Moonshine Why Carry

Description

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Dave Canterbury, David Canterbury, The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping,Moonshine

Video Transcription

morning guys dave k barry pathfinder school what we got right here in front of me is a black walnut tree and you can see I'm starting to get some walnuts that are forming on it right now they are basically an edible nut but there are some really good chemical compounds in the black walnut itself and the whole makes a very good brown dye what we're interested in today is the leaves of the black walnut which just like the holes are very very astringent in their properties and we're going to use them to make a tincture today in this video so stay with me morning guys Dave Canterbury the Pathfinder school what I wanted to discuss with you today would be reasons that you might carry alcohol or moonshine or some type of liquor in your kit and don't get the misunderstanding that I'm promoting it you should carry liquor for the purposes of recreational consumption within your kit because that's not what I'm saying what I'm saying is that throughout history different types of liquors have been carried by woodsmen and mountain men from the Appalachians all the way to Rockies for not only medicinal purposes but for other uses like disinfection and fuels and that's what I want to talk to you about today we're going to talk about some of the uses of alcohol what types of alcohol you should or should not carry how to store those types of alcohol to your kit and what you can do with those types of alcohol when you have them so stay with me guys okay so the first thing we need to understand about carrying alcohol and our kit is that it's always going to be best to carry green alcohols not wood alcohol or methyl alcohols we want green alcohol so we're talking moonshine we're talking Everclear

vodka things of that nature what you want to carry good clear green alcohols those will do you the most multifunctional good as far as carrying something like that in your kit so let me show you a couple different sources that you can get this type of alcohol and then we'll talk about how to transport it we thought before we talk about how we can best utilize it okay so what I have on this table is I have three different types of green alcohols here I have just a regular Tennessee moonshine this is going to be you know 100 to 150 proof green alcohol so proof means it's going to be half that in percentage of alcohol so if this was a hundred proof then it would be 50% alcohol this is a bottle of Everclear it's about 75 percent green alcohol this is a Smirnoff 100-proof vodka which means it's 50 percent alcohol now if you're going to use this stuff medicinally which is what you want if you're going to make it multifunctional you would like to have something at least sixty proof or better in other words at least thirty percent alcohol if you're going to use it for burning purposes for starting fire or running it some type of a fuel stove like an alcohol stove situation the higher the percentage of alcohol the better off you're going to be Everclear is probably going to be the easiest thing for you to get moonshine could be a little tougher but moonshine Everclear are going to be pretty close to the same alcohol content by volume they're going to be you know sixty to seventy-five percent pure grain alcohol for the most part and then small bottles like this that you can buy a liquor store of 100 proof smirnoff vodka will work as well now the advantage to these type bottles is these are a plastic like airplane type travel bottle so they're already in a plastic bottle you don't have to transfer them into anything else to carry them and there's enough liquid here to probably run a stove for you know a half an hour something like that but there's not enough alcohol in here really to use for Medusa

purposes because you're going to need to mix this with some type of plant material to make your medicine but for disinfection purposes and that's another important thing with alcohol we can disinfect things with alcohol like wounds and cuts we can also use it as a drying agent on our skin for a rash like poison ivy but when combined with something to make a texture which we'll talk about in a few minutes it gives you more medicinal power of that alcohol but for disinfecting instruments like your sail needle a pair of tweezers your knife that you're gonna have to cut your skin with or something like that to get something out of your skin and embedded splinter or something like that this much alcohol is fine to carry for that any of these alcohols will work fine for disinfection methods so we've got a multi-purpose item that we can carry again I'm not talking about carrying this for consumption purposes although you are going to consume drops of this and at ensure not shot glasses at a time but you're going to use it for fuel you're going to use it for disinfection you're getting it for fire starting in general in what conditions and you can use it for the medicinal values so let's talk about this a little bit one at a time give you a demonstration of each of these and then we can talk further all right so let's take our Trangia alcohol stove and our moonshine and we're going to have to I put a little bit in there already but we're going to have to let it wick up so we're gonna have to get more in there we want that thing to wick up in there and then stay about 3/4 of the way full this is a pint jar of Tennessee's best here almost there just put a little bit more in there and see how much it more wicks there's a wick inside here very much like a penny stove or a coke can stove you see on the Internet but these tend to work really really well

now we should be able to light this up with our ferrocerium rod or lighter so we'll just use the convenient lighter method here

