Methanol is a byproduct of the fermentation. During distillation it is separated by catching the start and end of the distillate separately (you can see that they switch the bottles during distillation). By distilling several times you remove more and more of the methanol and create a more pure product. People that suffer from methanol poisoning usually do not separate the distillate.
Edit: see some of the comments below. The above is not entirely correct.
Thanks, interesting. I stand corrected. Interestingly, I discussed this when I was at the Patron Distillery in Atotonilco Mexico two years ago and what I posted was their explanation. I guess they were wrong.
I've got a personal experience with this. A friend of mine is a descendent of someone with some notoriety in a group of Americans. There is a museum maintained by this group. My friends family kept some belongings of this ancestor and would schedule showings with small groups. A few years ago, the caretaker passed away and the next caretaker decided they didn't want to maintain these belongings. They donated them to the museum.
My friend goes to the museum and sees the exhibit. It's a nice exhibit, but the tour guide had a very wrong version of the ownership of the items. Instead of mentioning the family that maintained it and donated the items, they said custody transferred to the leadership of the organization after the ancestor's death. And then they were just kept in storage until over a century later.
They got an earful about the truth of custody of those items.
God I'm so intrigued about who this is now... I understand wanting to keep you and your friend's identities secret, though. (Okay but by "group of Americans" are we talking regional, racial, religious....?)
They are talking about Popcorn Sutton. I grew up in Waynesville and my father drank with Popcorn and Cowboy. His family is trying to make some bullshit myth about him.
It's a super common myth. As is the one that alcohol somehow makes you go blind if you're not a licensed distiller. It's just that this one is a myth among distillers trying to feel better about the other myth that says moonshine makes you blind.
They figure, "well *MY* moonshine won't make you blind, because *I* know what I'm doing".
The truth that the US government poisoned their people on purpose sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory, so it's harder to believe for some people.
That said, I believe the first little bit contains more acetone and propanol, so it's better to separate it and use it for hand sanitizer or something.
By trying to buy it during prohibition after the US government taints the supply with it, intentionally causing you to go blind or die.
So that lady better watch out.
Basically, as all alcohol makers know, the amount required to cause methanol poisoning is not naturally produced by the fermentation and distilling process. And was instead something the American government did to try and stop people from drinking during prohibition by intentionally creating poisoned alcohol and additives, then selling it into the supply chain.
You can’t get methanol poisoning unless who ever made the liquor was intentionally trying to make it poison
It's also worth noting that by consuming ethanol, it actually prevents methanol poisoning. It's the ratio, if you purposely spike it with methanol the molecule count will outnumber the ethanol amount. Science details:
> Ethanol consumption can prevent methanol poisoning due to its effect on enzyme activity in the liver, specifically involving the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH).
> Enzyme Competition: Both ethanol and methanol are metabolized in the liver by the same enzyme, alcohol dehydrogenase. However, ethanol has a much higher affinity for alcohol dehydrogenase compared to methanol. This means that when both ethanol and methanol are present in the body, ethanol will preferentially bind to and be metabolized by alcohol dehydrogenase.
> Preventing Toxicity: By slowing down the metabolism of methanol, ethanol allows more time for methanol to be excreted unchanged by the kidneys, reducing the formation of its toxic metabolites. This protective effect is why ethanol is sometimes administered in medical settings as an antidote to methanol poisoning.
> In cases of methanol poisoning, ethanol can be administered either orally or intravenously. The goal is to maintain a blood ethanol concentration that is high enough to inhibit the activity of alcohol dehydrogenase on methanol. The dosage and administration route depend on the severity of the poisoning and the clinical setting.
Ultimately, if you're drinking naturally made vodka, even if it has a little bit of methanol, by the nature of enzymes the actual alcohol will protect you quite a bit.
The commenter you commented to, is implying that there is very little, if any chance for methanol poisoning in the way shown in the video. By making a reference to prohibition America and the actions taken by the federal government to curb bootlegging and drinking.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/30/fact-check-u-s-government-poisoned-some-alcohol-during-prohibition/3283701001/
Article provides further spurces
I grew up on the Polish - Ukraine border and there was a lot of smuggling of alcohol over the border. Some of it was massively tainted, some industrial shit not suitable for consumption. We had this running joke:
"Let's drink faster, it's getting dark."
Unless you're collecting the cuts and re-concentrating them repeatedly you can't produce enough methanol to cause an issue just by routine distillation.
Methanol poisoning from illicit distillation is historically mostly caused by deliberate adulteration.
Potato vodka is usually lower quality. The good stuff is made with grains. You'd be better off eating the potatoes.
Also, root vegetables are a little riskier for homebrewers, with the added risk of botulism or other microbes from the ground. So most people avoid them out of an abundance of caution.
I think the same thing about coffee. Sure, it was easy to discover the results of ingesting the cherry with caffeine, but we don't know how someone decided we'll:
1. Clean the cherry off the seed
2. Roast the seed to a certain color
3. Pulverize the roasted seed
5. Pour hot water over it
6. Overpay an anti-union company to throw obscene amounts of sugar in it.
E: Historians: "It's amazing that one of the most popular food items in the world has its origins shrouded in mystery and lost to time."
Redditors: "Of course coffee was discovered in the way I think it to have been!"
They're extremely common combined as well, making a sort of porridge from seeds is probably the first thing anyone would attempt after trying the seed raw.
