Best Fruit Flavored Liquor Mixes | Moonshiners | Discovery

In South Carolina, Josh and Bill's still is completed and their mash is ready to run. All that's left to do is fire up. It smells great. Yes sir. But with both the still and the mash recipe untested, their chances of brewing good shine are a roll of the dice. I'm a little nervous about this run because we're making something we've never made before. We're making some strawberry brandy. Let's crank that still up. I'm totally excited man. This is the first time we've been able to make any moonshine all season. I gotta tell you, it feels real good. We're so close now, you can almost taste it. Heck yeah. Yeah, she's about ready. Let's put the cap on. Even for veteran moonshiners, running a still can be deadly. A leak in the system can quickly lead to a fireball explosion. There's definitely a chance of something major going wrong with every run of liquor. I mean, you're dealing with compressed explosive gases once that ethanol source boiling off. And if it finds a flame, I mean, it'll blow a sky high. Josh and Bill's first run of the season is off to a shaky start and a perfect storm of inexperience and untested equipment could bring it down in flames. Man, we're about to make some moonshine for the first time this season, but I'm a little bit nervous. I gotta tell you, because we're trying this new worm thing out. Not sure if it's going to come out good or not, but we're fixing to find out. It's about time we got this thing going. I'm ready to taste some of these doggone strawberries. It's all I can smell. A design we came up with, I'm sure it's going to work. I can't believe it ain't come out yet. We should be seeing it anytime. Anytime now, we're going to have some little drops of love coming out of that worm. And I must say, it's about time. There it is. There it is. There it is. Well, we got liquor coming out. We're in business. Well, sometimes people think when you're running fruit that the liquor's going to come out that color. This is definitely not true. Liquor's going to come out clear no matter what. Yes, sir. Over the state line in Haywood County, North Carolina, Moonshiners Mike and Jerry are busy turning a windfall of blueberries into high-end brandy. That's blueberry, ain't it? Me and Jerry, we want to make top shelf, high dollar premium alcohol. That's our goal for this season. Less alcohol, but for a higher price. That's what we're trying to do. Let me get you a snort of it. What's it taste like? Tastes pretty good. Oh my God, son. It's ready. Holy. Oh my God. That is fine. That's good. Just like it is. When you mash in fruit for a minute, it turns into wine. It's a semi-sweet, semi-dry. Oh my God. It's good. This is blueberry mash. This is some of the finest looking wine a man could ever lay his eyes on. Whatever we've done, by God, we've done something right. Let's get this stuff skimmed off here and get it in a pot. Got a nice thick cake on the top of it. Really, really pretty, real deep, dark in color. It smells great. Tastes damn good too. And look at the volume that we're going to have as opposed to distilling it off. Oh yeah. Seven gallons. That's what we distill it. We got 50 sitting right here. It's a no down brainer. Are you down for a damn challenge or what? Challenge is my middle name. Jerry, we got liquor, brother. She's a hit in the jar. Good deal. Our blueberry brandy goes for about $125 a gallon. We could probably sell, you know, a bottle of the champagne for 50 bucks a bottle. Per volume, it's double the money pretty much. Also, we'll have a hell of a lot more volume than if we distilled it off into brandy. It's good and cold. Heck yes, son. But it's a lot of extra work and making champagne is a process that neither one of us is really familiar with. We got money to be made on the brandy. If we turn this into a champagne, we may fail completely. We basically risking the bird that we have in our hand for two in the damn bush here. Money in the bank. Money in the bank. We're making our second trip in thanks to a stuck fermentation. We've got new yeast. Hopefully it's more liquor. Gotta do it. We gotta do it, he says. In the Great Smoky Mountains, it's attempt number two for Mark and Digger on their cantaloupe moonshine mash. Boy, it sure does look like it's ready to go, don't it? Yep, but it ain't. Mr. Tong will tell you that. Mark and Digger's first attempt failed because the yeast died long before fermentation was complete. There ain't a bit of alcohol taste to it. No? We're dead in the water. They're placing their bets on a slower acting, high alcohol producing yeast strain that should be hardy enough to complete the process. This yeast, I've never used it before. It's a different strain. At worst, we don't make any liquor, but we've got no choice. We're behind in the season. This yeast here has more potential than any yeast I've ever used in my life. Supposedly, it'll stand alcohol by