DIY smoking wood chips

Benefits of using wood chips

Using oak chips instead of barrels reduces the production time of the drink several times.

This allows you to save not only time, but also the final product, since a large amount of alcohol evaporates during many years of aging in a barrel.

Grinding wood contributes to a more complete extraction of tannins. Roasting of varying degrees of intensity affects the taste and allows you to choose a pleasant bouquet. Wood chips absorb harmful substances that cannot be removed during distillation.

Manufacturing methods

The method of producing wood chips for smoking is determined by:

• the expected volumes of its production,
• types of raw materials used.

When processing small volumes of wood waste, chippers (chips) are used for soft and hard wood. Such equipment can produce 600 kg or more of finished chips per hour of a customizable fraction. Hand tools - axes and cutlasses - are practically not used on an industrial scale due to low productivity.

Large enterprises use a complex of equipment for the production of wood chips for smoking. The raw material is debarked wood (stem part with the bark removed), which is processed in several stages. The output is high-quality smoking chips in a size that is considered the best and most expensive on the market.

We buy and select wood chips

1. You can buy oak chips or wood chips in specialized stores for moonshiners, but such stores are only available in large cities.
2. Instead of wood chips, you can buy oak bark at the pharmacy. Oak bark is a pharmaceutical product, which means it undergoes appropriate testing. Therefore, there is a great chance to purchase an environmentally friendly product.
3. Wood chips, chips and bark can be found in online stores. When choosing a store, read reviews so as not to purchase bad wood chips.

When purchasing, you should give preference to oak that grows:

• in the Urals;
• in the Voronezh region;
• in the Caucasus;
• in Crimea;
• in France;
• in the Caucasus;
• in the Krasnodar region;
• in Tatarstan and Bashkorostan;
• in Belarus and Western Ukraine.

Instructions for making oak chips with your own hands

Despite the fact that experts value the most the oak that grows in certain areas of the Caucasus and the Krasnodar Territory, but in the absence of such, trees located nearby are quite suitable

You cannot take oak that grows in areas with high humidity, or that has been treated with chemicals against pests at the sawmill.

Oak chips should be made from branches of a healthy and young tree. Their age (based on annual rings) should be from 2 to 5 years. You must first remove the bark and dry the branches.

The wood is split along the grain. The maximum size of the resulting chips should be no more than 10 cm in length and no more than 2 cm in thickness. Small fractions ranging in size from 0.5 to 2 cm are called chips.

The raw materials for refining moonshine should be dried in the sun, laid out in a well-ventilated place. Chips dry for about a week, large strips - up to one month. In the cold season, you can use a dryer: plastic boxes with holes under which a fan is placed.

The pegs are soaked in cold water for 24 hours, changing it every 6 hours. Before the last stage, soda is added - 1 tsp. for every 5 l. The volume of water should be 5-6 times the volume of wood. Chips from fresh branches (which have lain in a ventilated place for less than six months) need to be soaked for three days, then boiled for an hour in a soda solution, and then for another two hours in fresh water.

The cubes removed from the container must be rinsed under ice-cold running water and then steamed for 2 hours.

To do this, you can put them in a sieve or colander and place them in a pan of boiling water. To reduce the steaming time by almost half, some place the wood chips in a small container, fill it with boiling water to the top and cover with a lid. Then it remains to rinse it again with cold water and air dry for 12 hours, turning it over periodically.

Firing time and temperature

Before roasting, the wood must be heated in the oven for at least 2 hours at a temperature of +150…+160ºC. After this procedure, the wood chips acquire a pleasant vanilla aroma.

Then move the raw materials onto a grill grate or aluminum foil, and increase the oven temperature to +200ºC. The color of the wood should be checked through the glass without opening the oven door.

Golden oak chips give the moonshine a vanilla flavor, brown ones - almonds and caramel, dark to black - dark chocolate. The wood should neither burn nor char.

When the desired shade is reached, the oven must be turned off and the door opened. If you don't have an oven, you can fry a small amount of oak chips over medium heat in a frying pan. However, the material will have to be constantly mixed and its color controlled.

The firing temperature indicated in the recipes can be varied within the range of +120…+220ºC. It depends on the size of the chips and the degree of drying. At lower degrees, polysaccharides do not break down into monosaccharides, and at higher degrees, monosaccharides also break down, forming burnt areas.

What affects the taste of alcohol?