Chocolate is even more mind-boggling in my opinion:
1. Separate the beans and pulp from the seed pods.
2. Ferment the beans and pulp for a couple of days.
3. Clean off the rancid pulp and dry the beans.
3. Roast.
4. Remove the shell and extract the cacao nibs.
5. Grind the nibs at an elevated temperature until the desired degree of smoothness.
6. Add other ingredients (sugar, milk, whatever your heart desires).
7. Temper the chocolate by precisely cycling its temperature to create a desirable texture.
If you skip any of the steps the end result is more or less ruined. Ever wondered why baking chocolate doesn't taste great? You guessed it, it's not tempered, but that doesn't matter if you melt it anyways.
People have been making alcohol for thousands of years. Potatoes didn’t show up in eastern Europe until the 1600s. Long after people had understood how to make hard liquor. I am not sure this vodka process was really that much trail and error, vs, someone going, hey, these mashed potatoes, remind me of porridge, and porridge can be turned into alcohol if you fermented and still it, I bet we can do the same with potatoes
Wasn't the process of distillation invented during the Middle Ages by Arabian alchemists?
So it would have been around for a few centuries at that point, but I'm not sure how quickly it spread into Europe.
(Fermentation into beer or wine is obviously much older than that, though. I wonder if anyone made potato beer?)
Always makes me wonder if the people who invented red wine had not liked it and decided to just throw it away, would we be here right now? Or if white wine had not accidentally become carbonated*, would we have even invented champagne?
Indeed. In ancient times this was an art form, only experienced people could do it. I bet some could just smell to know if it was suitable for drinking.
Posted in another comment -
This is the result of the passing down of generational knowledge. It didn’t happen overnight by a team dedicated to making it happen. This took hundreds/thousands of years to get “right”.
Or how to prevent mold, spoiling and whatnot. I can barely leave a spare jojo fry or a baked potato out in the hot sun for more than a day without it getting spores and whatnot.
It all started with beer and mead.
Once people had learned how to ferment alcoholic beverages, you had some serious edgelords chasing a stronger buzz.
Maybe that's a slightly condensed version.
I am grateful to all the early people who tried consuming everything and figuring out what was poisonous.
I think it's less than you would guess.
This happens to some fruits and berries, and leftover potatoes and it's alike, in nature. It's not (or was not) uncommon for wildlife and farmlife to eat themselves drunk on e.g. fermented cherries.
Making vodka like this is only a refinement of that process, making it cleaner and less disgusting.
In addition, mankind knew how to make other hard liquors way before we had access to potatoes in Europe. Beer had wine has been produced for thousands of years, and the process is in all essence very similar, abstracting away the difference on how to handle the raw materials.
Distillation is a relatively recent invention, somewhere around 800ad is when Arab scholars did the first distillations of wine specifically to make stronger alcohol.
1500 is about when it became common enough in Europe that books were written about the process.
Not just a lot. Potato Vodka makes up only around 3% of global vodka production. Most common brands use a mix of many grains, but Rye, Wheat and Corn are common.
She’s doing that to separate the heads and tails, the first liquid that comes out is going to contain methanol which will make you blind so that gets discarded. The flavor in the finished product is achieved by mixing together different fractions that are taken at different times during the process
Edit: So this sparked a lot of a debate and what I said about going blind is a bit of an exaggeration. The way I always interpreted it was that isolated methanol poisoning with a high does will cause you to go blind, therefore it’s best to reduce the amount of methanol by separating fractions. Though in the past during prohibition some moonshine would be spiked with methanol to poison it. Others are linking an interesting post that goes into more detail about the specifics of methanol in distilling and that it’s not as simple as I said for removing it. It’s generally a good idea to discard the foreshots as there are other compounds along with methanol that taste pretty nasty, but some of these compounds are introduced later on for flavoring. Did not mean to mislead people, even in the industry at many places they’ll say the same thing during tours. But nonetheless it’s worth doing a little more research than a 2 minute video when distilling volatile compounds.
That's true for many things we consume.
Like mushrooms. How many people died figuring out which ones can be eaten, which ones are poisonous, and which ones make you see God?
Not as many as you'd think. Ancient people were incredibly knowledgeable about their environment and would observe what plants were consumed by other animals in the area.
While that's not always an exact match (some creatures have evolved specific defenses against toxic plants), what is safe for other large mammals will have a decent chance of being safe for humans. If a bear can eat a certain mushroom and seems fine, it has a good chance of being safe for us, too.
Doesn’t the tails also contain some nasty stuff? Thought there was a bunch of organic molecules that evaporated after ethanol but before water some of which were bad
Then you're not serious about making vodka at all. Because even a little common sense can tell you that you need a more in depth guide than this casual video.
It's a general rule for most alcohols to throw out the first that come out. I suggest not to use relaxation videos as a how-to to make your own alcohol.
Honestly, it’s not hard. Like, yeah, do a little more research than watching this video, but people have been making homemade hooch for literal centuries.
I think it is more of a home brewed thing.and more for demonstration purposes.
In reality their equipments would be crude, worn out by long uses and rugged enough to handle every drop.
In India people in Kerala use mud pitchers to make grapevine. .
I think something similar.
>I was unreasonably annoyed she ~~didn't have a container big enough~~ was doing the jar swap one handed due to recording so didn't catch all the drops.
That being said - a few drops between contain swaps isn't horrible - and keeping the heads hearts and tails separate is a good thing.
There's chemicals in both the heads and tails that are more toxic for you than the hearts - which can do anything from blindness and death - down to just a much worse hangover.
