Vodka

That used to be comedian Chelsea Handler's favorite drink, but, y'know, she can afford it.

En flaska Absolut, tack.

Moonshine fan myself. The good stuff mixes with just about anything and is smooth to the point you can drink it with no effect until you stand up.

Only had a few store bought brands and wasn’t really impressed. With it being so popular I’m seeing more new brands come out but I’m not gonna buy one to try so unless somebody offers me a taste for free I’m not looking.

Italians have been adding grappa in espresso for ages....it's called a Caffè Corretto.

As a kid I remember all the male oldies in my family loved the stuff. I can't do it to my espressos.

Call me a barbarian but after vomiting an acquaintance’s rare and very expensive scotch I finally had to admit that I just don’t like the taste of hard liquor, even vodka, but drank it for affect or to be sociable.

The only exception was the moonshine I used to get years ago when I was working out of Louisiana. A coworker brought it down from Arkansas and called it “Corn Liquor”. It was about 150 proof, had a nice slightly sour “twang” and was so smooth it was actually fairly pleasant to drink straight although I’d cut it with some 7 up. It came in gallon milk jugs for $15 a gal.

Wish I could still get it, but for now I’ll stick to beer and maybe a few shots of Tequila once in a while.

Well that can't be true or 1000's of reviewers are either just liars or fools ...or... it could be your brother in-law :)

I have taken to adding a few drops of BLUE food coloring to the vodka too and now it resembles windshield washer fluid .

Almost tempted to put it in an old Windex spray bottle. I have to admit it makes drinking a lot more fun.

I've got 12 oz. in a tabasco bottle and tried red food coloring but the Blue in a clear 12 oz. Louisiana hot sauce bottle with the label peel off is much more visually appealing .

'Good Old Blue'

You may as well get some Everclear for your coffee. Don’t drink it straight, though.

Sobieski has been mentioned, I’m personally also quite fond of the polish Żubrówka Biała, and Biała Dama is the absolute top.

I make vodka from anything that is no good to drink. Beer, wine is stripped then diluted to 40% then run again. Do this 3 times then filter through carbon and you get neutral spirit with no taste.
I drink it 2:1 vodka and orange juice

That’s a good idea if it can remove those nasty hops, i have some foul tasting IPA with extra hops that is undrinkable for me.

I watched a few of those hillbilly moonshiner videos, and one guy had an array of jars that he’d fill in series, and the first 1-2 tasted ugly, then it was a bunch of good alky, then the last few were ugly, too.

Never quite understood, as I thought distilling would just cook out the stuff with the lowest BP first, ie, EtOH.

I never got into the whole distilling thing, so just assumed that aside from EtOH and water, everything else was either solids or oils (eg, fusel).

Kauffman Vodka is the best vodka I have ever tasted. And I’ve tried a lot of vodkas :innocent:

To put it simple because I have trouble explaining
Vodka is distilled at 75% abv under that it starts to contain to many impurities. The hops are oil based so the boiling point is higher than the alcohol and stays in the boiler. Carbon is the final polish that makes it tasteless. Under 40% abv it tastes like the water it is diluted with and doesnt give you a hang over.

Not sure what you talking about. We don’t make shine here in arkansas :stuck_out_tongue:

$15 for a gallon must have been awhile back. The stuff goes for $20 a quart now days. $25 if it’s the flavored fu fu stuff the city boys like.

You get different flavor and ABV from start to finish as the pot heats and cools. You got heads mids, and tails (should be self explaining). A good distiller can mix a bit of each per flavor of each and come out with a better product than what some poorer distillers do and just dump the whole batch in a bucket then rebottle it. The art of making shine is reading the flow from the worm and knowing how to mix it not just some 100 year old recipe. Anybody can read a recipe card your grandma wrote but baking the pie exactly like she did takes some know how. Dumping it can also lower the ABV and if you didn’t know what you were doing from the start makes it lower quality and if you were selling it people won’t give you as much.

A lot of the flavored shines come from people trying to use up the lesser quality tasting stuff. If it aint good enough to drink straight cover it up. Back before my time people wouldn’t give as much for flavored shine because they could do that themself. Since the tv shows came out and the city kids made it the new IN thing to drink you can just dump a handfull of red hots or jelly beans in a jar of crap shine and charge more than the good stuff. Of course I do not make, sell, or have any knowledge of how to. All of this is just what I learned from what was written on the wall of the bathroom in the holiday inn express I stayed in last night.

The process follows a curve, first volatiles (some of which comprise the smell of the fermented mash), then metOH (if the fermented mash comes from fruit that contained pektins), then etOH, then water. These are not completely distinct as most of these form azeotropes- mixtures that have boiling points of their own, not individual boiling points of their constituents (some even lower than either, e.g. etOH and water form an azeotrope at 95-ish % by mass that boils off lower than either water or etOH alone). Because of this one needs to separate the distillate by temperature (the mixture won’t go any higher in temperature until the currently boiling phase is gone) and also why you can’t ever get 100% ethanol by normal atmospheric distillation alone if the starting mixture contained any water.

There’s an art to distilling good spirits. There’s also a huge price to pay if it’s not mastered by the distiller. No coming back from methanol toxicity.

Which is quite fascinating on its own as methanol itself isn’t actually much more toxic than ethanol, it’s even said to be sweeter and somewhat more intoxicating.

It’s our liver enzymes (alcohol dehydrogenase and aldehyde dehydrogenase) that turn it into formaldehyde and formic acid. These enzymes have evolved to break down ethanol naturally present in fermenting foods to acetaldehyde and acetic acid which are relatively harmless and our kidneys can remove them, we just get hungover by all the weird disbalances this detoxification process introduces. Formaldehyde and formic acid on the other hand are super toxic, damaging the optic nerves first and then wreaking all sorts of other havoc until one dies in agony.

Thank you for the explanations and the tip about the pectins, didn’t know about that before.

i knew about losing sight and optical nerve stuff, etc. learned about it on the Television and the pine cone liquor, seen it happen

Blinded—but is Good!

Mmmm, I wondered about “wood alky” (MeOH), thinking maybe unscrupulous ’shiners might cut corners and use garbage material to make it, but that’s pretty interesting.

Happy to share but (an obligatory) please don’t take this as comprehensive distilling advice, there are other ways metOH might be produced without involving pektins. Last thing you want in such operation is a false sense of safety.

This is utter nonsense.
It is actually made to be drinkable, that’s why it is called “Drinking Alcohol”, used for making extracts or other medicine.
What you refer to is Rubbing Alcohol, which is not drinkable and not meant that way, it’s to be used for disinfecting surfaces.