moonshiners???

[Thejiro]

Has anyone seen this new show on the discovery channel??? I started watching it and noticed when this episode while they were stilling they just added corn sugar and yeast to a pot they call the mash pot and boil it off to produce the alcohol. My question is how are they able to get fermentation to go off so quickly?? Is it because they are boiling the ingredients together..... But its my understanding that yeast are only active up to a certain temperature...... I may be off on this or the whole fermentation step is getting lost to the hollywood factor but anyone have any input????

Fwiw i have a decent understanding of the sciences.invovled in fermentation so im puzzled as to how this works.

 

[Double_D]

If I'm not misunderstanding the series of events you saw, they were most likely heating water to dissolve the corn sugar(still a necessary step) and then added the yeast. Then cut out the fermentation video, if there was any, and skipped to the distillation segment which is the part of the episode I saw. The alcohol vaporizes at a lower temperature than water. If you notice, they also didn't go in depth on the temperatures at which they make the cuts of the heads and tails or tasting the batch (moonshine style as apposed to temping the head or going off pressure) to tell when the sulfurous compounds and the solvents have started to subside.

 

[Yuri_Rage]

No distilling talk.