Crafting A Cherry Moonshine Recipe: A DIY Journey from Orchard to Glass

Welcome back to Moonshine How To. I’m Justin, and today, I’ll be showing you how to make cherry moonshine. We have a full recipe on the blog. Make sure you go get it.

You’ll have all of your ingredients and everything on it. We’ll leave the link down below. So, click that, go get it, and let’s make this together.

Today, we’re going to show you two ways we like to use to clean natural cherries. We’re also going to show you the frozen cherries because these are already pitted. It’s less work, but we don’t mind the work, so we’re going to show you both.

First, we’re going to add our filtered water and our sugar in the raw. Once that dissolves, we’re going to add our 100% natural cherry juice. This may look like a lot of sugar in a very little bit of water, but it’s all you need. You’re going to heat it until it dissolves and then add your 100% natural cherry juice.

Now, we’re going to add our cherry juice, and it’ll help cool it a lot faster. For our frozen cherry shine, we’re going to add our frozen cherries into our simple syrup to cool our simple syrup down a lot faster. We’re going to gently give it a stir.

For my preference, I like to use a ladle with the holes in it so that I can see the cherries. After I divide the cherries up into both quart jars, I will take and pour my juice evenly as well.

The next step, we’re going to add our white lightning or moonshine. This is a hundred proof. You can do whatever proof you’d like. We like to use 100 Proof. Once we add this, it’ll be cut in half, therefore making this 50 proof. [how to make moonshine at home]

So now, we’re going to add our moonshine. Now, when you get to this point, you can either add more water, add more cherry juice, or add more shine. We’re giving these as gifts, so we’re going to make sure we add our labels. You always want to label these.

As we let our simple syrup cool, we’re going to go pit our fresh cherries. Do you know how to pit a cherry? Because I sure don’t. So, mother’s going to show us. Come on.

Just like the frozen, you want to get two cups of cherries. Now that we’ve measured out our two cups, we’re going to wash and rinse our cherries. That was about five quick swishes.

Next, we’re going to dump our cherries into the water. Then we’ll rinse them and pit them. So now that we wash them, we’re going to spin them and rinse them, and then spin again.

So now that we’ve already put them all in here, we’re going to take this water out to the garden to put on our tomato plants. Yes, okay, it has soap, but it’s fantastic for the tomatoes. Do you know why? All natural and organic with no pesticides.

Blade part dead center on the pit. You can whiz through these, and they do splash. So, Justin might want to put on his little apron. Or pit just using your fingernails. The nugget, the pit, yay!

So, the reason why we’re pitting our cherries is because the pits are poisonous. And even though some people might do it, we don’t want poisonous pits fermenting in our anything. We’ll be right back.

Now that mother has shown us how to pit our cherries, we’re going to pour simple syrup into our jars here, evenly divided, and then we will go to the next step and add our shine. Thank you. Get a little sugar in the bottom just to start. It’ll dissolve.

Next, you guessed it, our moonshine. Add it till it’s gone. Don’t forget, always, always label. As I’m wrapping this one up, just know this is a tart drink. This is not a sweet drink.

So now that we’re done, you want to store all these in a cool and dry place. You also want to shake once a day and wait one to two weeks, up to six months.

Cherries, you can strain them through a mesh strainer. You can press them, and you can remove them after two weeks because, as you can see, they start to turn white.

If you choose to strain them, you can add the cherries to yogurt, cereal, or ice cream, or even just save them and put them out in a bowl for your adult parties, not your kids.

Now that that was a process, I can say we are done. This has been Justin. Catch me enjoying my shine, y’all. Look down below, hit the show more for the link to the blog to get the recipe, and please visit our sister Channel if you like DIY cooking from scratch in Old Time 11.

Karl S

Lead marketer, brewer, dad, and husband. Pretty much an all-round awesome guy. I’ve been homebrewing for +20 yrs, an aspiring pro-brewer and micro brewery owner!