Recipes, alcoholic drinks, yeast, mash preparation.

This page will provide you with recipes of an alcoholic drinks that can be prepared with help of fractional distiller, for convenience some spirits recipes will include fractions calculation. Also on this page you will find recipes of different dishes that originally consumed along with alcoholic drinks, so along with vodkas and liquors your table will be beautifully organized with good healthy food and you will be prepared for any kind of occasion.

Basic Recipe.

I call the following recipe the basic one, because this method is simplest, gives very good results (quality vice) and all the ingredients that used for this recipe are can be obtained in any supermarket, moreover they are cheap. Plus the basic recipe is basic because the spirit that made with the help of this recipe will be used as a base for different alcoholic drinks production.

First of all you will need the 25L fractional still, and following ingredients:

To make 20L of wash

6kg of sugar - any sugar: white, brown, raw, beet sugar, cane one or corn syrup, caramel candies (make sure that there is no additives preventing fermentation like sulphur dioxide or sulphites).

250g of yeast - can be active dry baking yeast, brewing turbo yeast, or fresh compressed baking yeast, in case of using just baking yeast add to your ferment (we talking about 20 L of mash) 6gramms of urea to supply the yeast with nutrition because the sugar is empty and fermentation can stop before completing another method is add to your ferment a quarter of rye loaf (remove it prior distillation), the beer kit yeast are good but very slow in case of using beer yeast mix them with compressed fresh baking yeast, in my case I mix 250gramms of fresh compressed baking yeast with 250gramms of turbo yeast very fast and 100% success.

Now you have got your sugar and yeast organized, and you have to have a 25-30L  fermenting vessel - it could be the square plastic barrel that you can see on video about distillation or it is can be a big plastic backed or any other vessel that could be suitable for fermentation ( avoid aluminum).

To prepare the mash get 5L of hot water into the fermenting vessel and add 5.5kg of sugar  and stir sugar and water till it dissolves completely,

 then add some more water to make approximately 19L of sugar/water mix in the fermenting vessel, the temperature of mix must be between 23 and 25 degrees Celsius,

now take your yeast and mix with 0.5kg of sugar in separate vessel if you are using a dry yeast then add around 250ml of sugar/water mix from the fermenting vessel, if you are using a fresh compressed baking yeast then mix it with dry sugar until the mix becomes liquid and absolutely consistent.

 When the yeast  is mixed, add the liquefied mix of yeast into fermenting vessel and stir properly.

Top up the level to make 20L of ferment

 and leave till fermentation is complete - in this case 7 days is more than enough please make sure that fermenting vessel is not closed tight make some kind of vent hole in the vessel's lid, and keep the vessel in the temperature range of 20 to 26 degrees Celsius, do not use old compressed baking yeast - only fresh ones and if you bought them - then use it the same day or day after make sure that you buying really fresh ones for your "baking" hobby, the old yeast are getting soapy and will form a lot of foam in your ferment and escape the fermenting vessel, run everywhere on the floor :-).

This is how the good fermentation is looks like:

When fermentation is complete - fill up the 25L fractional still with 20L of ready ferment and apply small raw spirit column then distill as specified in distillation manual that included with Fractional distiller construction manual,

 out of 20L of ferment you should get 6L of 50% raw spirit that is not yet suitable for drinking. To make a good spirit at    95%+ first empty the boiler after the first distillation an fill the boiler with 6L of  raw spirit that you get after the first distillation, add to the boiler approximately 8L of fresh water and apply fractional column - re distil the raw spirit and fractionally separate all impurities as specified in distillation manual that included with Fractional distiller construction manual. 

When fractional distillation is complete you should get 2L of 96% spirit that after dilution with water will bring  almost 5L of 40% spirit,

for dilution options see the dilution table below.

This is the basic recipe that you can use to make your spirit with fractional still, and use this spirit as a base for different alcoholic drinks - you can make it any strength you want, if you want to make a good vodka then dilute this spirit down to 40% and run it once though the straight filter, fill up the bottles and put in a freezer: drink vodka ice cold and enjoy, if you are planning to make different flavoured drinks then just dilute the spirit with water to the desired percentage and use your  spirit without filtration.

 Use table below to calculate the ratio of water and spirit to obtain the needed strength of alcoholic drink.

Where X – spirit strength before dilution with water/ %alc/vol

V – Spirit strength after dilution with water/%alc/vol

To calculate amount of water that needed for achieving of certain percentage of spirit take the top raw as a guide and check what figure is matching the spirit percentage you have got.

In most cases you will work with 95% spirit so first measure the amount of spirit you have got in this case @ 95% then choose what percentage you want this spirit to be after dilution.

After that find the figure crosswise on the table, and multiply the amount of spirit by this figure

The result must be divided by 100 and you will get amount of water to be added to your spirit to make planned percentage.

Example: we have got 2L of spirit @ 95% and we want to make 40% drink so we will need to find the amount of water to be added thus 2L of spirit must be multiplied by figure that cross match 40 on a vertical axis – the figure is 144.4 so 2L * 144.4 = 288.8 then divide the result by 100. 288.8÷ 100 = 2.888L of water that will be added to spirit to make 40% drink in this case you have got 2.888 + 2 = 4.888 L of 40% alc/vol drink.