Spirts
The Still Spirits Trilpe Distilled kit only comes out at 14% meaning you would need a still to get it any higher. And as for 2 weeks to ferment? You can get a Turbo 24 yeast that ferments to just under 20% and Turbo 48 yeast that ferments to between 14 and 18% so it's not all that time consuming. Check the Hambletonbard website.
Using the Still Spirits kit will work out cheaper but with lower alcohol. The kit costs around £4 plus £1 for the finings at my local brew shop and you need 6 bags of white sugar. Just ferment as normal. FG should be .990 or less add finings, wait for it to clear then bottle with your flavourings. The only bad thing with the Still Spirits range is that the small bottles of essence make 3 bottles of spirit. So if you experiment with something you've never tasted before and don't like it you have another 2 bottles you have to get rid of.
Using the Still Spirits kit will work out cheaper but with lower alcohol. The kit costs around £4 plus £1 for the finings at my local brew shop and you need 6 bags of white sugar. Just ferment as normal. FG should be .990 or less add finings, wait for it to clear then bottle with your flavourings. The only bad thing with the Still Spirits range is that the small bottles of essence make 3 bottles of spirit. So if you experiment with something you've never tasted before and don't like it you have another 2 bottles you have to get rid of.
Yeah, it's good stuff, and you can use the cheapest Gin you can find. The sugar and sloes knock any roughness out of it. One thing, I'd go for 40% spirit and not the 37.5% rip off stuff. Also, I've made it with dried sloes from the HBS - comes out just fine, as well as fresh sloes. Fresh ones should be pricked before use.DaaB wrote:
As for sloe gin, if you can get hold of sloes you will probably find it makes a much tastier drink if you make it from scratch, it's only a case of adding sloes and sugar to gin and with the amount of sugar in most recipes i've seen I suspect you wont be far off doubling the volume of gin you started off with so it's pretty good value too.
Take a biggish kilner jar, fill it 1/3 full of sloes, and 2-30Z of sugar - to taste really, top it up with Gin, leave for a few months, rack off. It helps if you shake up the sloes every few days for the first month - just briefly invert the jar.
Don't throw the used sloes away!! Then - fill the jar up with scrumpy cider - leave for 2 weeks. Sloe cider - it's damn good, particularly if you left a little bit of the spirit in the jar!
For an alternative take - try the same method, but use brandy instead. I think sloe brandy is even nicer than sloe gin. Again you can use the cheapest brandy you can find - but make it a 40% one.
I have used alcotec 48 a few times in the past and like the results as i can make a good butterscotch/skittles spirit drink out of them, but whenever i do the initial fermentation i can never get it anywhere near clear and the spirit always looks milky and uninviting, i use turboklar everytime but it seems to do little, is there anything i can use to make it clearer? whats all this charcoal stuff i hear about?
also is there an easier way of dissolving the mass amount of sugar in the water? it seems a buildup just sits at the bottom of the fermentor when you chuck it all in and endless stiring is needed to dissolve it
also is there an easier way of dissolving the mass amount of sugar in the water? it seems a buildup just sits at the bottom of the fermentor when you chuck it all in and endless stiring is needed to dissolve it
Heat up the water, and stir it lots. Boiling would be good as it ensures it'll be sterile.Chill wrote:is there an easier way of dissolving the mass amount of sugar in the water? it seems a buildup just sits at the bottom of the fermentor when you chuck it all in and endless stiring is needed to dissolve it
Can this be true. If so one heck of a big loophole.toplad wrote:in 2007 the law changed in the uk making it legal to distill without a licence for the purposes of fuel. so if the alcohol you use is for fuel no probs.. you can proiduce upto 2500 litres a year
Honest constable I mixed up my drums of ethanol and my bottles of Smirnoff