The next level of making your own booze is way simpler than brewing beer -- try aging your own rye.

Here’s a pandemic project: tailoring your own flavor of spirits, in your own home, as a simple chemical reaction does the work of turning a clear liquor into a flavorful amber elixir.

Hand Craft Your Flavor is a rye-making kit from Fog’s End Distillery, a family-run business based in Gonzales that produces less than 2,000 bottles a year. (The company also produces Monterey Rye and California Moonshine, made using a traditional sour-mash process, similar to making sourdough with a starter.)

Owner Craig Pakish, a former deputy with the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office, started experimenting with his Monterey Rye recipe at a small scale – one bottle at a time – using different sticks of French, Hungarian and American white oak at different toast levels. “I had nine bottles aging and I was recording the evolution of the flavors,” Pakish says. He followed this process for several months until he refined his recipe.

Each toasting and type of oak produced a different flavor. Hand Craft Your Flavor uses American white oak with a medium-plus toast. “You get a lot of vanilla, butterscotch, caramel – those flavors evolve from that oak,” Pakish says.

The process to age your own rye is simple: Add the oak stick to the bottle and let it sit for five or six months, or even longer. The color evolves from transparent to amber. A good way to find out the flavor you like, Pakish says, is tasting weekly. Once you get your desired flavor, remove the stick. Cheers.

FOG’S END DISTILLERY, 425 Alta St. #15, Gonzales. 809-5941, fogsenddistillery.com