I'm doubting one could make a better vodka than a Titos even with the best home still.
100% disagreeing with you. If you reddit, check our /r/firewater.
Here's the rub. You get/make a column still, same as any distiller. You strip it first - this separates liquid from solid and junk, essentially, and leaves you with low wines. Next, you do multiple distillation runs, however many you want. They go like this:
- Collect distillate in bottles, small ones, maybe 100ml plus or minus depending on how big your stream is.
- Lightly taste each bottle. For the first run, you can probably take out the first bottle and set it aside, this is your methanol and such (again, depending on how much you're distilling at a time, this might be 10ml or 50ml or 100ml etc...)
- As taste improves, mark each bottle. Eventually taste will start to get worse, mark each bottle.
- Take all the vile bottles - methanol, higher alcohols - and set them aside. This is your "bad" pile.
- Take all of your bottles that taste like water and set them aside. This is your "good" pile. It might take several iterations until you get water-tasting liquor.
- Take all the marginal bottles and re-distill them. Your first run or two might be entirely marginal.
- Eventually you're done re-distilling the same spirit, take all the good stuff and put it in the good pile, all the not so good stuff in the bad pile.
The good pile then is watered down to your choice of ABV. 40, 45, 50, are common.
The more brutal you are in your cuts, the better it tastes. No large company can match this. They need to profit, you don't. Even amateur distillers will be left with liters of 40% vodka that tastes like water, with barely a hint of burn or taste, drinkable by the glass. I am serious - no other vodka will be this tasteless and this smooth in the store, not tito's, not the $50 5x-distilled pure from russia made from potatoes, not the $200 kissed by virgins vodka. None. This stuff is peerless. Because you make cuts nobody else can afford to because you don't care if 50% of your decent product is wasted, because you're not paying tax so it's still relatively inexpensive.
Now, what do you do with the heads and tails? And the marginal stuff? You mix it all together and use it as industrial-strength degreaser, at some 90% ABV (unwatered down). Anything you clean with the stuff will be shiny and disinfected. Don't drink it, of course.
If you have trouble believing me, the folks on that subreddit show again and again that making absolutely, incredibly excellent vodka is not too difficult. Not only that, but you have an excellent base to make gin or absinthe or similar spirits if you want (neutral grain spirit + botanicals.) It's even high-proof enough for things like absinthe, which are often in the 65-75% ABV range.
But yes, it is illegal. Keep a good head about you - don't blow anything up, don't advertise buying/selling the still on craigslist, and absolutely for fucks sake don't sell any spirit. Give it away as gifts, sure, but never sell it, that paints a big red target on your back. Nobody cares about distilling until you make a fool of yourself.
