The Joy of Home Distilling

The Joy of Home Distilling by Rick Morris is the ultimate guide to making your own vodka, whiskey, rum, brandy, moonshine, and more.

Is Home Distilling Legal?

Is home distilling even legal? This very thorough book by Rick Morris will explain all that for you. In New Zealand and Russia, for example, home distilling is perfectly legal. In some countries it’s legal by virtue of the fact that no-one’s passed any laws to say it’s illegal.

In the USA you’ll find stills for sale on Amazon, and home distilling is perfectly legal. People distil things like essential oils, and you can distil ethanol for use as fuel. Ethanol is simply the chemical term for alcohol, though while you can distil it for fuel, you can’t distil it if you’re going to drink it. To make it legal you need a license, effectively turning yourself into a legal distillery.

Distilling Equipment

If you’re interested in home distilling, then you definitely need this book, although there are one or two similar titles also on the market. The author has been selling distillation equipment for over 25 years, so is the perfect person to explain what equipment you need, how it works, where to get it, and even how to build it yourself if you’re capable. He’s also the founder of the Hobby Distiller’s Association.

Is Home Distilling Safe?

The author constantly stresses the safety aspect of home distilling. After all, alcohol vapor is highly flammable, and you’re dealing with that and with very hot temperatures, so you really have to know what you’re doing from a safety point of view. But if you do know what you’re doing, and take the right precautions, then home distilling is safe. As the author points out, since home distilling was made legal in New Zealand in 1996, there have been no reported accidents due to people distilling at home.

‘Never, ever forget that you are distilling fuel and it is explosive.’

Fermentation

‘Jesus turned water into wine. The rest of us have to use fermentation.’That’s typical of the author’s sense of humor, which turns what could have been a dry and academic book into a lighter read. He makes both yeast and the fermentation process understandable, and even fascinating, despite it being a complex process with many variables.

I personally have no intention of distilling at home, but wanted to read the book because I wanted to know more about the whole process behind producing the spirits I enjoy so much. I now know more about yeast than I ever wanted to, and my admiration for the distillers – home, craft, or commercial – is now even more than it was already.

‘The actual origins of fermentation go back 5,000 years to ancient Egypt, when it is said that some grain was left outside in the rain accidentally (and ingeniously, I might add). Wild yeast on the grain resulted in fermentation, and the chain of events had some awfully interesting results.’

Home Brewing and Winemaking

If you’re a home brewer or a home winemaker, you’ll already have some of the basic knowledge you’ll need towards becoming a home distiller. But you’ll still learn a lot from this book, even if you decide you don’t want to move on to home distilling.

From doing your first distillation to filtering your spirits to aging in barrels or alternatives to barrels, everything the home distiller could possibly need to know is in here.

The Joy of Home Distilling

The Joy of Home Distilling: The Ultimate Guide to Making Your Own Vodka, Whiskey, Rum, Brandy, Moonshine, and More, by Rick Morris, is published by Skyhorse Publishing.