If you panicked and bought a lot of buckwheat: how to make moonshine from it, and maybe even whiskey

About a month ago, we all heard on the news that buckwheat, pasta, toilet paper and other essentials disappeared from supermarket shelves. As it turned out, now there is no problem with the supply of products. At least the government didn’t cheat.

My friend called me the other day and asked if I needed buckwheat. His mother-in-law bought this “strategic” product during the mass hysteria. But I didn’t take into account one thing – no one in the whole family eats this very buckwheat.

And after all, a sane woman is an assistant professor of a university department in retirement! And I thought that if buckwheat cannot be eaten, then it can be drunk. Today I will share with you a recipe for buckwheat moonshine. I hope it’s useful. Moreover, its cost is quite low.

Features of moonshine in Greek

For me, as for many, it was a surprise that moonshine can be made from buckwheat. However, it is. And the drink, depending on the type of cereal and the subtleties of technology, can be completely diverse in taste.

Moonshine made from brown roasted buckwheat will have a harsh taste and bready aroma. If you use green unroasted cereals for mash, then the drink will be soft, and fruit and flower notes will appear in the aroma.

If you stand buckwheat moonshine in an oak barrel or, in the absence of it, insist on oak bark or wood chips, you get a real buckwheat whiskey. After all, the recipe for making whiskey is very similar to the one above.

On such moonshine, it is not recommended to make sweet, fruit tinctures. Its “rigidity” will not allow such aromas and tastes to open up.

What ingredients are needed to make moonshine on buckwheat

Unlike ordinary sugar moonshine, buckwheat is much more difficult to cook. Yes, you will need more ingredients. But the resulting drink will delight you with its extraordinary taste.

Alcohol is obtained by fermenting sugar in mash. However, in buckwheat, as in other cereals, carbohydrates are present not in the form of sugars, but in the form of starch, which does not decompose when it is fermented by yeast.

Therefore, in order to get good mash, you first need to convert starch into sugar. This procedure is called saccharification and is carried out using malt. This is the name of a specially germinated grain of wheat, barley or rye.

So, the necessary ingredients for buckwheat mash are:

• buckwheat is suitable in any form – whole, cereal or flour – 5 kg;
• malt, preferably barley or wheat – 1 kg;
• sugar – 1 kg, it will be required only if the buckwheat is of poor quality and there will be few sugars in it;
• 30 liters of water will be needed in total, but it will have to be used in parts, when sugar is added, an additional 4 liters per kilogram will be required;
• yeast will need 150 grams of live, but you can replace them with 30 grams of dry.

All this must be prepared in advance so that the ingredients are “at hand”, since there will be no time to search for the missing ingredients in the process of preparing the mash. The yield of the product – buckwheat moonshine with a strength of 40%, with such a number of components, will be approximately equal to 5 liters.

How to make moonshine in Greek

The main differences from sugar moonshine are in the preparation of the wort. For cooking, you need a large saucepan and a thermometer.

It is necessary to control the temperature indicated below when performing all processes, otherwise the wort will not work. The maximum allowable deviation from the indicated values ​​is 2-3°С.

The procedure for preparing the mash is as follows:

1. Buckwheat and separately malt must be crushed to the state of cereals, without mixing with each other. After that, buckwheat must be placed in a saucepan and poured with 20 liters of clean water with a temperature of 50-55 ° C.
2. The contents of the pan must be heated on the stove to 60 ° C and boiled at this temperature for 15 minutes.
3. Bring the mixture to a boil and cook for 1-1,5 hours, stirring constantly. The result should be a thick porridge.
4. After boiling, cool the contents to 63-68 ° C and, stirring constantly so that lumps do not form, add malt.
5. Maintain the temperature at 63-68°C for two hours, stirring the wort every 30 minutes. The porridge should be sweet. If the taste is not strong enough, you can add sugar.
6. Pour the resulting contents with as cold water as possible and, after cooling to 25-28 ° C, add activated yeast.
7. After pouring the mash into a fermentation tank with a water seal, leave it for fermentation for 3-7 days. During this period, she will “ripen”.

You need to distill the mash after it “clarifies”, that is, it settles, otherwise the sediment in the distiller will burn and spoil the taste of moonshine.

The initial distillation is carried out without separation into fractions, until the fortress drops to 20-25% vol. After that, the resulting product (usually with a strength of 60-65% by volume) must be diluted with water to a strength of 18% by volume. and overtake a second time, selecting the first, strongest fraction – the “head”. It cannot be used.

Distillation stops as soon as the strength of the product drops to 45% vol. The entire volume of the product must be diluted with water up to 40-45% vol. and, pouring into glass bottles, leave for two days. After that, the product is ready for use.

The cost of moonshine in Greek

It would be interesting to calculate the cost of buckwheat moonshine. To do this, just add the cost of all the products indicated in the list of ingredients, and divide by 5.

So:

• 5 kg of buckwheat – 400 rubles;
• 1 kg of malt – 200 rubles;
• 1 kg of sugar – 25 rubles;
• 30 liters of bottled water – 150 rubles;
• 30 g of dry yeast – 20 rubles.

Only about 800 rubles. After keeping the resulting product in a barrel for a couple of months and dividing the cost by 5, we get 160 rubles per 1 liter of excellent whiskey! I think that at this price you can not buy a quality product in the store. Not bad, right?

Excessive alcohol consumption is harmful to your health. Take care of yourself!

Did you buy buckwheat and toilet paper before quarantine? Do you think it is worth making moonshine from buckwheat or is it better to leave it as an emergency reserve just in case?