It’s always the time of the day/year to enjoy a glass of gin but this Christmas, I have decided to make my own. Distilling has been a long standing dream of mine, but I have never really found the time to get started and besides, bulk duty free Bombay Sapphire is quite affordable.
Things changed when my early Christmas present arrived from Portugal – a copper still! There is a small family business over there who make artisan stills and sundry beautiful copper pots and vessels. Mrs Jerry found the company on the internet and excitedly messaged me over a picture. I knew then that it* was meant to be.
*’it’ being hours of endless fun leading to days of unending hangovers, if I wasn’t careful.
My still arrived in two large boxes and as I was travelling at the time, Mrs Jerry unwrapped her and took pictures to send to me. As always, I couldn’t wait to get home, but there was now another reason…
We christened my rather beautiful still ‘Genie’ because she looks a little like the bottle in ‘I dream of Genie’ and also because she’d be almost as much fun as Barbara Eden… Due to the rather archaic Australian laws prohibiting home distilling in anything larger than a 5 litre container, she was cunningly labelled as a still for making ‘essential oils’ – but given that she has a 33 litre capacity, that would be an awful lot of peppermint oil…
Genie’s first test drive was last week when a friend and I sparked her up. I had made a ‘wash’ a week earlier to give the gin a base. The wash is the basic source for making alcohol and you can brew it from all manner of organic substances. When the base has stopped fermenting; the idea is that you boil it in the pot and the alcohol ‘heads’ start to vaporise at around 70 degrees. You don’t want that bit as it’s the stuff that gives you really nasty hangovers, it also smells of oily rubbing alcohol. Heaven is where you want to be and that’s found in the high 70’s and at about 78 to 80 degrees it’s called the ‘hearts’ of the distilling run. As the temperature rises out to 100 degrees C, the smelly ‘tails’ emerge from the still; promising a slow and painful death to anyone unwise enough to do anything other than degrease a tractor engine with them.
In a typically Heath Robinson moment, I decided that the best way to cool the vapour passing through the condensing coil in the small copper cylinder was to hook up an aquarium pump to tubes in the large red bucket, which was full of cold water. The closed cooling loop of water could then be chilled further with ice or freezer blocks. Primitive, but effective. We giggled like naughty schoolchildren as the first drops plopped slowly out of the pipe. It really was like magic!
The Irish have a long history of making illicit alcohol and they traditionally made it from potatoes, grain or sometimes even treacle. They spelt it Potcheen, Poitin or Poteen, probably depending on how many they have had. It was illegal over there until 1997, when reality persuaded the authorities to change the law so that the drink could be made and sold legally under licence. During a tour of the province in the early 80’s, I remember coming across a batch in a van that the Royal Ulster Constabulary had confiscated during a search operation in South Armagh, Northern Ireland. I watched the burly Policemen quietly test it by lighting a small amount to look for its lead content – yellow flame = bad, blue flame = good.
It obviously met their benchmark as they slipped it into the back of their vehicle, rather than pour it down the nearest drain (it could make pretty good drain cleaner apparently). The RUC men shared it out liberally at our ‘end of tour’ party and stood back to watch the havoc ensue. A little while after the first few glasses, I somehow ended up in a conga line, wearing a bloodied toga with a button sewn onto my head after having it cut open by the front teeth of a severed pigs head that was thrown across a room. Perhaps there’s a reason why people think that the Irish are always drunk or mad, or both…
We made our ‘wash’ from a lot of sugar, water and yeast, which is simple but surprisingly effective. Many commercial distillers also make their wash from sugar and water when they are making gin or vodka as its simple to work with. It’s also pretty cheap!
My first attempt at distilling the wash took Terri and I several hours and a quarter of a bottle of Bombay Sapphire (I was so taken with the whole gin making thing, that I decided to do some benchmarking) and that first run resulted in some 70% proof spirit that smelt a little bit like windex. I spilt a few drops on the table and when wiping it up, I noticed that the varnish on the table had bubbled slightly. Hmmm, perhaps my technique needed a little tweaking?
Leaning over the collecting jug, I felt my face start to tingle and my eyes watered copiously from the vapours, so I knew I was in the right ball park. Another run through Genie and after we had added some aromatic botanicals, we had an 80% proof London gin with only the slightest bouquet of methylated spirits. Obviously, unless you want to lose your eyesight and probably most function in some pretty major organs, you don’t drink something that strong and I watered ours down by volume, with water to a manageable 42% Most gins are somewhere around 38% to 45%, so I felt that ours was safe enough. We mixed up a modest G&T and gingerly sipped it, not really knowing what to expect. Not bad for a first try, I thought. There was certainly some refining needed, but it was gin and thankfully not a different kind of poison.
Apparently you don’t age gin in barrels like you do with other kinds of spirit, you use glass or stainless steel, so I decanted mine into a glass demijohn and in order to cut the time needed by around a third, after tasting it again, I placed it into the freezer. I read that this also helps rid the gin of the slight metho smell. If it doesn’t, it’ll go back in the still for a second try. We’ll see what happens.
Happy New Year.
J.