What is Moonshine Made Out of?!
Corn is a common product used to make it but I have seen people use barley such as the Irish do,
The corn is ground into meal. Today, some moonshiners use commercial hog feed because it's mostly made of corn and is easy to buy without attracting a lot of attention.
The corn meal is soaked in hot water in the still. Sometimes sugar is added (or even used instead of grain), but traditional moonshiners added malt to convert the starch in the corn meal into sugar. Then the yeast is put in, which starts the fermentation process. (See How Beer Works for details on the fermentation process.) This mixture, called mash, is stirred thoroughly and heated for a set amount of time in the still. The still and all the metal piping used are made of copper, which conducts heat well and doesn't leech into the alcohol.
The stone furnace beneath the still is brought up to about 172 degrees Fahrenheit (78 C). Wood, coal and even steam have been used in the past to heat the still, but most moonshiners started using propane decades ago.
The alcohol evaporates. As pressure builds in the still, the alcohol steam is forced through the cap arm, a pipe that leads out of the top of the still.
Some moonshiners use a thump keg, which is simply a heated barrel into which the steam is forced. Some solid material from the mash usually comes along with the steam, so the thump keg, so named for the thumping sound the bits of mash make when they drop into the barrel, re-evaporates the alcohol, filtering out the mash. If a moonshiner wants to make his or her alcohol extra potent, he or she might "charge" the thump keg -- add undistilled mash or a few gallons of alcohol into the keg so the steam picks up extra alcohol vapor on its way to the worm box.
The steam travels into the worm, a coiled length of pipe that winds down the inside of the worm box. The worm box is a crate or barrel that has cold water, usually diverted from a nearby creek, flowing into the top and then back out the bottom. This keeps the worm bathed in constantly circulating cold water, which condenses the alcohol steam into liquid.
A spout, tap, or hose leads from the end of the worm into a bucket, usually through one last filter.
The resulting clear liquid is ready to be illegally bottled and sold.
Answers: gee a question i can answer due to the fact that i am a southerner.
Corn is a common product used to make it but I have seen people use barley such as the Irish do,
The corn is ground into meal. Today, some moonshiners use commercial hog feed because it's mostly made of corn and is easy to buy without attracting a lot of attention.
The corn meal is soaked in hot water in the still. Sometimes sugar is added (or even used instead of grain), but traditional moonshiners added malt to convert the starch in the corn meal into sugar. Then the yeast is put in, which starts the fermentation process. (See How Beer Works for details on the fermentation process.) This mixture, called mash, is stirred thoroughly and heated for a set amount of time in the still. The still and all the metal piping used are made of copper, which conducts heat well and doesn't leech into the alcohol.
The stone furnace beneath the still is brought up to about 172 degrees Fahrenheit (78 C). Wood, coal and even steam have been used in the past to heat the still, but most moonshiners started using propane decades ago.
The alcohol evaporates. As pressure builds in the still, the alcohol steam is forced through the cap arm, a pipe that leads out of the top of the still.
Some moonshiners use a thump keg, which is simply a heated barrel into which the steam is forced. Some solid material from the mash usually comes along with the steam, so the thump keg, so named for the thumping sound the bits of mash make when they drop into the barrel, re-evaporates the alcohol, filtering out the mash. If a moonshiner wants to make his or her alcohol extra potent, he or she might "charge" the thump keg -- add undistilled mash or a few gallons of alcohol into the keg so the steam picks up extra alcohol vapor on its way to the worm box.
The steam travels into the worm, a coiled length of pipe that winds down the inside of the worm box. The worm box is a crate or barrel that has cold water, usually diverted from a nearby creek, flowing into the top and then back out the bottom. This keeps the worm bathed in constantly circulating cold water, which condenses the alcohol steam into liquid.
A spout, tap, or hose leads from the end of the worm into a bucket, usually through one last filter.
The resulting clear liquid is ready to be illegally bottled and sold.
Moonshine is usually made from corn, but the strongest stuff is made from sugar. Anything that rots can be turned into moonshine. You just put your material in a still and add alcohol yeast to turn it into booze. Also, the more you distill it, the more pure it gets.
anything fermentable .... any vegetative matter (in other words, plants) contains sugars .... this is the only thing that gets fermented, regardless of what raw material you are using (crops, fruits, etc). in the case of grains, often an additional step is required to convert their starches into sugars before they can be fermented.
"strongest from sugar" is misleading because regardless of what your initial product is fermented from, distilling by it's very nature renders a nearly uniform ethanol level that's more dependent on the number of times you distill than the source of your sugars way back earlier in the process. using refined sugar is simply a shortcut to avoid using more labor-intensive materials like crops of fruits.
often corn for American moonshine;
often barley for Irish "poitin
any neutral grain spirit can be distilled from practically any fermentable base material; once it's distilled, flavors begin to erode into a generic ethanol, unless you then do things like age in oak (whiskeys) or add other flavors; in some cases if herbs are added to the fermenting base, those flavors are more likely to carry over into the distillation stage (juniper berries for gin, for example)