Good cognac is very expensive, I decided to make it myself from alcohol and oak chips: I share the secrets of processing chips so as not to spoil the drink

I like to drink pure alcohol and good cognac. Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to buy alcohol in pharmacies without a prescription, and good cognac costs as much as my salary. Once I managed to order medical alcohol to a friend from Murmansk, and he brought a whole box.

And then I decided, since there is a lot of alcohol, you can make something good out of it. Including homemade cognac.

Story from my subscriber Boris.

How did the idea come about

Each person at first is looking for the easiest way to realize their desires. So I decided to find and prepare oak chips or sticks and make cognac from alcohol.

I started looking on the Internet for how to cook wood chips, and found out that there are three ways to go:

• collect oak chips in the Leningrad region and prepare it as recommended by theorists;
• buy ready-made wood chips on AliExpress;
• buy in a specialized store (which itself usually buys this wood chips in China).

On the website, I ordered such wood chips for $6. But Aliexpress delivers it within two months, and it is very easy to find oak chips at a sawmill. In addition, I want, as usual, to do everything with my own hands.

How oak affects distillate

Before you prepare the wood chips, you need to figure out what the wood chips do with alcohol, that it turns into cognac.

Any tree has complex sugars that would not even decompose in nature if it were not for the fungi that turn the tree into rot. Obviously, these sugars must partially pass into alcohol.

Tannins, which give the drink astringent properties, must also pass from oak to alcohol (or rather, to distillate). Both sugars and tannins are very reluctant to pass into the distillate, so the chips must first be prepared.

Soaking and boiling

If you try to search the Internet for ways to soak and boil the bark, you will drown in recommendations for using running, spring, silver, etc. water.

It is even recommended to boil wood chips in “running water”. To be honest, I don’t understand this at all. It is difficult to imagine how it is possible to create flowing boiling water at home.

Therefore, I looked for real forums where experts communicate. It is clear that no running water is needed during cooking. And I did everything according to a much simpler procedure:

1. Chips finely chopped, but not to sawdust.
2. I soaked it in ordinary filtered water for a week, changing the water daily.
3. After that, for a day, the bark was placed in a soda solution for additional disinfection.
4. Rinse under running tap water.
5. Boiled for half an hour, which is quite enough, and then washed again in running water.

Drying and roasting

Theoretically, chips should be dried for a week, and sticks in general for a month. But I assure you that you will only waste your time.

After boiling and washing the wood chips, I dried them under a fan for 4 hours.

Then he heated the oven to 150 degrees and fried half the wood chips at this temperature. The second half I fried at a temperature of 200 degrees. As a result, I received chips of medium and strong roasting.

Chips of strong roasting.

I laid foil on a baking sheet, laid the chips loosely and kept in the oven for about an hour, until the color of the chips became the same as recommended on the relevant forums.

Do I need to impregnate wood chips

Practitioners on the forums, of course, do not recommend soaking. In no country with a developed cognac production, barrels are soaked with anything but water. So, soaking chips is pointless.

After all, the drink should take from the wood chips what is in it. The remaining ingredients are added already during blending according to strictly defined procedures for each manufacturer.

Since, in theory, the chips need to be insisted on distillate, and not on vodka, I diluted medical alcohol to 60 degrees and filled the chips in a regular bottle. Since I had two types of wood chips, I poured four bottles to keep them at different times.

Three months later, a drink of a very noble color and quite tolerable taste was obtained. However, he was, of course, far from natural French cognac.

That’s why I decided to make cognac more professionally. And where do you get wood chips for such experiments?