Home Experiments

This story starts off, as most good stories do, with a half gallon bottle of Everclear.

If you have ever woken up in a strange place without your pants, then you probably been introduced to Mr. Everclear.

For some unknown reason, I have had the wild hair to try and make whiskey at home. Since it is blatantly illegal to distill your own corn squeezin's at home- and it would involve a raid run by the same people that did Waco and Ruby Ridge- I wisely decided to start off with the commercial equivalent to White Dog. That would be the embryonic start of Trashcan Punch and a severe headache- Everclear.

I researched this fairly indepth. Well, as indepth as a lunch hour on the Home Distiller Forums will allow. So, I mixed Everclear 50/50 with distilled water, in several mason jars. In 4 jars, I did simple infusions. One was cracked black pepper, one was basil from the garden, the next was sundried tomato, and the last was a control. Just a 50/50 mix of Everclear and distilled water.

These will sit for 3 days, getting shaken once a day. Then they will be strained and used for beverage mixers.... if they aren't just flat out disgusting.

One jar I set aside, and added a spiral stick of medium toasted American white oak. This will be cycled every couple of days between the garage and the refrigerator. Going from 100+ degrees in the garage to 37 degrees of the fridge will hopefully simulate the effects of being in barrels in an aging shed for several years. I know it won't be the same, but I hope to make something at least drinkable.

You can actually see this is starting to take some color from the wood, and it is only been aging for 30 min at this point.

Updates to follow. If you see me posting random weirdness with misspellings- then I am probably sampling the goods.