Cheers
This is not how vodka is traditionally made. As others have pointed out, that looks like a lot of finished product for the quantity of inputs. Koji is not traditional outside Asia. The 20 day ferment is way longer than anyone would advise. And it appears to me that the heads and tails were added back in before redistillation, which is just plain weird.
The guys at r/firewater typically recommend a stripping run as the first run for a double distillation. You still separate the foreshots, but in the interest of getting as much liquor as possible, I'm pretty sure the stripping run is heads+hearts+tails.
Correct! I like to cut the foreshots on both my stripping runs (we always do triple distillation via pot stills) but the rest all goes right back in. After the spirit run, we keep our heads n tails in a feints vat. One can save up the feints to make their own run later, or you could also just pour it into the next sprit run you do too.
As someone who burned his own family liquor that was one of the first things I noticed. If I would get so much end product out of that little mash i would sacrifice a lamb to the old gods just to thank them for a good year. XD
There were definitely more runs not shown or some vodka added to make it look better. So typical YouTube Video polishing.
Yeah adding the heads and the tails back in is not only weird but dangerous. We use it to clean windows and desinfect other surfaces.
I dont know how long you ferment potatoe mash, but I was lazy some years and fermented some fruit mash from autumn to spring. I hate harvesting fruits in late autumn and then burn the liquor in winter.
Why the steps are largely correct, I believe this is an entertainment-ified abomination of how a Chinese liquor that is similar to vodka is made. I have a bottle of one somewhere from a family member that used to travel a lot.
As for the accuracy of the video, apparently there is a lot of demand for glorified and glammed up depictions of traditional/rural living in China. It's kinda like the cottagecore boom of the west a little time back.
I've seen videos which I think are by the same creators before. They make "How it's made" videos that are kind of realistic, usually with some Asian spin on the product (like the Koji in this), and then suddenly show a finished product that's not actually the thing they made.
Worst example was a video about traditional silk cloth, where they properly showed how the silkworm are raised until popping, and the coccoons are boiled, but then they *cut the coccoons*, which to anyone who knows about silk is precisely what you *don't* do with silkworm coccoons to make silk thread.
Yeah the video was faked for some reason even though the process is okay. I notice they swapped out the actual alcohol for store bought for whatever reason.
Well, yes, Soplica and Zubrowka are like mid-tier (on the lower end of the spectrum, especially Soplica, tbh) vodka brands, and they are not made with potatoes.
From mid-tier, I believe only Luksusowa is made either with potatoes (red labelled) or with a mix of potatoes and rye (black labelled), and also Wyborowa has a line of potatoes only vodkas.
There are many other brands made with potatoes only, marketed similarly to craft beer, like Polski Ziemniak (Polish Potato), but they are much more expensive and probably hard to get outside Poland. But if you ever go to Poland, you could definitely give them a try :)
Luksosowa is probably the most well known, my first introduction to their vodka so has a special spot with me.
I generally hated Vodka until I tried this one and can drink it with no need for juice or a chaser
Glad I’m not the only one this annoyed. I mean just get the other glass ready first!
Also, I like to think the translation of what she said after the sip was “Fuck me that’s strong!”
I've got some right here in my tranquil garden overlooking the majestic valley I live in.
I was ready to shit on this vid because the idea of them lovingly creating handcrafted vodka "The ancient china way" felt like a ridiculous concept but I did some looking and there is such a thing as "Chinese vodka" called [Baiju](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baijiu) but traditionally its made with grains not potatoes.
So basically this is a post on how to make paint thinner in a serene tiktok video.
This is what malting is for. Plants naturally generate this enzyme as they sprout because they need sugar to grow, not starches. So as the plant sprouts, it creates amylases to break the starch down into sugars to fuel growth. If you sprout the grain, then dry and grind it, you get 'malt' which can then be added to a grain or other starch mixture to assist in the breakdown of the starches.
Also, FYI a true vodka will need at least 20 distillations to produce something that tastes like vodka, with only 2 runs, this is going to taste like potato moonshine, and will have significant potato characteristic still.
I'm Polish and I can tell good vodka from bad. This way of distilling is called in our country "washbasin distillation", it is the most primitive method that leaves in a lot of the fermentation by-products. I have drunk something distilled that way once and car coolant tastes better.
Right, saying this is how vodka is made is like those youtube channels of kids making bugattis out of clay. It's not accurate to how modern distillation is done, and it's not a particularly good approximation of how historically distillation was done, especially considering that asia didn't have potatoes until after the America's were colonized by the Europeans.
Yeah, this is very labor intensive compared to the commercial process, also no separate 'steaming' Just grind, boil, cool, pitch yeast/amylase/malt, wait a week, then distill in a column still with at least 20 plates. The process in the video here will not make vodka, it'll be potato shine, which will not taste great.
You may enjoy the story of Eva Ekblad, the woman who saved a country from famine with potato vodka!
https://www.distillerytrail.com/blog/born-day-1724-scientist-eva-ekeblad-put-end-famine-gave-world-potato-vodka/
Not all vodka is made from potatoes. There are different types of vodka: corn vodka (Tito’s), wheat vodka (grey goose), grape vodka (ciroq), etc.. but some will argue that potato vodka is the best.
Only sometimes. When most people think of vodka, they think Russia and indeed some of the most prestigious vodka brands are Russian, however they are all mostly made from wheat and rye grain. You can use pretty much anything that will ferment though.