Alcohol penetrates the wood chips and washes out tannins. They give the moonshine a cognac flavor and tint, but that’s all. Simple sugars formed during heat treatment improve the bouquet, softening the taste and aroma of the drink.

Pre-impregnation of oak chips has a more significant effect. Before making homemade cognac, they are filled with a mixture of moonshine with caramel or sweet wine for 2-3 days. The wood absorbs some of the liquid, which it then gives back to the tincture. However, the additional addition of caramel reduces the strength of the drink by 2-3°.

Sometimes the “tail” left after distilling the mash is used for impregnation. Depending on the thickness of the chips, the process takes from 5 hours to 4 days. A small amount of fusel oils from the “tail”, which gets into the pores of the wood, is cleared of the unpleasant odor, and when infused with alcohol, it gives it the taste of whiskey or tequila.

Moonshine becomes sharper due to the use of branches along with bark, which contains a lot of resins. If the infusion time is reduced, the cognac notes will be barely noticeable, and increasing it will lead to an excess of tannins.

Due to the presence of burnt fragments in the wood chips, the alcohol will be very bitter. Adding various spices also does not always lead to improved taste.

The level of roasting of oak chips for moonshine, controlled only visually, is in fact not always the same. As a result of this heterogeneity, alcohol acquires a whole bouquet of different tastes:

• vanilla;
• clove;
• walnut;
• smoky;
• cinnamon;
• honey;
• floral;
• balsamic.

Preparing oak chips and moonshine before infusion

The tincture should always be made after distilling the mash, and not before it. The initial strength of moonshine to produce a cognac drink should be 45-70% vol.

Oak chips need to be sorted out, removing small burnt fragments. Preparing larger chips involves lightly removing charred areas. It is better not to touch the darkened wood underneath, as it gives the tincture a pleasant chocolate flavor.

Self-production of wood chips

If you have suitable wood, you can make wood chips and sawdust for smoking with your own hands . logs are selected . They have up to 70% natural humidity, which has a positive effect on the smoking process.

To produce a lot of smoke, the shredded wood must smolder, not burn. It is not advisable to use overdried logs. Dry wood burns quickly without forming a smoky coating on the surface, which leads to the rendering of fat in the products. Freshly cut branches give dishes a bright, juicy color, while dry branches give a delicate taste.

The most common way to make wood chips for smoking at home using simple tools. For this you will need:

• saw (electric or manual);
• wood trimmings;
• axe.

Prepare wood chips of the same size, so they will be consumed longer and burn out at the same time. The bark is removed from small tree trimmings. Thin longitudinal plates 2 cm thick are chopped with an ax. Sawdust is taken of medium size, without any admixtures of wood dust and shavings.

Before loading into the smokehouse, wood chips are brought to the required humidity by wetting or drying, depending on the initial state of the material. Dried wood chips are soaked in clean water 2-3 hours before cooking.

Cognac from moonshine on oak chips

The exact amount of wood chips needed to prepare the drink is not indicated in any recipe. For alcohol with a strength of 70° vol. 5-10 g of product per 1 liter of drink is enough. For instant tincture with 45-degree moonshine, a proportion of 40-50 g per 1 liter is recommended.

The infusion time is also indicated differently - from 2 weeks to six months. In order to prevent an excess of tannins that deteriorate the quality of homemade cognac, it is better to take a minimum amount of oak sticks and infuse them until the desired shade and taste are obtained.

It is most convenient to make the tincture in glass jars and bottles with a tightly screwed cap. Oak cubes (12-15 g per 3-liter jar) are placed in a bowl and filled with moonshine.

For light roasting, you can do without vanilla; in other cases, add to taste, but not more than ¼ tsp. Close the jar tightly with a lid and open it only once a week for 3 minutes to allow the contents to “breathe” a little. The process takes 3-4 months.

After 25-30 days of infusion, weekly tasting is recommended so as not to oversaturate the drink with tannins. The finished homemade cognac is poured into another container, passing through a cotton-gauze filter.

If desired, you can improve the taste by adding a little syrup, and to get a deep cognac shade - burnt caramel. To do this, mix sugar with water in a ratio of 3:1 and cook over low heat until dark brown.

Other additives also help improve taste: honey, cloves, cinnamon, herbs, flower petals, lemon zest. However, they can only be used in small quantities.

The oak chips in the alcohol absorb honey and the aroma of spices, which then transfer into the next infusion. The wood chips can be used 2-3 more times, without prior frying or soaking, but the infusion time will have to be increased.

