Making Vodka from Potatoes

[Skean Dhude]

Vodka seems to me, who doesn't drink btw, as the poor mans whisky. It is also one of the most versatile and cheapest spirits being recommended as an antiseptic wash for every first aid kit.

The reason though it is so popular is that it is relatively easy to make from potatoes in every flat in Russia. That is why they managed to survive and live in that society. Vodka has also been made with wood pulp as well as the standard grains, potatoes and rice among others which makes the ingredients easy to come by even in a poor society.

Anyway here is a simple recipe for Vodka from Potatoes. (Russian for little water)

To make 1L of Vodka.

Peel around 1Kg of potatoes and chop the potatoes into around 1cm cubes.
Put all of the potato cubes in a pressure cooker with quite a lot of water, make sure to well cover the potatoes.
When the potato has dissolved into the water let it cool down before straining the potato. The potato juice is your potato vodka base.
To distill the potato juice you heat the juice, capture the resulting steam and collect it which forms your potato vodka. This is the role of the still. You can improvise with a pot with a pipe that the steam can escape from. This pipe goes into a collecting bowl. If long enough the steam will condense and run into the collecting bowl. Discard the first 50 ml of output and stop collecting before the pot runs dry. This removes the bad parts in the vodka. This is the part that causes blindness.

This will be single distilled vodka. Repeat to double distill and again to triple distill. The more distillations the higher the ethanol level which can lead to fatalities. Don't do more than 5 distillations to minimise the potency.

Then store this Vodka for your medical kit. It is a very cost effective method of producing alcohol.