Moonshine from potatoes is a cheap recipe for strong alcohol. Drinking alcohol production technology

Potatoes are the main type of starch-containing raw material for the production of alcohol. In addition to potatoes, corn, rye, oats and other grains containing the carbohydrate starch can serve as raw materials for the production of alcohol.

Potatoes are steamed in large closed kettles with steam and turned into a semi-liquid pulp (mash). In large steaming vats, this gruel is mixed with sprouted and then dried barley grains - malt. Under the influence of diastase contained in malt - a biochemical catalyst of a very complex and still unclear structure (biochemical catalysts are called enzymes, or enzymes), the starch contained in potatoes (in an amount of about 20%) adds water and turns into sugary substances (mainly into the disaccharide maltose ):

The coefficients in the formulas show the required quantitative ratio of the reactants and the reaction product: for a certain number of starch molecules (m), half the number of water molecules m/2 is consumed and the same number of sugar molecules is obtained.

The hydrolysis of starch under the influence of malt with the formation of maltose was discovered in 1814 by the Russian academician Kirchhoff *. Distillers call this operation “saccharification of the mash.” The gruel becomes sweeter and more liquid. A “wort” is formed. A culture of lower fungi - yeast - is added to it and transferred to large open fermentation tanks, where wine fermentation occurs for about three days: sugary substances under the influence of yeast are converted into ethyl alcohol. The essence of fermentation is as follows. Rapidly multiplying in a nutrient medium, yeast fungi produce two enzymes, two different in action and complex in structure of the catalyst: maltase and zymase. The first catalyst hydrolyzes the disaccharide maltose into two glucose particles:

and the second, zymase, produces the actual fermentation: it decomposes glucose into carbon dioxide and ethyl alcohol:

From the resulting mash, containing about 10% alcohol, 90-96% raw alcohol is separated by distillation on columns, which is used to produce butadiene. From 12 g of potatoes you can get 1 ton of ethyl alcohol in this way. The residues after distillation of alcohol (stillage) consist of nitrogenous substances, fats, minerals and serve as excellent feed for livestock. It is estimated that the waste from each liter of alcohol can produce two liters of milk.

So, we got alcohol from potatoes. It is still received in huge quantities. There is only one bad thing: the production of such alcohol requires the use of food raw materials. But is it possible to obtain alcohol for technical purposes without consuming food products?

* Also known in the history of science is his namesake, the German physicist G. Kirchhoff, who was born in 1824 and who in 1859, together with R. Bunsen, discovered spectral analysis - a method for detecting chemical elements by their spectrum.

Homemade alcohol is primarily moonshine, the most famous and popular drink among residents of the former Soviet Union. Home distillers can make mash from various raw materials - sugar, grains, fruits, raw potatoes and distill excellent moonshine.

Potato moonshine is the easiest option for preparing a strong alcoholic drink at home, and is also cost-effective. Of course, such moonshine will not be of the best quality, but it will still be better than throwing away frozen and rotten potatoes in the spring. The right solution would be to make mash for moonshine out of it.

RECIPE FOR POTATO MOONHOON - “BABAKA”

Various recipes for potato moonshine require ingredients that are sometimes difficult to find in the home kitchen. The same recipe provides a simple technology for preparing moonshine and available ingredients.

Compound:

• Frozen potatoes – 10 kg;
• Brewing malt (or enzymes A, D) – 0.5-1 kg;
• Spring water – 15 l;
• Baker's yeast - 250 grams (or 50 grams dry).

In this recipe, you can use the enzymes amylosubtilin and glucavamorin instead of malt to convert starch into sugar. For mash, you need slightly frozen potatoes; if possible, keep them in the cold for a couple of days. The tubers will become sweeter, and the mash will ferment better.

Preparing mash for potato moonshine

1. To make moonshine from potatoes at home, you need to chop the tubers on a coarse grater or use a special feed crusher for this. Potatoes can also be cut with a regular knife, but in this case the fermentation period of the wort will increase by 5-7 days.
2. Add 10 liters of water heated to a temperature of 70°C into a container with potato pulp and stir the mixture thoroughly.
3. At a wort temperature of 65°C, add malt, mix everything, close the lid, wrap the container with a blanket and leave to saccharify for 1-1.5 hours. It is desirable that the temperature at this time be 65 plus or minus 2 degrees. Otherwise, saccharification will not occur.
4. After the time has passed, cool the wort to a temperature of 30°C and pour the liquid part into a fermentation container.
5. Pour 5 liters of water heated to 50°C into the remaining sediment, stir and let the solution brew.
6. After the mass has settled and a precipitate has formed, pour the liquid fraction into the fermentation container again. The base for potato mash is ready.
7. At a temperature of 20-25 degrees, pour pre-diluted yeast into the wort. Close the mash under a water seal and leave it to ferment in a warm place.
8. After one or two weeks, the mash for moonshine from potatoes is completely fermented. It should taste bitter, there should be no carbon dioxide bubbles, during this time the mash should lighten
9. Distill the finished mash using a moonshine still.

