I was watching some US prison doco earlier and the inmates were always getting caught making this 'moonshine' just using apples and plastic baggies.

I'm curious as to how strong it can be made in this way. Probably tastes like shit.

That shit's called "pruno" and I'm sure it does taste like hell. Pruno isn't generally distilled, but is more of a wine-like fermented beverage. That stuff is really easy to make at home. Just get a bottle of orange juice or apple juice, pour out a few inches off the top, toss in a packet of dry baker's yeast, attach a fermentation lock and set it somewhere cool and dry for about a week. You might want to set the bottle inside a bucket to catch any overspill caused by vigorous fermentation. If it does foam over, just remove the fermentation lock, wash it with dish detergent and hot water, refill it about halfway with clean water and replace it on top of the jar. After about a week or two the fermentation will stop and you'll have a crude apple cider or orange wine very similar to pruno.

I've always wanted to try my hand at distilling on a very small scale (like a stovepot still).

When brewing beer, occasionally you get a batch that doesn't taste as great as you'd like it to. Maybe you didn't rack it early enough and the yeast started to autolyze itself, contributing off-flavors. Maybe it somehow got infected via a insufficiently sanitized piece of siphon tube, or it was some kind of weird experimental recipe and the kimchee didn't work as well as you'd thought it would.

While this beer may not be the most pleasant beverage to drink, it still contains a good amount of alcohol and therefore it's a perfect candidate for distillation. You could set up a small distillery and convert it into firewater. If you had a charred-oak wooden cask and enough storage space and patience, you could even age it for a few years until it mellows into a more-or-less decent whiskey.

I have a friend who's a 1st-generation American daughter of a Bulgarian immigrant family. Once, while visiting her at her parents' house, she offered me a drink. I noticed several large bottles of clear liquid sitting on a high shelf above their kitchen cabinets, with dates scribbled on the glass in permanent marker. I asked her about those, and she told me it was "Bulgarian crunk juice" made by one of her family members. She poured me a shot of that stuff, and I could tell by the way it beaded in the glass that it had a very high alcohol content. It tasted extremely rough and harsh, not unlike grappa, but it seemed much stronger. I forget the Bulgarian name for this stuff, but she said it was made from the leftover grape skins from wine-making (like grappa). It wasn't the kind of thing I would prefer to drink on a regular basis, but if that's the quality of stuff I could expect to produce through home distillation (without aging) then I'd be willing to give it a go (if it weren't illegal to do).

My Greek father-in-law makes a lovely Greek-style wine. He's going to teach me how to do it when his vines fruit. He has a massive oak barrel which he ages it in.
The one he drinks at the moment is about 8 years old and tastes like a cross between a rose and sherry. You can drink the stuff all night and not have a hangover in the morning.

Er... I have heard that you can make a still that works fantastically out of a pressure cooker, a hot plate, a bucket and some copper piping for around $50.

I've heard that if you can make some 150 proof apple jack from a nice cider\molasses\maple syrup\cinnamon mixture that tastes fucking amazing.


I've also heard that if you mix some charred oak chips with the apple jack and alternate it between a freezer and room temp., it will speed age the alcohol.

I wonder if any of this is true?

Tom wrote:I've heard that if you can make some 150 proof apple jack from a nice cider\molasses\maple syrup\cinnamon mixture that tastes fucking amazing.

That sounds lovely. I like a bit of Scrumpy!

Tom wrote:Er... I have heard that you can make a still that works fantastically out of a pressure cooker, a hot plate, a bucket and some copper piping for around $50.

I've heard that if you can make some 150 proof apple jack from a nice cider\molasses\maple syrup\cinnamon mixture that tastes fucking amazing.


I've also heard that if you mix some charred oak chips with the apple jack and alternate it between a freezer and room temp., it will speed age the alcohol.

I wonder if any of this is true?

I have also heard that if you are at a EA members house and you say have a drink of this apple jack, a man who looks like Jesus will push you down the stairs and you will wake up in pile of puke, with a stain of your own blood on the wall... this is just what I heard, and they did not happen to a member of the hi-fi, I just heard about this...

yaledelay wrote:
I have also heard that if you are at a EA members house and you say have a drink of this apple jack, a man who looks like Jesus will push you down the stairs and you will wake up in pile of puke, with a stain of your own blood on the wall... this is just what I heard, and they did not happen to a member of the hi-fi, I just heard about this...

Yeah, I think I remember hearing that there is still a blood stain on a wall in that house cos the homo-ner never bothered to clean it up.

Weird the stuff you hear.