volume of up to 24 percent. Precious commodity here. I got all the faith in the world in you and this yeast. This yeast requires a lot of attention. We've decided we'd use our drill and our churn. You've got to put a lot of air into your mash to keep it going. To propagate in sufficient quantity to complete fermentation, yeast initially need an abundant supply of oxygen. About like us, we can't live without air. No, not very long. I've seen you, when you run out of breath, you quit eating for a minute. It's kicked off me. I can smell it. William Nance is going crazy. Looks like you just unzipped your britches while they're flying in there. Ain't that pretty? You never know which is the longest minute, a microwave minute or a treadmill minute. Well, neither one of them. It's waiting on mash to ferment when you're so far behind in your season. Well, it's kicked off. Now, all it's got to do is keep on kicking. Damn. High volume mash right there, baby. Wow. This yeast works and, you know, I'm going to be optimistic and I'm going to say we're going to increase our volume over half. Let's light this rascal boot. There I go. Whoa. We're also worried about taste. We've never fermented anything like this before. I've always got in the back of my mind, did we run enough air into that mash to to get it working good? Did we get that yeast kicked back off strong enough? You can have a hundred gallon liquor, but if it don't taste worth a ****, nobody wants it. I don't know. The mash smelled awful good. The mash tasted awful good. It tasted good, yeah. That ought to hold that. Now, just think, four or five days ago, you was ready to dump that out. You may be ready to dump it out again. Again, it's done. We got a lot of time, a lot of money invested in this still. We got a lot of making up we got to do. And if we don't make it up right now, we may not. I'm going to check this thing, Puss. We ought to have some liquor out of this. This is crazy. It takes a good quart to fill that bottom of that condenser up. Well, all we can do is wait there, Hattie boy. That's kind of disheartening. You'd think liquor be coming off of there. I don't understand it. We ain't forgotten something, have we? Lookie here, Puss. I told you I was smelling out the hall. Maybe you was right. Hell, yeah. Hey. Bump up. Oh, yeah. Look at that, baby, man. That's perfect strain. Keep on doubting my sniffer. You know something this big don't miss much. It's got its own zip code. I guess you're right. Pretty much. What do you think? It is goosey pud. Robbinsville, North Carolina, as fall approaches, Mark and Huck prep an early batch of their seasonal huckleberry brandy to meet the demand of a loyal customer. You better get them mashed up good. Yeah. We've picked huckleberries all our life. They're the same thing as a tame blueberry, except they're just wild. They grow back in the mountains, you know, up on these high tops and everything. I always thought they was a little bit sweeter. Fruit, that's what makes brandy. Usually we make liquor out of corn, but you can always get more money getting brandy. It just got a little better taste most of the time. Old specialty barrel. So we want to set up a barrel of huckleberry brandy. Huckleberries and corn, they ain't much difference. You have to bust it up and you just put sugar and malt just like you would with your corn. The last time we made some huckleberry brandy, Huck, everybody's crazy about that stuff. Yeah, they liked it, didn't they? Yeah. I dump them all in the natural yeast. The malted corn acts as a catalyst for the environmental yeast to ferment the mash. We ever do any more barries like this? I've come up with another idea on how to mash them up. I'll let you pull your boots and socks off and roll your britches and legs up and get in there. You don't want to do that. That's the way they do grapes, though, ain't it? I don't want to change the taste of the liquor. All right, let me get the water. Yeah, we call this old Huck, Huckleberry Brandy. What do you think of that? Yeah, it sounds all right. It's got a good ring to it. It does, don't it? Yeah, old Huck, we've always called him Huckleberry, you know, so that's a pretty good deal for him, I think. It sort of matches. Yeah. Brandy, you know, it'll take us as long as it does corn liquor. It'll get ready to run. You get that on, I'm going to get us a board to put over this crack. We don't want no rain water going in. Like where it takes seven days to work a corn, at least take 15 for the brandy. But the thing about brandy, just as quick as it gets worked off, you've got to run it because you just got a day or two and it'll turn to vinegar on you. This Huckleberry Brandy, it'll be good. People like it. I think we can sell all we can make. It's kind of, there it is. It smells good, don't it? You do smell it. Yeah, I can smell it over here. Huck, I'm going to go ahead and toss some heads. Let's start catching the liquor