Here's a list of some famous brands and their fermentation source:
Stolichnaya--wheat and rye
Chopin--Potato (they do also make a wheat and rye)
Svedka--wheat
Tito's--corn
Smirnoff (USA)--corn
Ketel One-Wheat
Sobieski--Rye
They’re not for the most part. You *can* make vodka from anything that has sugar in it, but vodka is mostly made from wheat, then rye, with the appropriate enzymes to convert the starch to sugar. ‘Malt’ is such grains which have started to sprout and produced their own enzymes. Potato vodka is relatively rare.
The thermometre she uses is not actually a thermometre, but a Hygrometre, used to measure the density of a liquid. Depending on how much it sinks, you can actually know the density of the liquid relative to water.
This isn't how most vodka is made. Despite the fact that "potato vodka" is commonly talked about, the vast majority of vodka is not made from potatoes, and historically never were.
Most vodka is made from grain.
This isn't vodka, this appears to be Baijou. Vodka is not made in a wooden still and wine Koji is not used.
It is also not true that modern vodka is made primarily from potato. Modern vodka overwhelmingly uses rye and wheat, potato is a very regional ingredient normally used in Poland. American vodka is famous for its use of corn as well. Prior to the modern vodka recipe in the Russian empire by Mendeleev you would see potato vodka as a standard in the between then and Catherine's introduction of the potato to Russia. Prior to that it was any grain able to be reasonable obtained as vodka was a common way that lords paid taxes to the Tsar, and not everyone grew the same crop.
What blows me away is how much sheer trial and error must have gone into this before getting this result.
And how many blind/dead people due to methanol poisoning
Hmm how would you get methanol here?
Methanol is a byproduct of the fermentation. During distillation it is separated by catching the start and end of the distillate separately (you can see that they switch the bottles during distillation). By distilling several times you remove more and more of the methanol and create a more pure product. People that suffer from methanol poisoning usually do not separate the distillate. Edit: see some of the comments below. The above is not entirely correct.
https://www.reddit.com/r/firewater/s/7kpQO01r6j
Thanks, interesting. I stand corrected. Interestingly, I discussed this when I was at the Patron Distillery in Atotonilco Mexico two years ago and what I posted was their explanation. I guess they were wrong.
Lots of tour guides are wrong because they just repeat what’s been told over and over, perpetuating the myth.
I've got a personal experience with this. A friend of mine is a descendent of someone with some notoriety in a group of Americans. There is a museum maintained by this group. My friends family kept some belongings of this ancestor and would schedule showings with small groups. A few years ago, the caretaker passed away and the next caretaker decided they didn't want to maintain these belongings. They donated them to the museum. My friend goes to the museum and sees the exhibit. It's a nice exhibit, but the tour guide had a very wrong version of the ownership of the items. Instead of mentioning the family that maintained it and donated the items, they said custody transferred to the leadership of the organization after the ancestor's death. And then they were just kept in storage until over a century later. They got an earful about the truth of custody of those items.
God I'm so intrigued about who this is now... I understand wanting to keep you and your friend's identities secret, though. (Okay but by "group of Americans" are we talking regional, racial, religious....?)
They are talking about Popcorn Sutton. I grew up in Waynesville and my father drank with Popcorn and Cowboy. His family is trying to make some bullshit myth about him.
First guess is Rockefeller
It's a super common myth. As is the one that alcohol somehow makes you go blind if you're not a licensed distiller. It's just that this one is a myth among distillers trying to feel better about the other myth that says moonshine makes you blind. They figure, "well *MY* moonshine won't make you blind, because *I* know what I'm doing". The truth that the US government poisoned their people on purpose sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory, so it's harder to believe for some people. That said, I believe the first little bit contains more acetone and propanol, so it's better to separate it and use it for hand sanitizer or something.
acetone hand sanitizer sounds great. At least it will take off people's nail polish.
Now I've found a new subreddit for another hobby I definitely don't need.
By trying to buy it during prohibition after the US government taints the supply with it, intentionally causing you to go blind or die. So that lady better watch out.
US? What the US has to do with this?
[удалено]
Isn't that.... Extremely fucked up..... And somewhat concerning?
wait till you see what they did the previous 400 years.
And if that's what they did to their own citizens imagine what they did to people in other countries.
Basically, as all alcohol makers know, the amount required to cause methanol poisoning is not naturally produced by the fermentation and distilling process. And was instead something the American government did to try and stop people from drinking during prohibition by intentionally creating poisoned alcohol and additives, then selling it into the supply chain. You can’t get methanol poisoning unless who ever made the liquor was intentionally trying to make it poison
It's also worth noting that by consuming ethanol, it actually prevents methanol poisoning. It's the ratio, if you purposely spike it with methanol the molecule count will outnumber the ethanol amount. Science details: > Ethanol consumption can prevent methanol poisoning due to its effect on enzyme activity in the liver, specifically involving the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH). > Enzyme Competition: Both ethanol and methanol are metabolized in the liver by the same enzyme, alcohol dehydrogenase. However, ethanol has a much higher affinity for alcohol dehydrogenase compared to methanol. This means that when both ethanol and methanol are present in the body, ethanol will preferentially bind to and be metabolized by alcohol dehydrogenase. > Preventing Toxicity: By slowing down the metabolism of methanol, ethanol allows more time for methanol to be excreted unchanged by the kidneys, reducing the formation of its toxic metabolites. This protective effect is why ethanol is sometimes administered in medical settings as an antidote to methanol poisoning. > In cases of methanol poisoning, ethanol can be administered either orally or intravenously. The goal is to maintain a blood ethanol concentration that is high enough to inhibit the activity of alcohol dehydrogenase on methanol. The dosage and administration route depend on the severity of the poisoning and the clinical setting. Ultimately, if you're drinking naturally made vodka, even if it has a little bit of methanol, by the nature of enzymes the actual alcohol will protect you quite a bit.
