.

You should know that whiskey should mature in oak casks. The minimum period is at least three years during which the alcohol actually breathes in the cask and gets its, color, flavor and aroma. Aging is also called mellowing and this takes “the edge off” raw whiskey and makes it “smooth”. Note that a certain percentage of your alcohol will evaporate during this mellowing/aging process. This percentage is usually called “angel’s share”.

There are different types of whiskey and many times people have no clue as to what is the difference among them all. Scotch and Irish whiskeys are blended whiskeys but differ from each other. While Scotch is made from malted barley the Irish use both un-malted and malted barley. Scotch has a smoky flavor because the malted barley is dried over peat fires while the Irish prefer to use dry closed kilns to dry the malt. American whiskey is known as bourbon and produced in Kentucky. Canadian whiskey is also very unique and can be easily distinguished from the other whiskeys because it is lighter than the usual bourbon, does not have the strong scotch aroma, and is light colored instead of being dark like many other whiskeys. Corn is used for the mash and sometimes they also use malted barley or wheat.