Making Baijiu (Part 2)

Baijiu is biggest selling spirit on the Planet. If you have never heard of it, you are not alone. Most westerners are in the same camp. In the last video we made the red rice wine and got it up to the point of starting fermentation. If you want the recipe for the red rice wine, here is the video for that….Making Red Rice Wine Baijiu https://youtu.be/p17b5HdKRHU This video focuses on completing the fermentation and then distilling the red rice wine into baijiu. The first few minutes of this video shows the progress of the fermentation over a few weeks. Next we move into distilling equipment, then finally running the still and tasting the baijiu. Equipment So we have 3 important pieces of equipment: The boiler - into which goes the rice wine The "heavenly pot" into which goes the lees and some rice hulls The condenser to cool the vapours and give us the product The boiler is our normal 50L keg conversion with a 3kw element The heavenly pot is my old stainless steel home brew conical fermenter The condenser is my regular shotgun condenser from my column. There is no column, and no bubble plates. My old fermenter fortunately has triclamp connectors so its easy to connect to the boiler. If you don’t have something like this, you could use a big thumper, or simply discard the lees and not bother with the heavenly pot. (just use a pot still configuration) However throwing the lees away will lose some flavour and alcohol from the baijiu. I mix the rice mush with Rice Hulls, you can get these cheaply from any good homebrew supplier as they are frequently used to prevent a "stuck mash" in very glutinous mashes. One kilo is plenty for our recipe. Running the still Traditionally baijiu is run hot and fast. The distillate comes off between 80% and 60% abv, and proofing down is your choice. Cuts are seldom made - just getting rid of 100mls as foreshots, and stopping when the tails become nasty and that is how I plan to do it, though I will collect in Jars in case we need to discard anything too horrid. SUPPORT If you like the content, please hit the thumbs up button - the more likes the video gets the more people YouTube suggests the video to. Please subscribe, and hit the bell for notifications of new videos as they get released. Leave a comment if you want to interact with me - I always respond as helpfully as possible. If you want to support the channel in other ways, please consider joining my new Patreon group. https://www.patreon.com/PlanetMoonshine?fan_landing=true