then. We'll have to try it. Yeah, try it. Pretty good, eh? Yeah, boy. Boy, it's stout though. Pretty high proof stuff. Yeah. That's the kind of wine you watch for, you know. Now, we're going to proof it down about 80, so it'll be a little milder, a little smoother to drink. Boy, it's got a good taste to it. Gentlemen, the oranges will ferment and make any nice wine. I mean, we got 1,080 jars of it. It don't get no cheaper than this. These oranges, they were free. You know, everybody's having hard times right now and we figured that if we could save our customers some money, good. But I ain't never heard of anybody ever make an orange moonshine, Mandarin or otherwise. They're not bad. I think the color is all it's off on. Here, let me fish you one out there and you can eat it. Well, they don't taste bad. What I'm telling you, they're all right. You know, people lose their damn mind over expiration dates. Back in the day when we was kids, you smelled of it. If it stunk, you didn't eat it. If it tastes bad, you spit it out. I mean, they're mushy. You don't want them to be mushy. That's what it is. It's just the texture. The syrup on these, it's not really sweet. It's probably just a natural juice with a little extra water, maybe some glycerin. So, we'll add just a little bit of sugars in it. I'll pour a little water in here and get that corn sugar dissolved. Keep on till you break the jar. See, that's what I think's bad on them because they just turn into nothing. This right here, it'll make anything from it. It'll take off in a couple of hours. This yeast is more useful with grapes. That's what it's generated for. It's wine yeast. It's more for an acidic nature than more of a basic nature. I'll put her over here in this wind. It'll catch that morning sun and warm up. Hey, I believe it'll Over the years, we've used fruit cocktail, we've used canned peaches, but this is something that's never posed itself before. I'm going to say it's going to have a hell of a cap on it. They're clean as a hound's tooth and they'll be fine, I think. Is that all of them? Yeah, that's all we got up here. We still got liquor, but that's all the jars we got clean. We've got all this tempered liquor jarred up. Now, we need to see if the liquor is going to taste good. How are we doing back there, steering wheel? Our jar shortage is temporarily solved for us. There you go. Perfect, perfect. In the woods of central Virginia, with a windfall of apples at their disposal. They smell good, don't they? Tickle and the Laws mash in for their first ever freeze distillation. You want to grab his grinder over here, Kenny? Yeah. I ain't never seen one like that before. I ain't gonna lie to you, I thought it was a leaf mulch or something like that. Josh brought us a whole lot of apples when he come to help us build our still site. All right, turn him on. So we're going to make us an apple jack. Apple jack is a form of apple brandy, but instead of using a heating distillation process, we use a freeze distillation process. Hold on, unplug it. Look at that. That's some apple sauce. That's good too. That's the finest leaf blower I've ever seen in my life. I've got a grinder that I normally use to grind up my apples, but it leaves bigger chunks. So I found this grinder, it grinds it up real fine, like apple sauce. And I'm hoping by doing that, we'll extract more flavor out of it. Damn, that looks good, man. Apple jack, baby, apple jack. She's froze. She's froze? Yeah, let's take this out. Frozen solid? Yes, sir, she's froze up pretty good. Yeah, look, that one's even fuller. It's damn tempting, too cold. Ain't but one way to find out, right? Get to C4. We've got to get the ice off of the top of this stuff, and about the only thing we know to do is just start breaking it and pulling it out. Oh man, I got a bite. You got a bite? Go on, go on. I ain't fishing, huh? That'll last, I'll finish you. Yes, sir. Taste this and taste what it's about. Does it? Seriously. Taste that apple? Yeah, taste the apple. It's good. We've got to extract this ice, throw it to the side, because that's water. Now we've got the alcohol, and you can tell right away the alcohol is there, but it's not as strong. We're going to have a totally different market with this freeze extraction. You know what, Kenny? Yeah, man? I ain't never in my life thought I'd be making liquor with a hammer and a jigsaw. Totally opposite. All right. God knows that's cold. We're on the right path here now. This is just the first freezing. I'll say she's about got it. Beautiful. Oh, that is hot. A little bit milder, seems like. Smoothly, too. Not quite have a bite to it. I think we got a winner right here. You want to test it tonight? Well, if I wake up being able to do a screen door in the morning, I'll know it ain't no good. You know, when we distill, we end up with about 10% of what we put in our mash pot. And with this freeze distillation, we wind up with much, much more.