Moonshine from potatoes needs to be distilled at least twice, and preferably more. After each run, clean with charcoal. After this, the quality of moonshine will improve significantly and will be practically incomparable even to sugar.

Since potatoes have a low carbohydrate content, the yield of moonshine will be lower than when using sugar or grain raw materials. It is advisable to do the first distillation using a steam generator or steam-water boiler so that the mash does not burn.

Video recipe for making potato moonshine

RECIPE FOR MOONHOON FROM POTATOES AND OATS

Ingredients for mash:

• Potatoes – 10kg;
• Oats – 5-6 kg;
• Yeast 2 kg;
• Water 30l.

Making mash:

1. Wash the tubers and chop using a grater.
2. Grind the oats, pour into a container, pour in 5 liters of boiling water, stir the mixture.
3. Add cooked potatoes to the container and leave for 3 hours.
4. Pour the remaining 30 liters of water, at a temperature of 25 degrees, add diluted yeast.
5. Close the containers and leave to ferment in a warm room.
6. After a week, the finished mash can be distilled.

For your information! Many countries around the world consider the distillate obtained using potato raw materials to be harmful to human health. Due to the increased content of methyl, hydrocyanic acid, as well as fusel oils. Therefore, its sale is prohibited.

Moonshine is a real folk drink that is very popular among people of all ages. And in the current market situation, producing alcohol with your own hands becomes especially profitable.

Moonshine attracts with numerous advantages: it is environmentally friendly and completely safe for health. If the mash is prepared correctly, it is completely free of harmful impurities. As a result, drinking alcohol does not cause such harm to health.

It is especially pleasing that a wide range of products can be used as base raw materials. So, people have long loved the famous moonshine made from potatoes. This is very important for everyone who has their own subsidiary farm and grows potatoes. And then you can specially leave large quantities of tubers for potato moonshine.

Today we will take a closer look at how to make moonshine from potatoes at home. We will tell you a few recipes and give specific useful recommendations.

Features of potato moonshine

Good advice! Moonshine from potatoes turns out better if you take frozen tubers. These potatoes are immediately distinguished by their special, slightly sweet taste.

If the potatoes have not yet frozen, they can be specially sent to the freezer. In a few hours, the tubers will already be in the desired condition. Why is this necessary? When potatoes freeze, the starch partially turns into sugar.

Want a more original drink? Then you will need to add other components to the composition: for example, hops or oats, natural sweeteners. The use of malt gives an excellent effect. As a result, the aroma and flavor bouquet of the mash will be richer, more multifaceted and richer.

It's time to consider an interesting recipe for making moonshine from potatoes.

"Babka" recipe

Let's look at a simple recipe for potato moonshine; you will need the following products:

• malt – 1 kilogram, you can take barley, wheat or rye
• 30 liters of water
• 20 kilograms of potato tubers
• 500 grams of pressed yeast

Malt is a sprouted grain. It must be used because it is thanks to the enzymes contained in malt that starch molecules begin to break down and convert into sugar. It is this sugar that the yeast converts into alcohol during fermentation.

The final yield of moonshine will depend entirely on exactly how much starch is contained in the potatoes. Of course, this indicator differs depending on the variety.

Let's move directly to the algorithm for preparing mash from potato tubers.

1. First of all, wash the potatoes thoroughly and then grate them using a medium-sized grater.
2. Then pour 20 liters of 70-degree water into the mass of tubers and place well
3. The wort should turn out to be 63-65 degrees, if not, then bring it to this temperature by cooling or vice versa by adding hot water
4. Now it's time for the malt. Add it and then stir. Stir from time to time, maintaining the same temperature at 63-65 degrees for 1-1.5 hours
5. Cool the wort to 30 degrees and pour into a fermentation container
6. Add yeast after diluting it in water. Move the container to a dark room where room temperature is maintained, and install a water seal
7. After 12 days, the potato mash is ready. The taste will become bitter, lighten and sediment will form.
8. The mash is distilled once first, selected until the strength drops to 10 degrees in the stream
9. Determine the total amount of raw alcohol, measure the strength and calculate the amount of absolute alcohol
10. Dilute the raw material with water to 20-30 percent.
11. Do fractional distillation with head and tail selection.
12. Dilute the finished potato moonshine with water up to 40% and leave in a glass container for 7 days until the taste stabilizes

Now you know how to make moonshine and remember that there will be a little less moonshine than when processing sugar mash. This is due to the lower carbohydrate content in potatoes. Carefully follow all the rules for preparing moonshine: then it will be safe and tasty.

