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Chacha is a traditional alcoholic drink that is prepared in Georgia and Abkhazia. Chacha has many names: some classify this drink as brandy, others call it cognac, but most lovers of strong drinks simply call it grape moonshine. Classic chacha differs in many ways from the one prepared in Russia, but all varieties of the strong drink have a pleasant taste and delicate aroma. Chacha is usually brewed from grapes, but it can also be made from other products.
You can learn from this article how to make chacha with your own hands according to a traditional recipe, what fruits can replace grapes, and what secrets will help you get a decent drink.
Traditional preparation of chacha
Real Caucasian chacha is prepared from Rkatsiteli or Isabella grape varieties. To prepare moonshine, they take marc - the cake left after making wine or grape juice, or fresh grapes.
Traditional chacha needs to be brewed from just two ingredients: grapes and water. Adding sugar increases the yield of the finished product, improves fermentation, but has a bad effect on the taste and smell of the drink, and increases the content of fusel oils.
The classic grape drink can be called brandy, because its preparation uses a distillation process. But, more often than not, winemakers cannot do without sugar and yeast, trying to expel as much of the strong drink as possible - this is no longer a real chacha, but ordinary moonshine.
Chacha manufacturing technology
You can try to make real chacha without adding sugar, but you need to be prepared for the fact that the amount of the finished product will be several times less than the mass of the original raw material.
For example, if the sugar content of grapes is 20%, 25 kg of berries together with bunches will yield only 5-6 liters of chacha, the strength of which will not exceed 40 degrees. If chacha is prepared from cake, you will get even less moonshine - all the efforts of the winemaker are not justified by such a result.
Therefore, you can add sugar to the classic chacha recipe, and to neutralize the consequences, they use one trick. But yeast will not be used in this chacha recipe, which will have a very favorable effect on its quality.
For moonshine you will need:
- 25 kg of fresh grapes or pomace remaining after boiling juice or making homemade wine;
- 50 liters of water;
- 10 kg granulated sugar.
Step by step, moonshine from grapes is made as follows:
- The grapes are not washed so as not to remove wild wine yeast from the skins. The berries are kneaded with your hands. There is no need to remove the stalks. Together with the juice, the crushed berries are placed in a large container (a saucepan will do).
- If the mash for chacha is made from cake, simply put it in the selected container.
- Add water and sugar to the mash and mix with your hand or a wooden stick.The container with the future chacha is not filled to the top - there should be about 10% free space left. This empty volume will subsequently be filled with carbon dioxide.
- A water seal is installed on the pan with mash and placed in a warm and dark place with a constant temperature of 22-28 degrees.
- Fermentation with natural yeast lasts quite a long time - 30-60 days, so you need to be patient. To prevent the mash from becoming moldy, it is stirred regularly (every 2-3 days), lowering the floating grapes to the bottom of the pan.
- When carbon dioxide ceases to be released, the mash will taste bitter and lose its sweetness, and the fermentation process can be considered complete. They begin to distill chacha.
- To prevent the chacha from burning during the cooking process, it must be rid of solid particles, that is, drained from the sediment. At the same time, it is the seeds and twigs that give chacha its unique taste and valuable aroma, so it is necessary to use some tricks. To do this, the mash is filtered through several layers of gauze and poured into a distillation container. The sediment is collected in the same gauze and suspended in the upper part of the distillation cube. As a result of such actions, aromatic oils from the seeds will enter the moonshine, and it will be quite fragrant.
- Now the mash is distilled through a moonshine still. Distillation is completed when the strength of the drink in the stream drops below 30 degrees. The total strength of the resulting distillate is measured.
- Chacha is diluted with water in an amount of 20% of the total volume and the moonshine is distilled again.
- The resulting moonshine is divided into fractions: the top 10% is drained - these are the “heads” that contribute to hangover syndrome and have a bad effect on health, the main product (the “body” of chacha) is collected until the strength in the stream drops below 45%.
- Measure the strength of the finished moonshine and dilute it with water so that the strength of the drink is 45-55%.