Chip manufacturing technology

The processes of harvesting wood chips at home for your smokehouse and its production on an industrial scale differ significantly.

Making wood chips for smoking with your own hands (video)

Smoking lovers who have a summer house or garden plot will most likely try not to spend money on purchased wood chips, but will try to prepare it themselves. How to do this at home?

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First you need to prepare the raw materials. You can’t count on leftover lumber from building a house or bathhouse - there are mainly pine, fir and larch. Therefore, you will have to either go to the forest or order the necessary material from a logging office or sawmill; advertisements about this can be found on the Internet and in local newspapers.

Next, the wood needs to be cleared of bark and crushed using one of the methods that will be discussed below in paragraph 3.1. Fractions ranging in size from 2x2 to 3x3 cm with a thickness of up to 1 cm are considered optimal for the best smoking results.

When producing wood chips, the main problem is to provide it with optimal humidity of 50-70%. Wet wood chips emit a lot of harmful smoke; dry wood chips will catch fire and will not produce enough smoke for smoking. Wood moisture can be measured in the following way:

• soak the chips in clean water at a temperature of 20-30 ° C for 4 hours, after which its humidity will approach 100%, regardless of what it was at the beginning and the weight of the water will become equal to the weight of the wood that absorbed it;
• place the soaked wood chips on a wire rack and let the water drain for 15-20 minutes;
• weigh the wet chips, record the weight and designate it as the initial one;
• multiply the weight of wet wood chips by 0.8 (this weight is required for cold smoking) and by 0.75 (for hot smoking), write down the results;
• dry the wood chips and when its weight reaches 0.8 of the initial weight, the humidity will be 60% (40% of the water has evaporated), and when it reaches 0.75, the humidity will be 50% (only half of the water remains);
• pour the finished wood chips into a plastic bag, carefully tie it and write its weight on the bag so that in the future, if necessary, possible loss of moisture can be restored;
• before use, weigh the container with wood chips again and if the weight is less than the original, pour water into a spray bottle or spray bottle in an amount equal to the lost weight and spray the wood chips in the bag with it;
• tie the bag again and leave it for an hour, after which the optimal moisture content of the wood will be restored and the wood chips will be ready for their intended use.

Wood chips with optimal humidity burn well and evenly, without forming soot, emitting “clean smoke”, which gives smoked products a refined, delicate taste and aroma.

Industrial production of wood chips

In the industrial production of wood chips, you cannot do without automation, for example, like the MK-100BD and its analogues, a comparison of which we will provide at the end of the article:

The first step in the technological process for producing woodchips is debarking (removing bark) of wooden blanks. For small production volumes, a two-handed scraper or ax is used for this; for large volumes, drum or rotary devices are used.

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According to the standard, wood chips must have a strictly defined moisture content, so before crushing the wood is dried in special drying chambers.

After this, the raw material is loaded into a device where it is crushed to the required size.

Then the chips are sorted using vibrating sieves. They have several platforms with cells of different diameters, which allows you to quickly separate large and small fractions. The resulting chips, if necessary, undergo additional drying to the required moisture content in a drum dryer. Next, the product is packaged and stored in a dry room.

There is also a smoking technology, little known in our country, developed in Canada, which involves pressing sawdust into briquettes specially designed for unique Bradley Smoker digital electric smokers.

Moonshine infused with apple wood chips

For tincture, you can use not only oak chips, but also chips from other trees. For example, in Italy, Calvados is aged in chestnut or mulberry barrels. An excellent tincture can also be made from chips of cherry, apple, pear, and bird cherry.

The preparation of apple chips is no different from oak chips. You will need:

• 3 liters of apple moonshine;
• 150 grams of apple wood chips.

Leave for up to 3 months. During this time, the moonshine acquires a golden color and a fruity aroma.

Latgalian cognac recipe

This unusual alcoholic drink owes its name to the historical region of Latvia, where the secrets of distilling have been passed down through generations.

It can only be called cognac or brandy conditionally, since the tincture contains more ingredients. To obtain it, only high-quality alcohol is used: diluted to 45-50% vol. alcohol, vodka, double distillation moonshine.

Since it is necessary to remove excess tannins from the bark through complex manipulations, it is better to use ready-made medium-roasted chips. You will need the following components:

• alcohol - 3 l;
• oak chips - 2 tbsp. l.;
• ground nutmeg - 0.5 g;
• cloves - 3 pcs.;
• ground coriander - on the tip of a knife;
• sugar - 50-60 g.

