My wife and I grow most of our own meat and veggies and I would love a mini still to produce pure moonshine for the tincture. I figure I only use a 60 oz bottle for the season, and the sole purpose of the moonshine would be for tincture. Are you a shiner? Chat with me
Just happened upon this thread but it was another side hobby of mine, currently dont really have the space, but mainly i don't drink much, but my last batch is almost out, but for references Everclear is available in Alberta but you have to be in province i believe and can't get it shipped, but i could be wrong.
First if you're actually interested head on over to homedistiller.org, wealth of info, do some reading on the main site then the forums are the gem.
With that out of the way, i you want to actually make your own i recommend nothing else other than a 2" bokakob to start, it's relatively easy to make and is the most tried and tested one out there and you can do everything with it, as in rums whiskeys, and high proof flavorless spirit if running a tall packed column.
Cost to make one is about $150-200 or less depends on how you source things, or more if you go with stainless steel milk jug boilers with electric elements "very nice", it's gonna be over kill if you only want a 60oz bottle a year though but i'll explain why.
For example i like to make my own rum, and other spirits, but rum is my base go to.
I typically make 15-16 Liter Washes which fits a 5 gallon bucket, a wash is the the same as say a beer wort or a wine must, its just the beginning stages of the process, really just some fermentable starch, water, and yeast, and the odd nutrient.
Would have to break out my brew notebook as it's been awhile since my last batch, but my typical wash for rum was made out of around 1-1.5kg of feed grade molasses, and 1.5 or so kg of sugar which i bought in 10kg bags, and then used standard baker's yeast which you can buy in a 2lb brick pretty cheap from most places.
the molasses coincidentally provided enough nutrients for the yeast that you didn't have to worry about that, which make sense why it also works well for our plants.
But after i would make a batch up it would finish brewing up in a week and half to three weeks, depending on how cold it was in the room where the wash was being stored.
That i would decant off into my brew vessel and could run off that batch in about 3hrs from startup to clean up, but this is where things can get interesting with what you want.
If i was wanting a flavorful rum i would typically run it through twice, and be running my still in a pot still fashion "no reflux, you condense and collect all the vapor you produce" so first run you come out with a product that's around say 40-60% alcohol, the second run it would end up being in the 80-85% range, but if running a reflux still such as a 2" bokakob with a tall column, you can get a purity of 95.6% which is the max concentration you can get alcohol "ethanol" without the aid of chemical drying because it creates a azeotrope with water at that percentage.
Saying that out of a 16 liter wash id typically yielded about 3-3.5 liters of 40-45% or 1.5 liters of high purity 95%, of which the material cost plus energy was around $1.30 a 750ml bottle of 45%, very cheap...
It's a hobby all to its own if you're interested, and is fun, i got to the point where i was trying to start to really tweak and perfect things but it was at a point where i was doing new batches to do real comparisons, with things like controlled heat gradient fermentations, different yeasts strains and how they impact final flavor, sugar sources and ingredients at what stages and how that effects things, ect, but with that when you only have a couple drinks a week, and each batch makes roughly 4-5 bottles a pop, you quickly get into a situation of having more than i could ever drink, and or give away, and would just toss batches that weren't to my likings or keep some of the bad stuff around for cleaning purposes, but then again i had a acquaintance that was doing two batches a week just to keep up to his and his wifes and friends consumption, which at that point you know its more than just an enjoyment type thing.
If you have questions i'll answer what i know, or help you if you want to go down that route.
Fun hobby.
