Booze in the Time of COVID-19: Making Moonshine

Many people have dealt with the pressure of being under-extended during quarantine by hoarding supplies or taking up old hobbies to make themselves feel less reliant on the fabric of society. I was one of the folks who broke out the old refrigerated instant yeast and flexed long underutilized baking skills to make myself feel safe. My wonderful* husband, on the other hand, reacted by buying an Air Still.

An air…what? You might ask. Why, a counter top distillation machine! The electric appliance missing from every average household. Though my loving quarantine companion has been making a great effort to reduce our sobriety by supporting local breweries, he still needed a project and wanted to feel more self-reliant in this time of social distancing (he insists it could always be used to purify water in a pinch). Hence, the Air Still.

Our first distillation attempt was on old homemade blueberry cordial we had sitting around. I won’t go into all the details of exactly why we have gallons of this stuff just hanging out, but it involves an absolutely excessive quantity of blueberries from our family’s farm, a good idea for a gift, lots of vodka, and (arguably) poor execution.** These disused potential gifts have sat around for five plus years and we’re too scared to drink their contents. But there’s perfectly good ethanol in those bottles! Let’s distill it back out!

The basic theory goes like this: input up to a gallon of alcohol-containing garbage (a.k.a. mash); output 700mL or so of potentially drinkable liquid that contains approximately 60% ethyl alcohol by volume (120 proof liquor). All the various components in the initial mash have different boiling points, so the goal is to boil them off separately and only catch the part you want, thereby extracting the tastier parts out of the mixture. The different groups of compounds that have similar boiling points and therefore come out together are called “cuts.” We caught our cuts in different glasses because we were doing so. much. science.

We were forewarned in the instructions to discard the first 50mL. This is because the lighter compounds that come out first (cuts called the “heads”) can range from not so great for you to stinky. Now, all of this doesn’t exactly apply to our distillation of the cordial, since it was made with vodka and not fermented, and isolating cuts is not entirely accurate on a tiny electric counter still without temperature readings. That being said, our first sample did smell a bit like rotten fruit and generally gave you the feeling of “not so good.” We caught the next 100mL or so in a separate glass and smelled of pleasant flowery things and, unsurprisingly, blueberries. We thought, “holy crap we may be doing this right!” Next we had several cuts where we thought “this smells like booze!” The middle desirable cuts are called the “hearts.” After a while the smell started leaning towards Colonial Club and Bad Brandy (the “tails”) and eventually we were getting mostly water and decided to give up and unplug the machine.

Overall, we probably got right around the promised 700mL of crystal clear stuff-that-will-get-you-drunk. The instructions say to water down the end product with about 300mL of distilled water and any desired flavoring (giving you about 1L total), since 120+ proof liquor is a bit powerful. We did absolutely no such thing, since that would defeat the purpose. After we get through our stash of blueberry cordial, we plan to try distilling dubious wine given to us over the years by friends and neighbors and eventually we would like to make our own mash with grain and yeast, although that requires some additional equipment.

Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to call what we made “good” by any means. It is, as advertised, extraordinarily high ABV drunk juice, aka moonshine. The kind of stuff you pull out to scare your friends at a party. But if you’ve ever been interested in attempting distillation or just learning more about it, an air still might be a fun kitchen toy for you. It advertises itself as a tool for making your own essential oils as well, but we have not attempted that.

In case you’re a defiant teenager thinking you’ve found the master level alcohol loophole, I will caution you that FedEx still requires an adult signature to take possession of the item (though our delivery person was thankfully OK with a COVID-19 wave from 6’ away). Although, what kid trying to go around and buy booze has $200 burning a hole in their pocket? Because that’s roughly what it costs to buy this contraption on Amazon.

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*Editor’s note: her husband is indeed wonderful; I’ve known him since he was 10.
**This is hilarious, to me.