This part here is the pot. That's what you put your mash in. And uh this is the cap right here. You pour your stuff in there, put your cap
on and connect all this back up. You boil this, the steam comes up, goes over
here, down through this pipe to the bottom of this. And then this pipe just goes in the top. This thing will fill with steam and it'll
go right on over and go down through this worm. And then it comes out here. After you run about a quart, you pull this
stopper out, you pour it back in here. This part's called a thumper. It makes a thumpin sound when this steam boils
through this uh liquid down here. And that's kinda like an extra filter on it. And uh this thing stays full of water and
cools the steam and condenses it back into a liquid. And the first that comes out is high alcohol,
high grade alcohol. It's probably 180 or 190 proof, whatever. And it gets weaker and weaker as you run. A little still like this will probably make
maybe a gallon or two. Of course, this is the complicated end. If you want to see a real simple way, uh,
I'll take you up here to the cabin and show you a real simple way you can do it with a
pressure cooker. Well we went down and checked out the little
still in the woods, and now I'm gonna show you the simplest way you can possibly make
this stuff. First thing you need is five gallon, or uh,
five pound of cornmeal. Pour it in, and you need plain cornmeal. It won't work if you got self-rising. You need five pound of cornmeal and five pounds
of sugar. Just dump that in. Now we need a couple gallons of hot water. And we just dump that in. A
gallon at a time works good, and just stir it up, that way you can get all that sugar
dissolved. Hard to dissolve it when you've got five gallon
of water in there. You need a pound of sugar with a gallon of
water. That's stirred pretty good. We'll put another gallon of water in it and
stir it some more. This is not corn whiskey. Because pure corn whiskey is made out of nothing
but corn. We put sugar in this because to do it the
other way is a long process and it's complication. What we're trying to do is to do it simple. That feels like it's stirred pretty good. I've got three more gallons of water, to make
five gallons. And we'll stir that a little more. This is Fleischmann's Yeast, for baking bread. But, we're not baking bread ha ha ha ha. You want to stir this as you put it in cause
it'll lump up and won't work good. You need a thermometer to put in this, so
you can check and see how hot it is. You want it about 90 to 95 degrees. If you get it too hot it won't work, if it's
too cold it won't work. So it needs to stay around that uh temperature. And if it should get cold on you, take a jug
and fill it full of hot water and just lay it down in there and it'll sink. And it'll warm that back up and keep you working
right. And that's about all there is to putting it
together. This is what it should look like the second
day. You can see how the bubbles are working and
it's bubbling all over. Can you see that? I have a thermometer in this thing to keep
check on the temperature. Right now we're running a little over 90 degrees,
which is about where you need to be. Between 90 and 95, somewhere in that neighborhood. Maybe even 100 but not over that. Notice all the bubbles is working, uh, that's
when you're making alcohol. That's about what it should look like the
second day. This is what it should look like the third
day. There's not much activity, but there's still
a few bubbles so it's still working some. You keep watching it a little bit and you
may see a few more bubbles come up. It's not doing much. It'll be ready to run tomorrow. Now this is what it should look like maybe
on the fourth day. Sometimes it takes a little longer, sometimes
a little less, but when it quits bubbling, that's all you. It's worked out all the alcohol you're gonna
get. From this point on, if you don't run it today,
you'll get less tomorrow than you would today. So today's the day to run it. An old pressure cooker I picked up at a flea
market. I took the pressure gauge out, and went to
the hardware and bought a roll of 3/8 copper and a fitting that fits on it. A compression fitting. And this end is a pipe plug and you can get
that will fit about anything. You just put that in the hole, where we took
out the uh pressure gauge. Not much to that. Now, this part, we got an old paint bucket
here. We'll bend this thing around to get a good
fit on it. That looks good enough. This is just a five gallon bucket. We're gonna drill a hole right close to the
bottom of it. That's a 3/8 copper so I drilled a 3/8 hole. We don't need all this coil so I'll straighten
some of it back out. That ought to be enough. Then we'll turn this part out so we can get
it out through this hole. Put this end through this hole and bring this
over this way. It will go right into this fitting. And we'll tighten that down. Get this good and tight. Don't want to lose any steam. Now we can take it back off. We're not ready to do that yet. The compression fitting is already on there
so we can connect any time we want to. I'm gonna set this aside for a minute. Slide this right over here. We're gonna dip this mash out and do this
real slow so you don't stir it up too bad. We only want the clear stuff. We don't need all that meal in here. That gets up around the side and it'll scorch. Make a awful taste. I personally like rye whiskey the best but
that's a little more complicated and a little harder to find. Anybody can find cornmeal anywhere. This is about a 15 and a half quart pressure
cooker. So by the time we get all this out, except
all the meal that's in the bottom, we'll about have it full. And if you got more, well you can run some
more later. Getting down to the meal now. That meal all settles in the bottom. When it gets through working. I'm gonna leave about an inch clearance so
we don't boil it over. You boil it too strong, you get this beer
over in the. That ought to be enough. Now I gotta move all this out of the way and
get my stove up here. And we'll set this right on one of the eyes. And we'll light a fire and get this thing
going. That'll take a little while to heat. Meanwhile, we'll be setting all the rest of
this stuff up. Turn this. Need to lock this down good, cause we don't