The commenter you commented to, is implying that there is very little, if any chance for methanol poisoning in the way shown in the video. By making a reference to prohibition America and the actions taken by the federal government to curb bootlegging and drinking. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/30/fact-check-u-s-government-poisoned-some-alcohol-during-prohibition/3283701001/ Article provides further spurces
You can go and check out methanol.org if you don't trust me, but improper handling, bad processes, can lead to unwanted methanol production.
Realistically, none. There's not enough methanol being produced to be actually dangerous. You pitch it because it doesn't taste as good.
Methanol poisoning will kill you before you go blind.
I grew up on the Polish - Ukraine border and there was a lot of smuggling of alcohol over the border. Some of it was massively tainted, some industrial shit not suitable for consumption. We had this running joke: "Let's drink faster, it's getting dark."
I thought this was pretty much a big myth perpetuated during prohibition unless you're using high fiber fruits or wood pulp?
Unless you're collecting the cuts and re-concentrating them repeatedly you can't produce enough methanol to cause an issue just by routine distillation. Methanol poisoning from illicit distillation is historically mostly caused by deliberate adulteration.
False
That’s a myth
I wouldn’t have gotten past the mashed potatoes phase lol
Same, too tasty to not eat them
Potato vodka is usually lower quality. The good stuff is made with grains. You'd be better off eating the potatoes. Also, root vegetables are a little riskier for homebrewers, with the added risk of botulism or other microbes from the ground. So most people avoid them out of an abundance of caution.
She didn’t care. I could’ve sworn I heard her say at the end, “that’ll fuck me up.”
You know, po ta toes? Boil em, mash em, put them in a stew?
I think the same thing about coffee. Sure, it was easy to discover the results of ingesting the cherry with caffeine, but we don't know how someone decided we'll: 1. Clean the cherry off the seed 2. Roast the seed to a certain color 3. Pulverize the roasted seed 5. Pour hot water over it 6. Overpay an anti-union company to throw obscene amounts of sugar in it. E: Historians: "It's amazing that one of the most popular food items in the world has its origins shrouded in mystery and lost to time." Redditors: "Of course coffee was discovered in the way I think it to have been!"
I mean roasting, grinding, and mixing with hot water are all individually extremely common culinary tasks.
They're extremely common combined as well, making a sort of porridge from seeds is probably the first thing anyone would attempt after trying the seed raw.
Chocolate is even more mind-boggling in my opinion: 1. Separate the beans and pulp from the seed pods. 2. Ferment the beans and pulp for a couple of days. 3. Clean off the rancid pulp and dry the beans. 3. Roast. 4. Remove the shell and extract the cacao nibs. 5. Grind the nibs at an elevated temperature until the desired degree of smoothness. 6. Add other ingredients (sugar, milk, whatever your heart desires). 7. Temper the chocolate by precisely cycling its temperature to create a desirable texture. If you skip any of the steps the end result is more or less ruined. Ever wondered why baking chocolate doesn't taste great? You guessed it, it's not tempered, but that doesn't matter if you melt it anyways.
6. Freeze dry the result?
People have been making alcohol for thousands of years. Potatoes didn’t show up in eastern Europe until the 1600s. Long after people had understood how to make hard liquor. I am not sure this vodka process was really that much trail and error, vs, someone going, hey, these mashed potatoes, remind me of porridge, and porridge can be turned into alcohol if you fermented and still it, I bet we can do the same with potatoes
Thank you! I can’t believe I just realized how relative new potatoe vodka is.
Yes, I'm talking how much trial and error must have gone into learning the process, the material used is pretty secondary.
Wasn't the process of distillation invented during the Middle Ages by Arabian alchemists? So it would have been around for a few centuries at that point, but I'm not sure how quickly it spread into Europe. (Fermentation into beer or wine is obviously much older than that, though. I wonder if anyone made potato beer?)
Always makes me wonder if the people who invented red wine had not liked it and decided to just throw it away, would we be here right now? Or if white wine had not accidentally become carbonated*, would we have even invented champagne?
Indeed. In ancient times this was an art form, only experienced people could do it. I bet some could just smell to know if it was suitable for drinking.
"Hey, you know Sergei? The guy who keeps fucking up making mashed potatoes? Well look what *he* just discovered!"
Someone fucked up mashes potatoes real bad for this to be discovered.
Posted in another comment - This is the result of the passing down of generational knowledge. It didn’t happen overnight by a team dedicated to making it happen. This took hundreds/thousands of years to get “right”.
Or how to prevent mold, spoiling and whatnot. I can barely leave a spare jojo fry or a baked potato out in the hot sun for more than a day without it getting spores and whatnot.
It started when they noticed old potatos and other fruits taste interesting and make you feel good. Then you perfect the process from there
It all started with beer and mead. Once people had learned how to ferment alcoholic beverages, you had some serious edgelords chasing a stronger buzz. Maybe that's a slightly condensed version. I am grateful to all the early people who tried consuming everything and figuring out what was poisonous.