Watch another video of how moonshine is made from potatoes.

Making moonshine from potatoes is one of the methods for processing surplus crops. But in moonshine making, potatoes are considered a complex raw material, since they require saccharification - the processing of starch into sugar. Simply pouring water over the crushed tubers and then adding yeast, as is done with berries and fruits, will not work. The technology is much more complicated, you need to know the nuances and you will need at least a thermometer.

Attention! Even after cleaning and double distillation, moonshine from potatoes will contain quite a lot of harmful substances, including hydrocyanic acid, methyl alcohol and fusel oils. In many countries, due to dangerous impurities, the sale of potato distillates is prohibited by law.

Theory. Yeast needs sugar to produce alcohol, but potatoes have very little of it. But the tubers contain enough starch, which, under the influence of enzymes and high temperature, is broken down into sugar.

The necessary enzymes are found in malt - any sprouted grain that is sold in specialized stores for moonshiners, brewers and distillers. Malt can also be made at home from grains that can germinate.

Yeast is unable to convert pure starch into alcohol. Without adding malt, you will get very little potato moonshine and almost all the raw materials will be wasted.

Moonshine output. Theoretically, from 1 kg of starch you can get up to 1.7 liters of moonshine with a strength of 40%, but in practice this figure is 10-15% lower due to losses during fermentation and distillation. The starch content in potatoes is in the range of 10-25%, this figure depends on the variety (in late varieties it is much higher than in early varieties), the ripeness of the tubers and other conditions, including weather and soil nutrition.

If we take the average starch content as 15%, then 15 kg of potatoes will contain 2.25 kg of pure starch, from which, under ideal conditions, 3.83 liters of distillate (40%) can be obtained. From 1 kg of malt another 0.8-0.9 liters of forty-degree product will come out. As a result, the total theoretical yield according to the proportions in the recipe is 4.63 liters of potato moonshine.

1 kg of sugar reduces the amount of distillate by 1.1-1.2 liters with a strength of 40%. If the starch content in potatoes is low, it makes sense to add sugar, resulting in more moonshine. It is important to remember that for every kilogram of sugar an additional 4 liters of water is required, otherwise the wort will not ferment.

Ingredients:

• potatoes – 15 kg;
• malt (barley, rye, wheat) – 1 kg;
• water – 30 liters (and 4 liters for every kilogram of sugar);
• yeast - 100 grams dry or 500 grams pressed;
• sugar – 1 kg (optional).

Potato mash recipe

1. If possible, keep the tubers in the cold for 2-3 days so that the potatoes become slightly sweet. Freezing helps increase the yield of moonshine.

2. Wash the potatoes well, grate them or chop them in any other way until they become a liquid puree.

Attention! For saccharification to be successful, strictly follow the temperature ranges specified in the recipe, otherwise you will end up with little moonshine. The permissible error is 2-3 degrees.

3. Heat 20 liters of water in a saucepan to 70°C, add grated potatoes, stir until smooth.

4. Add malt. Mix again. It is very important that the mass does not stick to the bottom of the container and there are no lumps.

5. Cover the pan with a lid, heat the wort to 65°C and maintain the temperature for 60 minutes with slow, periodic heating, stirring every 10-15 minutes.

6. As quickly as possible (so as not to infect with pathogenic microorganisms), cool the potato porridge to 30°C. It is best to place the pan in a bath of cold water or ice.

7. Pour the liquid part into a fermentation container, add sugar and clean cold water in a ratio of 1:4 if desired. Add yeast diluted according to label instructions.

8. Pour 10 liters of water at 50°C into the remainder at the bottom. Mix. Wait 10-20 minutes until the sediment forms again, then pour the liquid into the fermentation container, where the first part of the potato mash obtained in the previous step is located.

9. Close the container with the mash with a water seal (you can use a medical glove in which a hole is pierced in one of the fingers), transfer to a dark place (or cover) at room temperature.