want to lose the steam. That's the liquor, in the steam. Ok. So that's gonna cook a while. We'll get this other part set up. We can go ahead and hook that up now. Ok now we gotta put a sealer on this, right
around this cause we don't want any water coming out. We need our worm kinda straight so it don't
have water trapped in it. Ok. I need to put this under here to jack this
up just a little bit. Because I've gotta bottle right here I'm gonna
be running in. Need a little room. So we got that part fixed. Now we gotta put a sealer around this tube
cause we don't want water running out. Gotta have this bucket full of water. It's good if you do this the day before with
some kind of a good sealer. And I do this just in case it leaks. If it does, what runs out will follow this
string and it'll drip on the floor instead of in your whiskey. Ok we should be ready to go there for that
part. Now this has been heating for about oh maybe
20 minutes, 25 minutes and I can feel the steam getting up in the pipe. When it starts getting over here, you can
tell about where it is. It's about right here right now. So it'll be another, oh, 5 or 10 minutes before
it starts running. We need to fill this container full of cold
water. When that steam comes over here this cold
water will condense it back into a liquid, which hopefully is alcohol. This is pretty hot all the way over to here
so it won't be but just a minute before it starts running. I've got a little leak right here, the reason
you need to do that the day before you run. But that's not getting in the whiskey so we'll
be alright. Ok, it's beginning to run. We'll put a little cotton in there to filter
it and I need to turn this flame down a little. We need to run a real small stream. Just about like that. The reason I use this type of stove, you got
good control on your heat. I gotta get me a little taste of that. About a spoonful's all you need. Tastes pretty good. I'll give my camera man a drank, he's liable
to mess up. All
you can do now is be patient. Just wait for it. I'm gonna move over to the other side so I
can taste it again ha ha. Still good. Move this and see what that looks like. Looks like alcohol to me. When you make a small amount like this it
can be running alcohol for a while and then it can just quit running alcohol and start
running weak whiskey or almost water. And this is the first run, it's called a sweet
mash. And you don't usually make much on your first
run. The next run should make maybe a quart but
this run it won't be all that much. I'm gonna look at it again. Yep, it's still, still running liquor. Gonna sample it again. Still tastes good! I need to show you something about the bead. So how that bead is big bubbles and it's staying
on there. So that's well over 100 proof right there. Ok. I poured that other we just looked at in this
jar so we can see what it looks like now. We run almost another half a pint. And it's still, still beadin good. As long as them beads come up there and stay,
we're doing alright. We've already made a pint. In a good old mason jar. Now we'll let that run a little while and
see what we got. Well we've run about another half a bottle
full. Let's look and see what we got now. It's still pretty high. We're making a lot more than I thought we
would. You don't make a whole lot on the first run
usually. Set that aside and see what happens. Real low so you got a little bitty stream. You get it too hot, it's not good and this
needs to stay cool. You can see the bead on that. That's the first pint we run. If it's weak that bead won't stay on there
very long. It won't look like that. Ok we might better check that bead again. See if we're still making liquor. Yeah it's still making liquor but it's getting
down to about a hundred proof now. Pour a little of this in this jar and run
a little more and see what we got. Well we gonna look at it again and see what
we're doing. That's getting down to about a hundred proof. The bubbles stay on there for a good while. They're half under the water and half on top. That's about a hundred proof. When it gets down to that, I quit runnin cause
the more you run now the worse it'll taste. So, it's all over 100 proof so if you want
it weaker than that you can cut it with water and get a better taste. But I like it straight. So that's all we're gonna run. We're gonna turn our flame off now. Let that thing cool for a few minutes and
then we'll put up a sour mash run. This is the first pint that we run, you see
the bead on that. It don't stay on there very long. And this we quit running as soon as it got
down weak and that bead's staying on there good. That's still well over a hundred proof. That's not much but it's more than we had
before we started. Ok this thing has cooled off so we're gonna
disconnect it. This thing's still a little bit hot but we
want it to be pretty warm. This is what's left out of that run. There's probably another gallon in there that
you could run if you wanted to fool with it and make a little bit more. But I'm just gonna leave it in there cause
it'll come out high alcohol next time. So I'm gonna take what's in this pressure
cooker and put it back in there while it's hot so it'll cook that meal. If I don't get burned. Set this here out of the way. Try to not get burned. I hope that don't melt my cooler. This time I'm only gonna put a half a bag
of cornmeal because you'll accumulate a lot of cornmeal after a while. So I'm just gonna put a half a bag in here. But I'm still gonna put five pounds of sugar
in it. We'll stir that in real good. You don't want to put your yeast in yet because
it's too hot and it'll just kill the yeast. But after you let this cool down for oh a
little while, when you get down to about a hundred degrees, maybe 95 to 100 you need
to check it or it'll kill the yeast and it won't work. Don't want anybody to be disappointed. That hot water melts that sugar real good
and it cooks that meal in. And since this has been run, it'll be a sour
mash run and you should make a good quart out of it. We almost made that much that time, which
is unusual. And all you gotta do is wait about four days
until this thing looks like that last one I showed you. On about the fourth day it should clear up
and look about like that. You may get a little bigger cap on it this
time since we got more cornmeal in it. And like I say, you need to wait until it
cools down before you put the yeast in it. And that's all there is to making moonshine.