Legally making your own Whiskey

Home made whiskey is a very nice addition to home brewing. In the UK and most other countries it is illegal to distil alcohol but you can ferment a high alcohol wash and using high alcohol yeasts and a lot of sugar! Your local homebrew shop will be able to advise you on what exactly to buy but the process is as follows:

Add the sugar to a 26 litre fermenting bin, the same type you would use for beer. You would use 10kg for fermenting only, you would use less, perhaps 6kg if you were going to distil. Pour in enough hot water to dissolve the sugar and stir well.

Next you'll need to add some carbon, you can buy a pack from your homebrew shop, I used "Still Spirits Turbo Carbon". The carbon is there to ensure your finished product is as pure as possible, it will absorb fermentation flavours and make the finished product "almost" drinkable without flavouring (not recommended).

Now you'll need to kick off fermentation so you need to add some yeast. I used "Still Spirits Power Turbo Yeast and Nutrients" but again if you were going to distil then you would use a "triple yeast" such as "Still Spirits Triple Distilled" or "Alcotec Triple Still". The yeast is sprinkled on the top like any home brew yeast.

Fermentation will take about 7-10 days at (18-24°c), I left mine for 8 days, using a standard hydrometer to ensure fermentation had finished. Once fermentation has stopped give it a good stir to remove all trapped gasses. This will redistribute the carbon sediment but that is fine.

You could leave the carbon to resettle naturally and let the brew clear on its own but this would take a very long time indeed. It's better to clear it with some specialist finings. I used "Still Spirits Turbo Clear" alcotec also make one called "Alcotec 24 Turbo Klar". These both come with two sachets, add the first one, stir and leave it for an hour or two, then add the second one, stir very gently and leave it for 24-36 hours.

After this time you should have crystal clear spirits of about 21-25% ABV. At this point if you had been brewing to distil you would have 14-16% ABV and it would now be time to feed it through your still. Again that is illegal in most countries so that isn't what I did. :) If you were to do so, then make sure you get a still designed for alcohol, a standard water distiller runs far to hot!

So next is to add flavours to your spirit, home brew shops sell a range of flavours for rum, gin, whiskey, schnapps, etc or you could come up with your own interesting concoctions.

Most of the flavour and the colour of whiskey comes from its barrel conditioning. When it is first distilled it is mostly a pure ethanol with some residual flavours from the grain and sugars it was originally fermented with. I added some of my spirit to a demijohn with some chopped up chunks of whiskey barrels and left for several weeks, months will be even better. I also added 20g of finely ground vanilla sugar per litre of whiskey, this makes a very nice smooth whiskey, you can add vanilla pods or you can buy ground vanilla sugar that has been aged in bourbon barrels which goes very well.