After 5-12 days, the potato mash will be ready: the water seal will stop releasing gas (the glove will deflate), the sweetness will disappear in the taste, the mash will become lighter than initially, and a layer of sediment will form at the bottom. When all these signs appear, you can begin distillation.

Making potato moonshine

10. Filter the spent mash through several layers of gauze (so that the sediment does not burn) and pour into the distillation cube.

11. Make the first distillation, select the distillate until the strength in the stream drops below 30%. Measure the total strength of the resulting moonshine and determine the amount of pure alcohol. For example, 4 liters of 43% alcohol contain 1.72 liters of pure alcohol (4*0.43=1.72). If desired, clean the moonshine with charcoal or any other method.

12. Dilute the distillate with water to 20% strength, then distill again. The first 15% of the yield from the amount of pure alcohol is collected separately and poured out or used for technical needs. This harmful fraction is called “heads”, contains dangerous substances, and is therefore not suitable for consumption.

13. Select the main product (called the “body”) until the strength in the stream drops below 45%, then finish the distillation.

14. Dilute the finished potato moonshine with water to 40-45%, seal it tightly and leave for 2-3 days in a dark, cool place before tasting. After the completion of the chemical reactions of mixing with water, the taste will stabilize and become better.

Among the people, moonshine is almost the most popular alcoholic drink. No matter what home craftsmen made it from, almost any raw material can be used to make mash and distill moonshine. Today we will look at several recipes for moonshine from potatoes. The end result, of course, won’t be the most ideal product, but it’s still better than just letting the potatoes rot in your cellar. After all, from my own experience I know that often in the spring there are a lot of potatoes left, which will rot before they have time to eat them. And one of the options to give it a second life is to make mash from it.

For the fermentation process we need two main components: sugar and yeast. To do this we need to convert the potato starch into sugar. For this recipe we will use flour. But it’s even better to freeze the potatoes first; I think you’ve noticed more than once that frozen potatoes have a sweetish taste. Many recipes advise using frozen potatoes; if this is not the case, then specially place them in the cold or in the freezer for several days.

The recipe for potato moonshine will be very useful if, as a result of severe frosts, you end up with a lot of frozen potatoes, which are of little use.

Potato moonshine recipe - “Babka”

Ingredients:

Step-by-step preparation of moonshine from potatoes:

1. Grind the well-washed potatoes on a grater;
2. Fill with 15 liters of boiled water at a temperature of 60 degrees;
3. Pour flour here and mix;
4. After sediment has formed, drain the liquid into another container;
5. Add 10 liters of water again, mix and let it brew;
6. After sediment appears, drain the liquid into the same container as before (point 4); This will be our potato mash;
7. Then add yeast to the mash and let the mash steep for two weeks. And as soon as it is infused, we do the distillation.

Moonshine from potatoes, sugar and bread

This is a quick recipe for making moonshine with potatoes, but sugar will help us here. And so, let's take:

• 2 kg potatoes
• 4 loaves of bread
• 5 kg sugar
• 750 ml milk
• 500 g pressed yeast (100 g dry)
• 25 liters of water

Preparation:

• Cook and mash the potatoes, add sugar, milk, yeast and crumbled bread, then pour in warm boiled water, stir and leave the mash for a day. After which we distill it.

Moonshine from potatoes and oats

Ingredients:

• 10 kg potatoes
• Oats 6 kg.
• Yeast 1.5 kg
• 35 liters of water.

Preparation:

Potato and sprouted grain recipe

• 8 kg potatoes
• 4 kg of sprouted grain (wheat, oats, barley);
• 25 liters of water
• 100 g yeast

Making mash:

1. First of all, we cook the potatoes, after which, without draining the water, we crush them until pureed.
2. Grind the sprouted grain, it is best to pass it through a meat grinder.
3. We put some of the ground malt into hot purees and mix, pour the rest on top and let it brew for 12 hours.
4. Stir, add water and yeast, steep the mash for about a week.

All of these potato drink recipes recommend making.

I warn you right away, this is not the best way to prepare moonshine; due to the low sugar content in potatoes, the yield of the finished product will be significantly lower than when preparing classic sugar moonshine. And it will be of worse quality, it will contain a large amount of fusel oils and hydrocyanic acid. In a number of countries around the world, such a drink is prohibited from being sold, as it is considered hazardous to health.

But if everything is done correctly, the harmful fractions are separated, you will get a very good drink, and if you take a number of additional cleaning and odor control measures, you will generally get a normal product.

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