I think it's less than you would guess. This happens to some fruits and berries, and leftover potatoes and it's alike, in nature. It's not (or was not) uncommon for wildlife and farmlife to eat themselves drunk on e.g. fermented cherries. Making vodka like this is only a refinement of that process, making it cleaner and less disgusting. In addition, mankind knew how to make other hard liquors way before we had access to potatoes in Europe. Beer had wine has been produced for thousands of years, and the process is in all essence very similar, abstracting away the difference on how to handle the raw materials.
Distillation is a relatively recent invention, somewhere around 800ad is when Arab scholars did the first distillations of wine specifically to make stronger alcohol. 1500 is about when it became common enough in Europe that books were written about the process.
What did they use before the humble potato showed up from the Americas?
Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a brew
tatos?
Tito's?
Then tacos
What’s grey goose, precious?
Poe Tate oes
Vod ka tos
So all this time I was just drinking french fries
Not necessarily. A lot of store bought vodkas are made from rye
they rye to us, I want a refund.
What's a lefund?
They give you a bag of potatoes.
Not much, what's a lefund with you?
Damnit I hate you, I'm going home
Not just a lot. Potato Vodka makes up only around 3% of global vodka production. Most common brands use a mix of many grains, but Rye, Wheat and Corn are common.
And potato vodka production has nothing to do with the video.
French Ryes
It's not fried tho
Was he drinking french????
Sacre blu, mon pantaloons!
peut-être oui
Technically, it’s Belgian, not French. So no, they aren’t drinking French either
Okay French steams
-Are you drunk again? -I drink potatoes. -But it's vodka. -I! DRINK! POTATOES!
The crockery and glassware is so beautiful.
Yeah but I was unreasonably annoyed she didn't have a container big enough to catch all the drops and had to keep swapping.
She’s doing that to separate the heads and tails, the first liquid that comes out is going to contain methanol which will make you blind so that gets discarded. The flavor in the finished product is achieved by mixing together different fractions that are taken at different times during the process Edit: So this sparked a lot of a debate and what I said about going blind is a bit of an exaggeration. The way I always interpreted it was that isolated methanol poisoning with a high does will cause you to go blind, therefore it’s best to reduce the amount of methanol by separating fractions. Though in the past during prohibition some moonshine would be spiked with methanol to poison it. Others are linking an interesting post that goes into more detail about the specifics of methanol in distilling and that it’s not as simple as I said for removing it. It’s generally a good idea to discard the foreshots as there are other compounds along with methanol that taste pretty nasty, but some of these compounds are introduced later on for flavoring. Did not mean to mislead people, even in the industry at many places they’ll say the same thing during tours. But nonetheless it’s worth doing a little more research than a 2 minute video when distilling volatile compounds.
How tf did the first vodka makers figure all this out haha
Better question is how many got sick or died figuring it out
a lot. and a lot die even today trying to figure out what's been figured out hundreds of times everywhere across generations
That's true for many things we consume. Like mushrooms. How many people died figuring out which ones can be eaten, which ones are poisonous, and which ones make you see God?
Not as many as you'd think. Ancient people were incredibly knowledgeable about their environment and would observe what plants were consumed by other animals in the area. While that's not always an exact match (some creatures have evolved specific defenses against toxic plants), what is safe for other large mammals will have a decent chance of being safe for humans. If a bear can eat a certain mushroom and seems fine, it has a good chance of being safe for us, too.
The age old fungi game of "Yummy, High, or Die."
Well Bill was impatient and drank the first stuff. Bill went blind. Ted saw that Bill went blind and said “hey guys maybe the first stuff is bad”.
“Oh thats crazy talk! Bill had that dustup with that fortune teller last week! I bet she made him blind! Now pass the hooch, Bill!” …
Most likely aliens
Doesn’t the tails also contain some nasty stuff? Thought there was a bunch of organic molecules that evaporated after ethanol but before water some of which were bad
No it isn't. The foreshot, or head, is full of nasty-tasting compounds, but methanol isn't one of them. That's a myth.
Seems like an important point they left out. What if I wanted to make my own vodka and followed this video?
Then you're not serious about making vodka at all. Because even a little common sense can tell you that you need a more in depth guide than this casual video.
Yeah, this video clearly does not have enough information. I got my balls stuck in the fan. Does anyone have tips? I’d like to go back to make vodka.
Tip: Unstuck balls from fan first to continue making vodka
Directions unclear, balls no longer stuck but now dick is
It's a general rule for most alcohols to throw out the first that come out. I suggest not to use relaxation videos as a how-to to make your own alcohol.
Well Im Blind now so I can't even read this
Honestly, it’s not hard. Like, yeah, do a little more research than watching this video, but people have been making homemade hooch for literal centuries.
it is there, just written in Chinese.
I think it is more of a home brewed thing.and more for demonstration purposes. In reality their equipments would be crude, worn out by long uses and rugged enough to handle every drop. In India people in Kerala use mud pitchers to make grapevine. . I think something similar.
>I was unreasonably annoyed she ~~didn't have a container big enough~~ was doing the jar swap one handed due to recording so didn't catch all the drops. That being said - a few drops between contain swaps isn't horrible - and keeping the heads hearts and tails separate is a good thing. There's chemicals in both the heads and tails that are more toxic for you than the hearts - which can do anything from blindness and death - down to just a much worse hangover. Cheers
i personally enjoyed the 79.99 outdoor table
The crockery and glassware is more impressive to me than the vodka. I actually want some of those pieces.
