I don’t trust drinks in our stores, I decided to make Calvados from concentrate, sugar and yeast: I tell you what came out of this idea

Somehow, passing by a store with moonshine stills, I decided to go in and see what was interesting there. In addition to the moonshine and distillation machines themselves, it also sells related products.

In particular, I saw on the counter small bottles with all sorts of concentrates of famous drinks. There were both beer and wine concentrates, and there were also concentrates of strong drinks such as Calvados, cognac, whiskey, Bourbon.

Story from blog subscriber Leonid.

Why I decided to make alcohol myself

I bought a few bottles and decided to try making concentrate drinks first. For example, I bought a bottle of Calvados. For what?

Yes, simply because I don’t really trust the pretentious drinks sold in our stores, and it turned out to be impossible to buy them in Duty Free or abroad this year due to covid restrictions.

There are several ways to make your own drinks from such concentrates:

• Buy good vodka, dilute it to the desired degree with distilled water and make a drink. Unfortunately, the quality of vodka, even expensive in Russia, often leaves much to be desired.
• At the distiller, overtake the mash, get moonshine, clean it and then blend it. But you need to understand that no matter how you clean the mash obtained from the moonshine, all the same, extraneous odors will remain in the final product.
• I used the third way – I rectified the mash twice, got pure alcohol of 96,5 degrees and already diluted it with distilled water and blended it with various additives. The only way that eliminates any unnecessary odors and ingredients from the final product.

What ingredients are required

In my case, I needed:

Now sugar has risen in price a lot, 2-3 times, at the beginning of the year I specially made mash and distilled it while sugar was cheap. In February, I bought it for another 125 rubles per bag of 5 kg.

But even at 200 rubles for such a bag, it turns out to be very inexpensive compared to store-bought vodka. To the cost of materials must be added the electricity for the stove, which heats the distillation column, and running water, which cools the serpentine.

In my case, 20 kWh and 1 cubic meter of water are spent per liter of alcohol. That is about 200 rubles.

The cooking process

First, I put mash: I dissolved 20 kg of sugar in 10 liters of water, then I poured wine yeast and kept it all without oxygen for 2 weeks.

After preparing the mash, I distilled it on a distillation column, getting 6 liters of distillate with a degree of about 60 at the output.

Then I switched the distillation column to the rectification mode, selected the “heads” (acetone and fast-boiling alcohols), then the main part of the alcohol (body) about 4 liters and then selected the “tails” – various essential substances that boil at a temperature of more than 80 degrees.

I usually use these tails in the next distillation of alcohol, as they still have enough degrees that it is a pity to throw away.

After obtaining alcohol, I diluted it with distilled water, added sugar and Calvados concentrate.

What result did I get

If I blended Calvados from distillate or vodka, I would get a vodka taste or a musty smell. It is clear that for Calvados it would not give anything good.

Since I distilled pure alcohol, which has no foreign odors, the resulting Calvados turned out to be of excellent taste. I even invited my partner for a tasting, who actually has a greater ability to perceive smells than the average person.

Thanks to pure alcohol, he could not determine any impurities in the resulting Calvados and was even ready to take it for real. I think this is an excellent result.

Have you tried making drinks from concentrates?