I was surprised how little free information was available on  the web for brewing moonshine, brandy, whisky,  schnaps, and all the other forms of homemade  alcohol. As I live in New Zealand where the law allows distillation for personal use, I am free to indulge the  passion of my Austrian ancestry and make schnapps.

If your country does not allow you to distil, change the  law or move to New Zealand!

Schnaps varies from 40%-70% alcohol, which is a  little more than normal whisky. Do not confuse the  pure, clear, strong Austrian schnapps with the sickly  sweet weak stuff in cocktail bars. Real schnapps was  reluctantly used as rocket fuel in WWII.

Schnaps is made by fermenting about 1 1/2 - 2kg / 3-4lb of fruit  per 4.5 litres / gallon of water. Basically you make a fruit wine, for  which recipes abound. The only difference is that you  ferment the fruit pulp. This is more easily done in a  fermentation bin than a demijohn or quart bottle.  Besides, brewing in 5 gallon polythene bins is actually  more reliable.

Whatever you brew, do it well. Schnaps traditionally  preserves the flavour of the fruit, and if you put 'orrible  brew in, you get 'orrible Schnaps out. If your brew  goes bad there is a chance that it may have methanol  in it, so don't distil it with the method I'm about to  describe or the methanol (the stuff that can make you blind) will get concentrated along with the desirable ethanol. Also always remove  the stones from peaches and cherries - the cyanide distills over. Scary, huh? That's it for  bad news.

 So you've made a cheap fruit wine, and you have no  still. Or do you? A still can be made easily and without  modifications from common kitchen equipment.

Find your largest stock pot, saucepan or even the  lower half of a wide pressure cooker. Fill it 2/3 full with  fermented stuff.

Now find a big glass or other heatproof bowl that will fit  inside the pot with enough room around the edges for  you to reach round with an oven glove to fetch it out  again - tying on a string handle makes it much easier to extract. The important thing is that it must always have a  portion over the centre of the pot, no matter where it  floats to.

Now find that round-bottomed Chinese wok or an Olde  English round-bottomed copper. Anything bigger than  the top of your pot that has a domed bottom will work.  Put it on top and warm up the pot. Just remember that  alcohol is inflammable from here on in.

When steam starts to rise, you need to put something cool into the wok. We’ve modified ours with a drainage hole at the top to let warm water out and just trickle feed in cold water from the tap. As you may not want to drill holes in your wok, try filling it with  ice, cold water, or snow. Water and large, plastic milk bottles or ice cream containers filled with ice work well. . The alcohol fumes from the fermented  stuff rise up past the sides of bowl, condense on the bottom of  the wok, and drip down back into the bowl. That's it. You don't need to suspend the bowl out of the boiling stuff because evaporation of undesirable methanol and refluxing ethanol will keep it sufficiently cool. Do not attempt to block the gap around the rim of the big pot beacuse this is the escape route for methanol.

To keep the liquor of high quality:

• Don't let things boil too hard; you might sink the bowl  or get froth into it.
• Make sure the bottom of the small bowl does not  touch the bottom of the pot.
• Replace the contents of the wok if the ice all melts  and/or the water gets too warm.

Taste the stuff off the bottom of the wok - don't you  wish you'd cleaned it better? - to see if there's still  alcohol in it. When it doesn't taste strong, or tastes unpleasant, stop distilling. Remove from heat, leave lid on and let it all  cool. Brave souls who fear no fire hazards may pull the  bowl out quickly at this point with oven gloves.

Schnaps doesn't need to be aged, but it is wise to at  least let it cool!

Bottle and enjoy - just don't drive anywhere or shoot  things after you've drunk it. That's being a bloody idiot.

If it's not strong enough for you, clean out the still, put  the liquor in the pot and distil that as per above. You'll  lose a lot of flavour and some alcohol, but the end  result will be stronger, and more flammable. My family has sucessfully brewed from apples, apricots, cherries, elderberries, kiwi fruit (well, that one wasn't great to be honest), nectarines, peaches, pears, plums, raspberries, rowan berries, and quince. If you want to find out how the Austrians do it (in Austrian, of course), go to this link. There is also a more high-tech Kiwi Brewer, for those that feel comfortable with more complicated equipment.

I plan to experiment with very large, cheap, stainless steel cookware for the still body, together with a giant wok from the local chineese supermarket to increase the capacity of the still. This means I won't have to go through the messy task of cleaning everything out so often. I'll publish my findings as they come.

What About Methanol?

Methanol is a poisonous alcohol that can make you go blind or even kill you. It can be present in badly-brewed beverages as well as distilled spirits. The best way of avoiding methanol is to avoid brewing methanol in the first place. This is done a with a clean brew, and by not brewing from starchy produce.

Secondly, with this method the distillate sits in a bowl which is above the boiling point of methanol and only just below the boiling point of ethanol. If present in modest amounts, the methanol is continuously evaporated and leaks out of the gap between the wok and the sidewalls of the big pot.