Apple mash recipe
There are as many moonshiners as there are chacha recipes. Each owner has his own recipe for this drink, at least slightly different from the others. For those who want to experiment, we can recommend making moonshine not from grapes, but from other fruits: apples, tangerines, pears and others.
To prepare apple moonshine you will need:
- 25 kg of apples (you can mix them with pears, some moonshiners add potatoes - this is a matter of taste);
- 50 liters of water boiled and cooled to room temperature;
- 10 kg of sugar.
The production of apple chacha is no more complicated than traditional one:
- The apples do not need to be washed; simply wipe them with a soft cloth to remove dust and soil.
- The fruits are crushed together with peel and seeds and placed in a large container for fermentation.
- Add water and sugar, mix the mash and leave for one and a half weeks in a warm and dark place for fermentation.
- Stir the apple mash regularly (every 2 days) with your hands or a wooden spatula, trying to lower the fruit mass to the bottom.
- Fermentation can be considered complete if all the apples have sunk to the bottom and no air bubbles are visible in the liquid.
- The mash is drained from the sediment and distilled using a moonshine still.
- The strength of apple moonshine should be 50 degrees.From the specified amount of products you should get at least 10 liters of aromatic moonshine.
How to clean chacha from fusel oils
Every novice moonshiner knows the problem of fusel oils, when the finished drink has an unpleasant odor and leaves an unpleasant “precipitate” in the form of a hangover.
To get rid of fusel, moonshiners came up with a lot of ways to clean the finished chacha:
- Potassium permanganate. Potassium permarganate powder is poured into moonshine at the rate of 2-3 grams per 3 liters of moonshine. The jar of chacha is closed, shaken well and heated to 50-70 degrees in a water bath. After 10-15 minutes, a precipitate should form - this is fusel oil. Moonshine is simply filtered and you enjoy the excellent taste.
- Soda. For each liter of chacha, take 10 grams of baking soda, mix and leave for about half an hour. The moonshine needs to be stirred again and left for 10-12 hours. After this time, the moonshine is drained, leaving a little liquid with precipitated fusel oils at the bottom of the vessel.
- Violet root. For 3 liters of chacha you need to add 100 grams of crushed violet root. Infuse moonshine for at least 12 days. The method is very effective, but it is very difficult to find violets with roots on sale; you can only grow them yourself.
- Freezing. Chacha is frozen in a glass jar or metal container. As a result, the water contained in the moonshine will freeze to the edges of the dish, and the fusel will leave along with the water from the chacha. Pure moonshine will not freeze, but will only thicken - it is poured into another jar. If necessary, the procedure is repeated several times.
- Charcoal. They use high quality coal (birch is best). They crush the coal, pour it into cheesecloth and filter the chacha through this filter.
Secrets of successful tea brewing
The recipe for making chacha is not as important as following the technology. Therefore, every moonshiner must strictly adhere to the instructions, strictly follow the proportions and use a high-quality alcohol meter.
The secrets of making aromatic chacha are very simple:
- using only high-quality raw materials. These are blue grapes of sweet varieties or pomace remaining after processing. If fresh berries are used, they should be slightly underripe.
- If there is not enough wild yeast for fermenting moonshine, you should use special wine yeast; baker’s yeast is not suitable for this purpose. How much yeast you need to add depends on the grape variety and its natural sugar content.
- Instead of special yeast (which is very difficult to find), you can use raisin starter, which is easy to prepare at home.
- A good chacha has a strength of 50 to 70 degrees; it is not recommended to dilute this drink more, because grape moonshine is easy to drink in the fall.
- In small quantities, chacha is good for health, because it relieves colds and viral diseases, stabilizes blood pressure, and treats inflammatory processes. However, large portions of alcohol, even very healthy ones, are harmful and dangerous to the human body.
- It is most convenient to prepare chacha at the same time as wine: this way you can get two drinks at once from one raw material.
- To make the moonshine distilled from grapes even more aromatic, it is stored and infused in oak barrels.
It doesn’t matter what recipe or what products chacha is made from, it should still turn out quite strong and aromatic. This drink differs from ordinary moonshine in the presence of a fruit component and a minimal amount of sugar. Chacha is not just alcohol, it is a drink for real gourmets!
