Grey Dog Distilling - dedicated to craft brewing and distilling

Hello everyone, firstly apologies for the delay in posting. Two problems conspired to keep me offline, namely the weather and work. When I had time to distill it was -30 degrees Celsius, not exactly conducive to sitting in a cold garage for any time. That being said, it was still -20 degrees Celsius last night when I (finally) ran some whiskey through the still. It had been sitting in the primary fermenter for the past 2 months waiting for me to get it together enough to run it. It is a corn, rye, and barley mash that I had attempted in the fall with partial grain, partial dry malt extract and corn syrup. I'll write more on the recipe and process later, with pictures. For now let me pass along two learnings: 1. -20 degrees Celsius is still a difficult temperature to distill at since it's a challenge to maintain proper still temperature. Constantly adjusting last night to keep the stream a nice steady pencil-lead sized stream. 2. More importantly, my nose doesn't work

Quick post today. Below see a picture of some rye whiskey I made last fall. Each bottle has been aging at cask strength (140 proof) for one year on wood chips, from left to right: hickory, apple, light American oak. The fall season in Alberta is very short, and the harvest a very busy time. I can't think of a better way than to enjoy the fall's bounty than with a drop of whiskey.

Howdy all, been a while but quite busy lately and not a lot of time for making things. I thought I'd bring you up to speed with my first attempt at apple cider. I've got a lot of friends with crab apple trees and who know I'm handy with alcohol. I got 2 large Rubbermaid totes worth of apples dropped off at my place. Since they did the hard work of picking, they (correctly) figured they could get part of the final product. First thing to do was prep them by coring and quartering them, getting rid of seeds, stems, and leaves. While I was chopping them up I noticed that some of them had damaged parts or potentially signs of pests eating at them. I got rid of those parts, and decided that it might be best to pasteurize the prepped apples. I fired up the burner and brought the apples to almost boil for 10 minutes or so, in batches since the pot is a 20L stock pot. This also had the effect of softening up the apples and giving them a cooked taste. As I'l

Hello all, with the end of the summer right around the corner I've been busy with getting the kids ready for a new school year, the inevitable busy September at work, and learning definitively how not to make apple cider (that's another post that I'll be making as soon as I've dealt with my experience and am able to speak of it in positive, or at least objective, terms). In the meantime, lets talk rum. If you're starting out distilling, rum is one easy to make but deceptively difficult to master. To be honest, all you need is some sugar, molasses, yeast, nutrient, and a plastic primary fermenter. Simple, right? Yes! Where the difficulty lays is developing a distilled product with the depth of taste that you can get from a good store-bought rum but lacks in your home made product. More on that in a later post though, let's just get you going for now. First of all, let's start with a recipe. I find the following works well for me, as the ingredients ar

Howdy all, and welcome to Grey Dog Distilling, a blog dedicated to the hobby of craft distilling and brewing. I started this blog to document some of my adventures, success, and more likely, failures in craft distilling and brewing. I plan on learning lots from these failures, repeat my successes, and have a fun and engaging hobby along the way. If others can read about what not to do and apply them to their endeavours, then all the better. A bit about my background; I started making wine from kits in 2004 or so and found I could make a fairly consistent and drinkable wine, but didn't really challenge myself that much. It was more of a way to make cheap wine in a region of Canada with high taxes and low selection. A few years ago I relocated to a part of the country that has relatively lower taxes and a great deal better selection. I didn't want to go to the expense of transporting broken glass carboys, so I got rid of all the wine making stuff as it seemed redundant any