Pumpkin moonshine at home – a recipe with and without sugar

Alcohol, as you know, is made from almost everything that contains food for yeast, namely sugar in any of its manifestations. You’ve probably heard of hydrolyzed alcohol, which is made from forest industry waste. Against its background, pumpkin is far from the most extravagant sugar-containing raw material, from which moonshine is obtained not only with the prescribed strength, but also with a pleasant organoleptic. You need to prepare!

It’s nice to know that pumpkin contains not only sugars (up to 11% in ordinary pumpkin), but also starch (up to 20%), which can be successfully saccharified and fed to yeast (we will deal with this in the first recipe for pumpkin mash). And also: an immense amount of carotene and folic acid, a lot of vitamins and trace elements, calcium, potassium, iron and others like it. This is not to say that pumpkin moonshine will become a panacea and will promote health, but some of this will definitely remain in the distillate in a concentrated form and slightly brighten up the harm done by alcohol and its decay products to the body. But this is all in theory, and for us, as always, practice is more important.

Sweet table varieties of pumpkin (Marble, Azure, etc.) are more suitable for home brewing. An interesting organoleptic is the distillate obtained from Muscat pumpkin varieties (Vitaminnaya, Prikubanskaya, Zorka, Kroshka, etc.). Laying autumn varieties contain more starch, but during storage it is converted into soluble sugars, which, in turn, are also consumed during long-term storage of fruits. Pumpkin is high in pectin, which is known to be a source of methanol. During storage, the amount of pectin also decreases, so here you have to choose: use only harvested fruits with a high content of sugar, starch and pectin, or wait a little, which will reduce the yield of distillate, but also the amount of methyl alcohol in it. However, boiling pumpkin pulp helps to solve this dilemma (with prolonged heat treatment, pectin is destroyed).

Braga from pumpkin for moonshine without sugar

A traditional, slightly modified mash recipe with saccharification of pumpkin starch with barley malt. You can use store-bought malt or make your own. Due to the fact that only pumpkin and malt are used in the recipe, it is possible to achieve a truly pumpkin flavor in the distillate. That is why this mash is recommended for obtaining moonshine, from which tinctures and pumpkin liqueurs will later be prepared (at the end of the article you will find a recipe for pumpkin cream liqueur). It is better to use a sweet pumpkin, not stale, in which there is a sufficient amount of starch.

Peel the pumpkin from the seeds with the seed bed, remove the hard peel. Finely chop the pulp and transfer to a saucepan of a suitable volume. Add water and cook until pumpkin is fully cooked (1 to 2 hours). During the cooking process, pieces of pulp can be broken with a pusher or any other convenient tool. The puree should be homogeneous and quite liquid. After that, it needs to be cooled to 64..66^оC, add malt, heat insulate the pan and leave to cool to 20-23^оC. Add yeast prepared in advance (fermented in warm sweet water) and under the water seal. Wait until the mash ferments completely (usually 2 weeks) and proceed with the distillation. During fermentation, the wort can be stirred once a day.

Braga from pumpkin for moonshine with sugar

The lack of sugars from starch is compensated by granulated sugar. Organoleptics with this approach suffer somewhat, but the result is more predictable and therefore preferable for a novice moonshiner. Here it is better to pay attention to sweet table varieties of pumpkin after storage, when most of the starch has been converted into sugars (from this we conclude that mash with sugar can also be cooked in winter).

Peel the pumpkin, chop the pulp, transfer it to a saucepan of a suitable volume and pour water so that it completely covers the pulp. Boil until the pumpkin is completely boiled (1-2 hours), breaking the pulp with a crush or spoon. You should get a homogeneous, fairly liquid puree (if necessary, add more water). Condemn mash to 20-23^оC, pour into a fermentation vessel, add sugar, mix well, add prepared yeast. Cover the fermenter with a thick cloth and leave overnight. The next day, remove the cap formed on the surface of the mash, mix the wort and install a water seal. Every day, while the mash is fermenting, remove the resulting dense cap and mix well, while you need to monitor the liquid level – add clean vodka at room temperature to the initial volume of the wort. After about 2 weeks, fermentation will end – it’s time to distill.

Distillation of pumpkin brew on moonshine

To get started, read the material on fractional distillation, which describes everything you need to know about this process. We will definitely distill the pumpkin mash 2 times. The first time as quickly as possible, without selecting any fractions and dry (perhaps, a few tails can be selected from the mash with sugar). Before re-distillation, dilute raw alcohol (CC) to 20% alcohol, remembering to calculate the amount of absolute alcohol (AC). The second distillation, on the contrary, should be slow, with careful selection of the head (according to organoleptic or 8-12% of the AC in the SS) and tail (up to 40-50% alcohol in the stream) fractions. The remaining “tails” are taken to dryness and added to the next hauls or rectified. The resulting distillate can be purified in any suitable way, diluted to the desired strength and left to rest. The longer pumpkin moonshine is aged, the more pronounced the pumpkin flavor will come through.

The resulting moonshine can be drunk immediately after a few days of rest, but it is better to pour it into a prepared oak barrel or insist on medium-roasted oak chips (read about the preparation of chips and its use in this article). It makes a decent drink. You can also make pumpkin cream liqueur, which is closest in taste to commercial Fulton’s Harvest Pumpkin Pie cream liqueur. For this you will need:

Place half of the pumpkin on a baking sheet and send to preheated to 190^оC and bake for about 45 minutes. At the end of baking, the pumpkin can be cut into sticks and browned at a higher temperature until a crust forms (helps with filtering). In any case, cut the baked pumpkin into pieces and remove the hard skin, then transfer it to a jar of a suitable volume, add spices and pour in a liter of moonshine. Insist in a dark, cool place for 5 days, strain through cheesecloth, if necessary, filter through cotton wool or coffee filters. Take 400 ml of the resulting infusion, add condensed milk, cream and ground hazelnuts in a coffee grinder, then mix everything with a submersible blender. Let the liqueur rest in the refrigerator for a couple of days and start tasting (or prepare cocktails, the recipes of which are described in the article with other pumpkin cream liqueurs).

Cook boldly, drink deliciously, know the measure!