A bunch of years ago I started making my own beer with my friends Eric and Rhett (of whom the latter is an old school award-winning brewer that got started in the 80’s and now owns a brewery in VA Beach), and the former being a nutjob that would throw whatever was in the kitchen sink in the mash (with sometimes uncanny results!). So yeah, I had a good crew to get me into it.
It was a deep dive, a lot of learning, and a lot of mess. Brewing is messy, involved, expensive, scientific, annoying, disgusting, delicious, and amazing. Kegerators, stoppers, wort, yeast, and grains, valves, knobs, moss, cleansers and sludge, contamination of everything and all the while surrounded by bugs! 
Most people get jumped in by making their first beer their worst beer. That was my case.
Anyhow, I finally got around to making a few good beers after a year of toil- This Saison above was probably not the first beer I should have tried (IPA’s are way more forgiving- hey at least I didn’t make a lager as my first!) I was all about those fruity beers that started getting called “Juicy” and made a Tropic IPA which I lifted off of some website. I made I think three runs of this and the last was totally drinkable. Tropic IPA,
Then a Sierra clone with Rakau hops (and Cascade). It was good. We got it from it’s (OG) Original Gangster to it’s (FG) Final Gangster which was about 1.01, eventually.
Anyway, Vodka. Well turns out beer after however many thousands of them I drank wasn’t working out perfectly with my gut in the heat of NOLA- I mean drinking a 10% ABV Double IPA is a heavy, syrupy, goopy sort of thing to do in when it’s 95% humidity and 95% degrees- maybe one but if you’re trying lighten the mood you may need a few more which to me became overwhelming. It’s refreshing that it’s cold, for about 24 seconds. Tried lighter IPA’s but then the flavor wasn’t there and well, I just switched to,
Vodka- the clearest of the clear, the most transparent of your PNG’s. So, drank rot gut from the rail for 3-4 years at the best bar in the ByWater known as JJ’s and stepped up my game in the last few pandemic-free years to drink a little fancier stuff at home. Naturally once you’ve paid enough for something that is essentially flavorless and overpriced (the high end stuff, at least) you may get around to wanting to pay less and maintain your same ridiculously high standards (what..). Plus I’m not drinking it to crucify germs, I’m mixing it. This same notion occurred to me with coffee roasting which is another story for another time.
Vodka is a neutral spirit as many know- In fact Vodka is confusing in that the best is supposed to be, flavorless?, but then why are there 500 brands? Is everyone competing to be less flavorful? Marketing, who is the best label designer, or? Obviously vodka has “flavor” and really what people are differentiating, I think, is the distillation process far less than what you make it out of (the mash). On the other hand, ultra premium vodkas are easy to distinguish from each other as well as from middle of the road stuff like Tito’s. So there’s something there. I fell in love with rye vodka which again, reading on the internet, so, yeah, “they” say that the idea of using rye is counterintuitive because rye has so much flavor and vodka…and so on…If you drink enough different vodka’s you will know the difference between rye and potato and corn and whatever pretty quickly… If you spend enough time on Reddit, you’ll learn that the internet is a place to argue over petty things…I prefer to just drink vodka.
The barrier to entry to make vodka is pretty low- you’re capturing the vapor from fermented mash and then the jargon kicks in with heads, tails, and cuts and other stuff. But as a complete amateur I concluded, probably with plenty of Reddit “do you even know who I am?” bluster if I so dared, that you don’t keep the first part because it’s basically poison and you drink the next part or re-distill it depending on how you did.
So, my plan,
#1- I had the cash so I bought an overpriced Air Still Pro because I don’t have time or cycles to build a still in my back yard (or you may say the patience, the back yard, or any one or all of these reasons (or another 20 reasons). All of your reasons are valid.
#2- Speaking of distilling, how do you distill out information from the internet that’s accurate? Well, I built my own mini AI/ML/chatbot setup a while ago that turns out to be pretty modular depending on my current interest- that only knew about what I was interested in by feeding a marginally non-biased base model embeddings- If you’re like WTF are you talking about Alex then… In short: I fed a computer information about vodka that did not come from Reddit. Opinions be damned! Now I can talk about vodka without cognitive dissonance and fighting..
Okay that should be enough info.
#3: Now I need a recipe- Turns out the internet also works in Poland so that took about five minutes to find a ripoff recipe for my favorite vodka named after:
#4: Mix it all up and stick it somewhere warm. Use Angel Koji yeast according to the Polish folk, and of course only the highest quality ingredients.
#5: Wait 7-10 days. Well that’s the easy part.
#6: Run 4L of of this slurry through the Air Still Pro in reflux mode- Make sure your metal pieces in the Weir as properly configured so that the copper is on the top! But why- and what’s a Weir and..oh what are you talking about.. Well…
Okay but why use copper and regular metal? Why copper?
OK thanks AI. Tell me a funny story about a guy that got drunk off of his own vodka. Tell the story like you’re already sort of drunk yourself:
And the final…