Pour 100 ml of moonshine into a separate bowl and dissolve sugar in it. Place the spices and cubes in a glass jar, pour in the sugar liqueur and the rest of the moonshine, stir. Screw on the lid and put it in a dark place.

The drink must be infused for at least 10 days. After this, you will have to taste it every 2 days until the taste and smell become sufficiently saturated. If oak chips for moonshine were made from dry wood, the aging time can take up to 1 month. It is not recommended to keep the tincture longer so that it does not acquire a strong chemical smell.

The resulting Latgalian cognac is filtered through cheesecloth and bottled in hermetically sealed bottles. Before drinking, it is recommended to keep alcohol in the cellar or refrigerator for at least 2 weeks. The best drink is considered to be 6 months old. When stored in a dark place, it retains its aroma and taste for up to 5 years.

Moonshine tincture on oak bark (homemade brandy)

Another method popular among moonshiners is to infuse moonshine not on oak chips, but on bark. You need much less bark than wood chips because... it is more “vigorous” and can quickly ruin the drink.

• 3 liters of moonshine
• oak bark - 3 tablespoons;
• 1 tablespoon each of dried oregano and St. John's wort;
• one tablespoon of honey;
• 4-5 buds of cloves;
• allspice to taste, but no more than 10 peas;
• a little (on the tip of a knife) vanillin or vanilla sugar and ground coriander.

Do not infuse moonshine on the bark for more than three weeks!

Common Mistakes

List of mistakes that are often made at various stages of this process:

1. Using wood that has not been cleared of bark or is of poor quality: damp, rotten, pest-ridden, or impregnated with chemicals.
2. Violation of the temperature regime when frying chips or prolonged calcination, which led to the formation of charred areas.
3. Plastic bottles are used as containers for tinctures, since alcohol gradually dissolves the harmful substances contained in them.
4. Adding spices beyond the norm specified in the recipe, which makes the drink too spicy. Using a large number of ingredients, the combination of which can irreversibly degrade the taste.
5. An increase in the amount of chips or infusion duration compared to the recipe. Excessive tannin content affects the bouquet of cognac and gives it the smell of furniture polish.

It is not recommended to mix drinks made according to different recipes, as they may contain spices that do not combine well with each other.

Sawdust - a universal fuel for smoking

Smoking sawdust is an excellent fuel for smoking. They can not only burn, but also smolder. This is what makes them a widely used material for preparing smoked meats. Let's look at when to use sawdust.

Important. When selecting sawdust, it is unacceptable to prepare it from coniferous trees. Such fuel will add bitterness to the food and worsen its taste.

Sawdust made from ash, alder, and birch are universal. And also oak, hornbeam, willow, acacia. They can be used for all smoking methods. Beech sawdust gives the product a wonderful smell, but it is not used for home-smoked lard, as it imparts an unpleasant taste and aroma to the lard.

The use of sawdust from fruit trees is perfect for smoking all types of meat, fish, cheese products, fruits, and vegetables.

Attention. Sawdust from fruit trees is not suitable for cooking poultry, as it will give the dish an unpleasant odor.

By combining different types of sawdust, branches and shrubs, you can give a dish unique taste. Another important point is the selection of sawdust according to humidity. The dampness required for smoking must be at least 50%; if it is below this level, the fuel may begin to ignite and violate the required temperature regime.

When the humidity is more than 50%, the combustion temperature will decrease, and the smoke will be saturated with a high content of heavy fractions, which worsen the taste of the food.

If you are at a loss as to which sawdust is best to choose, then you should opt for birch or alder sawdust for smoking.

Sawdust for smoking

This type of sawdust will give the product a divine aroma and taste, for this reason they can be used for cooking fish and meat.

The wood of these trees has a number of positive characteristics:

• it contains a low percentage of resin;
• it contains many different microelements and sugars.

The easiest way to purchase sawdust is from a wood processing plant. If there is no wood of the required species, then check out the offers on the Internet.

You can take advantage of the offer of specialized companies and purchase a briquette for smoking, which consists of compressed sawdust of different species.

In addition, you can make sawdust yourself. To do this, they need to be planed, sawed or crushed. You can collect dry branches in the forest or in the garden.

Attention. Living wood cannot be used to make sawdust. It contains a lot of moisture, which will negatively affect the quality of the product.

There are several ways to cut wood:

• use a hand saw, but this will take a lot of time;
• use an electric circular saw;
• using special equipment for processing wood residues.