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May 21, 2014 How to Make Watermelon Moonshine (Step By Step With Pictures)

Watermelon Moonshine Recipe

Are you tired of making the same old moonshine recipe? Perhaps you've noticed the early summer bins of watermelons at the entrance of every supermarket or maybe it's harvest time and you have some ripe melons in the garden? If so- don’t waste your time eating them. Get ready to party and make some watermelon moonshine! Below is a detailed watermelon wine recipe which once distilled makes an awesome watermelon brandy.

Mashing Equipment

Making watermelon wine is pretty simple. You'll want to have the following handy to make this mash:

Cutting board and a sharp knife

Blender

A fine cheesecloth

A couple of 5 gallon buckets

Large pot for mashing

Hot plate

A large paddle or spoon for stirring

Wort / immersion chiller (for cooling the mash)

A hose for siphoning

Thermometer

A glass carboy or food grade plastic bucket for fermentation

An airlock

Ingredients

5 large watermelons

2 pound of raisins

4 pounds of cane sugar

2 packets bread yeast (or wine yeast)

Mashing, Fermentation, and Distillation Procedure

The first thing you'll need to do is extract the sweet, sweet watermelon juice from 5 large watermelons. The easiest way to do this is to cut the Watermelon in half and then into quarters. Once quartered, cut into slices and remove the rind. Next, reduce to chunks that will fit into a blender.

Next, add to chunks to the blender and obliterate!

Don't over-blend. Shut down the blender as soon as the fruit has been liquefied. Remember you'll need to pour this through a cheesecloth later and you don't want to blend it so much that the pulp comes right through the strainer.

As you fill up your blender containers with watermelon puree, dump the blended goodness though a cheesecloth installed in a sanitized food safe straining bucket. Nylon paint strainers work great for this.

Remove the cheesecloth containing pulp from the bucket and let some of the juice drip out.

Once the bag is a manageable size, squeeze it to extract as much watermelon juice as possible.

Pour the strained watermelon juice into a large stainless steel mash-tun.

Add sugar to the juice and stir until it dissolves.

Add 2 pounds of raisins.

Heat the strained watermelon juice, raisins, and sugar to 160F. This will kill most of the naturally occurring wild yeast and bacteria found in the watermelon juice.

After heating, add cold water to reach a total volume of 5 gallons (if needed).

Cool mash to 70 degree with a sterilized wort-chiller.

While the mash is cooling, make a yeast starter using 2 cups of 120F water, 2 tsp of sugar, and 2 small packages of bread yeast.

Take a starting gravity reading using a brix refractometer. Load the hydrometer by using a small dropper to remove a bit of juice from your mash pot.

Ideally, the brix reading should be around 1.065, which will produce a starting alcohol of about 8%. If the reading is low add 100% pure cane sugar until the desired starting gravity has been reached.

In case you're not familiar with brix refractometer, here's what the reading looks like

Aerate the mash by transferring it between two sterilized food grade buckets. Pour it hard so lots of bubbles form on top of the liquid.

Transfer the 70 degree mash to a sterilized fermentation vessel.

Add the yeast starter to the fermenter.

Admire the beauty of the carboy full of watermelon juice.

Add an airlock and ferment at 70F until finished. If you're not sure how to tell when it's done, read this article on fermentation.

Our batch finished very quickly (in about 2 days) due to a high starting temp (which is not ideal).

Once the bubbles in the airlock slow down/stop take a gravity reading. Once the gravity reading does not change for 3 days or is 1.010 or below it is done. Our gravity finished just below 1.00, giving us a starting alcohol of about 8.5%, which is exactly where we want to be.

After letting the wine settle for another 3-4 days (this will give the yeast time to settle to the bottom of the fermenter), siphon into a 100% copper still.

Leave the raisins, settled watermelon pulp, and as much yeast behind as possible. Transferring this stuff into your still could cause off flavors to be present in the final product.

Distill, making tight heads and tails cuts.

After distillation we'dsuggest you add some finishing touches to your watermelon moonshine by doing one of the following:

Combine the hearts in a mason jar, add a fresh chunk of watermelon, and leave it sit for a week, refrigerated. Drink soon after. The watermelon fruit likely won't hold up very well for very long at room temp.



You could also add some lightly toasted oak chips to the hearts and age for 2-3 weeks.

Additional Notes:

As we've discussed in previous articles on alcohol yield, the final take from your distillation run will be highly dependent on the amount of sugar you start with in the mash. Much of the sugar in this recipe will come directly from the watermelons. However, we've added some sugar as well.

Why did we add sugar to this recipe? Well, fresh watermelon juice has an average brix of about 10. Some are higher. Some are lower. But that's a good average to use as a rule of thumb.

The particular watermelons we used had a brix of around 8. About 20% lower than the average. We bought them from Walmart and they were grown in Mexico...and you get what you pay for! If we hadn't added sugar, our starting alcohol wouldn't be any more than about 4.5-5%. For the sake of maximizing our efforts we bumped that number up to 8%.

Why did we stop at 8% starting alcohol, as opposed to adding enough sugar to bump it all the way up to 20%? That'd really maximize our efforts, right? While we would certainly end up with a lot more alcohol, the flavor profile of the fermented watermelon juice would be much less ideal at 20%. Most craft distilleries never produce spirits with a starting alcohol higher than 8-10%, as starting alcohol in this range produces a far superior product to that with a starting alcohol of say, 20%.