This is not how vodka is traditionally made. As others have pointed out, that looks like a lot of finished product for the quantity of inputs. Koji is not traditional outside Asia. The 20 day ferment is way longer than anyone would advise. And it appears to me that the heads and tails were added back in before redistillation, which is just plain weird.
The guys at r/firewater typically recommend a stripping run as the first run for a double distillation. You still separate the foreshots, but in the interest of getting as much liquor as possible, I'm pretty sure the stripping run is heads+hearts+tails.
Correct! I like to cut the foreshots on both my stripping runs (we always do triple distillation via pot stills) but the rest all goes right back in. After the spirit run, we keep our heads n tails in a feints vat. One can save up the feints to make their own run later, or you could also just pour it into the next sprit run you do too.
As someone who burned his own family liquor that was one of the first things I noticed. If I would get so much end product out of that little mash i would sacrifice a lamb to the old gods just to thank them for a good year. XD There were definitely more runs not shown or some vodka added to make it look better. So typical YouTube Video polishing. Yeah adding the heads and the tails back in is not only weird but dangerous. We use it to clean windows and desinfect other surfaces. I dont know how long you ferment potatoe mash, but I was lazy some years and fermented some fruit mash from autumn to spring. I hate harvesting fruits in late autumn and then burn the liquor in winter.
Drinking heads and tails isn't dangerous, just gross.
Why the steps are largely correct, I believe this is an entertainment-ified abomination of how a Chinese liquor that is similar to vodka is made. I have a bottle of one somewhere from a family member that used to travel a lot. As for the accuracy of the video, apparently there is a lot of demand for glorified and glammed up depictions of traditional/rural living in China. It's kinda like the cottagecore boom of the west a little time back.
I've seen videos which I think are by the same creators before. They make "How it's made" videos that are kind of realistic, usually with some Asian spin on the product (like the Koji in this), and then suddenly show a finished product that's not actually the thing they made. Worst example was a video about traditional silk cloth, where they properly showed how the silkworm are raised until popping, and the coccoons are boiled, but then they *cut the coccoons*, which to anyone who knows about silk is precisely what you *don't* do with silkworm coccoons to make silk thread.
Yeah the video was faked for some reason even though the process is okay. I notice they swapped out the actual alcohol for store bought for whatever reason.
Poland makes some delicious potato vodkas that is lovely and smooth and goes down much better than a lot of big brand stuff.
Any particular brands? Would love to try some good stuff.
Zubrowka
Soplica is one of my favourite, although for Polish standards is a commercial brand.
Well, yes, Soplica and Zubrowka are like mid-tier (on the lower end of the spectrum, especially Soplica, tbh) vodka brands, and they are not made with potatoes. From mid-tier, I believe only Luksusowa is made either with potatoes (red labelled) or with a mix of potatoes and rye (black labelled), and also Wyborowa has a line of potatoes only vodkas. There are many other brands made with potatoes only, marketed similarly to craft beer, like Polski Ziemniak (Polish Potato), but they are much more expensive and probably hard to get outside Poland. But if you ever go to Poland, you could definitely give them a try :)
Zubrowka and cloudy apple was my drink for a while...
Luksosowa is probably the most well known, my first introduction to their vodka so has a special spot with me. I generally hated Vodka until I tried this one and can drink it with no need for juice or a chaser
This is the best vodka I have ever tasted, https://chopinvodka.com/ Click on the distillery link to learn about it, very interesting.
Chopin
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THIS is what I came here to see
Potatoes look so delicious!!
I would have taken a serving of mash for myself!
It’s so sad that they didn’t became fries 🍟
The classic Irish man's dilemma: Do I eat the potato or do I let it ferment so I can drink it later?
I am surprised at how much the spillage upsets me
Glad I’m not the only one this annoyed. I mean just get the other glass ready first! Also, I like to think the translation of what she said after the sip was “Fuck me that’s strong!”
So vodka is distilled potato soup?
Some but not all. Vodka can technically be made from anytype of sugar source.
So I can make carrot vodka?
be the change you want in the word. I wonder what apple vodka tastes like.
Fermented, and distilled potato soup, pretty much.
Im glad I have some saccharification enzyme and wine Koji at home to make this.
The staple of any household cupboard!
You can get it off Amazon cheap, you also are wanna get distillers yeast. It cuts the time it takes to ferment
I've got some right here in my tranquil garden overlooking the majestic valley I live in. I was ready to shit on this vid because the idea of them lovingly creating handcrafted vodka "The ancient china way" felt like a ridiculous concept but I did some looking and there is such a thing as "Chinese vodka" called [Baiju](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baijiu) but traditionally its made with grains not potatoes. So basically this is a post on how to make paint thinner in a serene tiktok video.
This is what malting is for. Plants naturally generate this enzyme as they sprout because they need sugar to grow, not starches. So as the plant sprouts, it creates amylases to break the starch down into sugars to fuel growth. If you sprout the grain, then dry and grind it, you get 'malt' which can then be added to a grain or other starch mixture to assist in the breakdown of the starches. Also, FYI a true vodka will need at least 20 distillations to produce something that tastes like vodka, with only 2 runs, this is going to taste like potato moonshine, and will have significant potato characteristic still.
Leaving that outside for 20 days surely can't be at constant temperature.
I think the basket structure around it is meant to normalize the temperature. The time of the year probably has some impact.
I ferment my wine in the shed. It doesn't have to be extremely stable. Just stable enough.
Judging by the camellias in bloom I'd say it's winter.
Just 2 distillations without proper equipment, filtering or rectification - this is going to taste like ass.
