Aussiedistiller, Home Distilling, Moonshine, Home Brew

Wondering if any of you fellas distill wine on a regular basis.
I dont like wine but wanna try making some into brandy to see what its like.
Any recomendations on a wine to try? Should it be red or white, oak aged unaged? Etc :-B

My previous school I did fruit wine with my senior chem class and it was entered into the ekka fruit wine comp. Parents had to come and collect the wine afterwards but some didn't bother. I took it home and ran it through my little 2" bubbler and after aging on medium toasted oak chips (it's all I had) I thought it made a nice brandy. Can't remember how long I aged it, probably 3 months or so. Can't remember what fruit wines there were either, lots of different types, just chucked em all in.

Give it a crack and see what you get :handgestures-thumbupleft:

Wine takes a while to "turn" for the brandy characteristics.

Or make nuetrel out of it.

Sam I was reading a thread earlier doc said he likes to oxidise the wine first for better flavour. This what you mean by turn? Or time on oak :-B

Db yea I really have to get organised to try this get something fermenting. I have a bunch of lady finger bananas on the tree they might be first.. :handgestures-thumbupleft:

If by turn you mean oxidise then that's pretty much what happened to the fruit wine I used. It was sitting around after a wine and cheese tasting night the school put on and the bottles were about to be thrown out after a fair time (a few weeks) after being opened.

I was meaning it takes a fair amount of time on oak before it becomes any good. Wine fresh off the still is the worst thing I have smelt out of a still. Once you have smelt foreshots of wine you can understand why drinking wine gives you such a cracking hangover :-B

My son put some old port through an air still just to see how it went, oaked for a couple of months and it was nice but very sweet

Anyone tried cask wine some have 13% alcohol and seem to have more standard drinks $3 per L but thats still expensive. .

The Stig wrote:My son put some old port through an air still just to see how it went, oaked for a couple of months and it was nice but very sweet

Yea have been considering port for quite a while stig.

Also been considering cask white for a start wynum..

Had a bloke the other day telling me to get grape juice straight from the winerys and distill it to make the best neutral [never herd of it ]

Ive done a bit now as neutral as I was given 250 litres. Cant tell the difference to any of my other neutrals. It is 14% too so a nice score

I did a brandy a couple years ago and well I'm not a brandy drinker so didn't really know what to make of it. I didn't like it but that doesn't mean much. I turn wine into neutral all the time and works fine. Free booze really if it's given to you :handgestures-thumbupleft:

I've done about 5000 litres of various wines through my continuous stripper.
The one important thing to learn is a crap wine makes a crap brandy. Period.
It doesn't matter if what was a good wine is corked or oxidised, it still makes a great brandy.
If when you do your spirit run you smell a piercing smell that hurts your nostrils then you haven't had enough copper to strip out the sulphides. You must rinse your product condenser in something alkaline to get what I think ends up as sulphuric acid out. My shotgun condenser had the vapour tubes eaten away by this. I had to make a new one.
I do a spirit run at about about 85%ABV and then dilute to 65% and then in 2 litre flagons use 2 French oak medium char dominoes in each.
After about 4 months you have a brandy that you couldn't buy an equivalent for less than $200 per bottle.

BTW, some wine spirits are so good that I don't make brandy from them. just dilute them down to 35% and enjoy them with a block or two of ice.
Another thing to do with them on a hot day is to make a Pisco sour, the national drink of Peru.

30ml of wine spirit per person
30ml of lemon juice per person
Crushed ice
One egg white
Put into a cocktail shaker and shake.
Pour into flat style champagne glasses and put about 5 drops of bitters onto the frothy eggwhite.
Heaven. :angelic-cyan:

Interesting....

YarraRanges wrote:You must rinse your product condenser in something alkaline to get what I think ends up as sulphuric acid out. My shotgun condenser had the vapour tubes eaten away by this. I had to make a new one.

I would say the caustic is what ate your copper away, i would be cleaning it with acid not caustic.

So are people doing sugarhead fruit mashs? Is there a rule of thumb for amount of fruit to total volume in the fermrnter?

Sam. wrote:

YarraRanges wrote:You must rinse your product condenser in something alkaline to get what I think ends up as sulphuric acid out. My shotgun condenser had the vapour tubes eaten away by this. I had to make a new one.

I would say the caustic is what ate your copper away, i would be cleaning it with acid not caustic.

I didn't do any rinsing with caustic at all as I was under the opinion that the product would be clean. After the condenser failed I assumed it would be acidic and most likely sulphuric as there was so much in the way of sulphides and the backset is always acidic and great for cleaning copper.
I'll rinse the failed part of the condenser in rainwater and test with some litmus paper.
BTW, we use the foreshots for killing flies and moths by flaming them. It's great fun. The foreshots from the wine have a green flame and the foreshots from a sugar wash have a blue flame.

bluc wrote:So are people doing sugarhead fruit mashs? Is there a rule of thumb for amount of fruit to total volume in the fermrnter?

Crows plumb brandy would be it :handgestures-thumbupleft:

bluc wrote:Yea have been considering port for quite a while stig.

You should call in for a taste