and it burns a very clear flame so you've really got to be careful because that thing will be on fire and you won't even know it but I can feel the flame coming off of it so give it a couple minutes here in the mall oh yeah we got to give it a few minutes to draft and get going here and start feeding and then we might be able to see it okay you can see it's starting to fire up a little bit better now and that's the deal with these alcohol stoves you really got to watch burn that's good clear great alcohol in there is it throws a very very blue clear flame you almost don't even know it's on fire if you put your hand over it'll burn the crap out of you look I've been sitting here for a good 10 minutes if not more getting other stuff ready for this video and I just left that alcohol thing burning with that corn liquor in there and it's not even phasing the level of how much alcohol is in there at this point so I'd say I think it's going to burn for probably a solid hour if not more I have to test it to take for sure but it's going to burn for a good long time and that thing is really really hot you're not going to put your hand over that thing I can if my hand is 5 inches away from that thing I can only stand to have it over the top of that for just a few seconds so it's burning really really hot which means going to be good for cooking your food on so we've got one source without alcohol is going to be to run an alcohol base type stuff okay so alright so I just took a piece of fire brick out of my fire pit at the classroom over there and I'm going to just took a piece of cotton material out of my backpack and twisted into like a reverse-wrap two-ply cordage and I'm just going to take this Everclear I'm going to open it up and I'm going to go ahead and dip this wick in there and just let that thing wick up some alcohol and you can see it's pulling it right up in there getting pretty damp and then I'm just going to lay it out here on my fire break and then I'm going to like this with a fair cerium rod and a regular striker all right I think you can see the flame coming off of that again that's just a piece of regular cotton material like bandana type material that was just soaked down tonight Everclear just a little bit up the bottle still totally full you just suck up enough to get that fabric wet and that gives me an extended flame that would light in damp weather because of the alcohol because alcohol is an accelerant not a fuel in other words it will light by fume the fumes will combust on alcohol and that gives me a little bit of an extended flame time that I can use to get a stubborn fire lit in inclement conditions now that we've opened that bottle of Everclear really doesn't matter at this point I don't want to carry a glass bottle in my backpack anyway if I can help you can buy these plastic Tempe duty ABS plastic flasks at Walmart for about three bucks no different than the plastic bottle that the hundred percent vodka comes in and I can take this green alcohol from this glass container and pour it into this plastic container it's got a good overhang ceylon now it's going to give me a way to transport that alcohol safely so there's not going to leak into my pack to be able to use for all these multifunctional things okay so we've talked about using this alcohol as a fuel we've talked about using it as an accelerant to start fire we've talked a little bit about using it to disinfect things in our kit including a cut or scrape just by wiping it on because it will evaporate but it also is a very good germicide so now let's talk about making something we can use medicinally and we're going to talk about something that's really simple what I've done is I've went out of that found a beer bottle it's just an old brown beer bottle this is the old pop cap type this is a very old beer bottle but it came out of the wildlife area and I've got our black walnut here and I'm going to do is I'm gonna strip the leaves off this and I'm going to jam them in this bottle

just like this I don't care anything about the bar the branch itself or the nuts at this point all I really want are the leaves and I'm going to jam this bottle right to the top with these leaves one branch will definitely get me done beyond the shadow of a doubt crush them up on the way in just mix that much better not going to hurt anything I don't have to get overboard with the maceration of it or trying to destroy them the alcohol will pull all of that good stuff out this is a very astringent plant so it's a very drying plant it's going to press the skin cells and we're going to use this for a poison ivy wash which means it's going to be astringent Lee valuable for squeezing those cells of the on the first layer your skin on the outer layer your skin and kind of push that your salt oil out of there and then that alcohol from the tincture is going to be very drying so it's going to instantly dissipate that oil and dry it now this is not the miracle cure all by any means for poison ivy but it will have a great effect on how long that stuff lasts once you get in your skin so we've got that pretty well stuff I'm actually over stuffing it just a little bit and that's no big deal now if we had a funnel that would be ideal but we don't so we're going to pour directly from our flask or whatever we're using and we're just going to fill this bottle to the top with alcohol now we don't have to fill it to the top if we're limited on how much alcohol we have we can just use what we have if we only have a certain amount left but I poured most of that bottle there off into this smaller plastic flask and I'm going to fill this thing about three-quarters

'we remember you've taken a lot of volume up inside here with the leaf matter so i've got it pretty full now now what you want to do with this to make a tincture out of it is you've got to give it time for the chemicals in that plant material to leach out into the alcohol so you take a dark colored container like this you're going to have to put a cork on this to keep the alcohol from evaporating and I just cut a wooden plug and what I'm going to do is even if I've got a tight-fitting plug on here I know I could still get some evaporation so what I'm going to do is I'm going to get in my kit here and I almost always carry a cake of fixing the wax with me and I've got one right here and I'm going to use this fixing wax which is good medicinally all by itself to tell you the truth stuff we sell on our website it comes in a cake that looks like this it's completely edible there's no no toxicity in this whatsoever you can use this for bait for crawfish and things in traps and it works great you can use it directly on your skin it's got vitamin E in it you can use it directly on your lips if you get chapped lips but what I'm going to do is I'm just going to push it down in here and use it as a seal to seal this container and I'm just going to smear some down in there real good like that and that's going to keep any liquid or alcohol from evaporating out of here and once I've got that sealed all the way around the ideal thing to do with this is to let it sit for a couple of weeks so now what I'll do is I'll take this and put it in the shade somewhere I don't want to put this in the sunlight I just seen put it in the shade now if I don't have two weeks to wait because I need this stuff immediately they're not going to use the alcohol I'm just going to make an infusion with the leaves it's going to be plenty astringent but I'm not going to have that drying effect of the alcohol the combination of the alcohol and the Australian sea of that plan are what make it great for poison ivy rashes irritation to the skin and things like that now that I've got sealed up I'm just going to shake it up really good and if I'm storing this somewhere in a cool dry place like in the yurt in the hunters camp in my camp in general I put it in the shade every couple days I'm just going to come and I'm going to shake it and if I see I got a leak like I just saw some liquid come out of there then I'm just going to press that wax down in there a little bit better to make sure that doesn't happen

and then shake it up every couple days like I said just let it sit and when I'm done the liquid that I'm going to use is going to strain I'm going to strain it off of this but because I just put whole leaves in there and didn't really macerated too much I can just use this jar if I want to for my medicine jar pull the cork off of it put that rinse on a bandanna or directly on my skin rub it in with a bandana and then pull the bandana off and let it evaporate and dry at the same time help take care of that poison ivy so I can make medicinal tinters with this alcohol as well so now I have a very multifunctional item that's not going to take a lot of room of my pack if I want to carry a pint in a plastic container like this because I have an accelerant I have a fuel I have a disinfectant and I have something I can use for medicines as well so there's four really really simple uses for grain type alcohols and I think that's a good reason to think about in your longer term type pack carrying moonshine or liqueur

okay guys I'm Dave Canterbury paths fire school appreciate enjoy another video out here I appreciate that you did for me for my school for my family for my foolish friends and sponsors and instructors I'll be back for another video

soon as I can thanks guys you