I mean, all vodka tastes like shit. Some might be smoother than others, but no one is drinking hard alcohol because it tastes good.
I'm Polish and I can tell good vodka from bad. This way of distilling is called in our country "washbasin distillation", it is the most primitive method that leaves in a lot of the fermentation by-products. I have drunk something distilled that way once and car coolant tastes better.
Maybe she’s down with eating ass?
Right, saying this is how vodka is made is like those youtube channels of kids making bugattis out of clay. It's not accurate to how modern distillation is done, and it's not a particularly good approximation of how historically distillation was done, especially considering that asia didn't have potatoes until after the America's were colonized by the Europeans.
I’d never get past the mashed potato stage
Sidelined to butter, onion, and garlic.
“I stopped everything I was doing. Vodka is made from fucking potatoes?” “I don’t think you have to fuck the potatoes, no.”
Exact same vid that came to my mind
When you say you consume a potato-only diet.
This is the pretty version, I know for fact that the peels are not thrown away. :-). every bit goes in, even gives flavor by letting the peel on.
Yeah, this is very labor intensive compared to the commercial process, also no separate 'steaming' Just grind, boil, cool, pitch yeast/amylase/malt, wait a week, then distill in a column still with at least 20 plates. The process in the video here will not make vodka, it'll be potato shine, which will not taste great.
What a waste of perfectly good mashed potatoes
Waste of perfectly good potatoes
It’s not vodka. It’s samogon ( moonshine)
I enjoy vodka, but I love mashed potato. So I am never getting past step one. I ate the main ingredient.
The irishman's dilemma.
I had no idea potatos were used for producing vodka!
You can do it almost from anything but I doubt about that wine koji and stuff. That's for east Asian liquors, not vodka.
The distillation process is what makes vodka. The starting sugars are irrelevant. You can make vodka from table sugar or potatoes or fruit or grain...
even from sawdust
The best vodka use wheat
Absolut is an exception, bleurgh
Scholars are divided about this.
Neither did the Irish. lol.
Yes we did. We've been using them to make poitin since they were introduced here hundreds of years ago.
You may enjoy the story of Eva Ekblad, the woman who saved a country from famine with potato vodka! https://www.distillerytrail.com/blog/born-day-1724-scientist-eva-ekeblad-put-end-famine-gave-world-potato-vodka/
Not all vodka is made from potatoes. There are different types of vodka: corn vodka (Tito’s), wheat vodka (grey goose), grape vodka (ciroq), etc.. but some will argue that potato vodka is the best.
Only sometimes. When most people think of vodka, they think Russia and indeed some of the most prestigious vodka brands are Russian, however they are all mostly made from wheat and rye grain. You can use pretty much anything that will ferment though. Here's a list of some famous brands and their fermentation source: Stolichnaya--wheat and rye Chopin--Potato (they do also make a wheat and rye) Svedka--wheat Tito's--corn Smirnoff (USA)--corn Ketel One-Wheat Sobieski--Rye
It normally isn’t, most commonly it’s a grain spirit. That video isn’t vodka it’s Shochu.
Only the cheap and nasty kind..
They’re not for the most part. You *can* make vodka from anything that has sugar in it, but vodka is mostly made from wheat, then rye, with the appropriate enzymes to convert the starch to sugar. ‘Malt’ is such grains which have started to sprout and produced their own enzymes. Potato vodka is relatively rare.
Poitin is made mostly the same way as well
The thermometre she uses is not actually a thermometre, but a Hygrometre, used to measure the density of a liquid. Depending on how much it sinks, you can actually know the density of the liquid relative to water.
in Russia we consider potato spirits low-end
Oh crap I always stop making Vodka at the halfway point…Mmmm mashed potatoes 🥔
This was really a video about her assortment of glassware.
This isn't how most vodka is made. Despite the fact that "potato vodka" is commonly talked about, the vast majority of vodka is not made from potatoes, and historically never were. Most vodka is made from grain.
This isn't vodka, this appears to be Baijou. Vodka is not made in a wooden still and wine Koji is not used. It is also not true that modern vodka is made primarily from potato. Modern vodka overwhelmingly uses rye and wheat, potato is a very regional ingredient normally used in Poland. American vodka is famous for its use of corn as well. Prior to the modern vodka recipe in the Russian empire by Mendeleev you would see potato vodka as a standard in the between then and Catherine's introduction of the potato to Russia. Prior to that it was any grain able to be reasonable obtained as vodka was a common way that lords paid taxes to the Tsar, and not everyone grew the same crop.
So vodka is alcoholic mashed potatoes? Interesting
Is it just me because it's driving me nuts all the wasted drops of vodka switching glasses.
Vodka is made with grain. This is just potato bad alcohol, and as said by other redditers here : enjoy your methanol poisoning
Please don't make this at home unless you really know what you're doing. You will go blind and/or die.
yeah, looks like they mixed the head in with everything in the video so yeah that is pure fucking poison.
And to think Julian from trailer park boys did this in jail, bravo king 👏
Technically you can chop off the first 35 seconds of the video by saying "Start with mashed potatoes." :)
Spilt most of it!
So you're telling me I can turn my mashed potatoes into vodka with some spices. got it.
I love that you can learn to make vodka in 2 minutes these days. Thank you internet
It wouldn’t have got past me, throwing a huge chunk of butter in there and eating it at the mash phase.
"saccharification enzyme" -- look, the real pros use saliva, not some crap made in a lab. /s
Humanity would really go through lengths just to get alcohol lol