A sugar wash is the simplest route to a neutral spirit: sugar, water, yeast and a nutrient. The only real questions are how much sugar to use and how strong it'll finish — and Broover's free calculators answer both, with proven sugar-wash recipes to start from.
Enter your fermenter volume and a target original gravity (OG) and the sugar-bill calculator returns the sugar to dissolve. Sugar is what sets the potential alcohol: more sugar means a higher OG and a stronger wash — up to whatever your yeast can tolerate.
Don't over-sugar it. Standard distiller's and bread yeasts give up around 10–12% ABV; turbo and high-tolerance yeasts push 14–20%, but the higher you target the slower and harsher the ferment. Most clean sugar washes aim for the 10–14% band, and the calculator gives the exact sugar weight for your volume and target.
Your OG sets the potential ABV; the ABV calculator converts OG to that figure. After fermentation, take a final gravity (FG) reading and the same calculator gives the actual ABV via the Hall formula — accurate across the strong-wash range where the textbook linear estimate under-reads. Sugar washes ferment close to dry, so a healthy one lands near its potential.
You don't have to design one from scratch. Broover's free recipe library includes the classics — Birdwatcher's Sugar Wash (a clean neutral base) and UJSSM (Uncle Jesse's Sour Mash, the corn-sugar moonshine staple) — each with the full sugar bill, yeast, nutrient and OG target.
Once the wash is done: strip it to low wines, spirit-run to neutral, then dilute to bottle strength — the dilution calculator does that last step contraction-correct (OIML R22). The whole chain, wash to bottle, lives in Broover.
Open the free distilling calculators for the sugar bill + ABV, or browse proven sugar-wash recipes at distilling recipes. No signup, runs in your browser.