I take it your using an airstil then, they are a useful bit of kit but I'm afraid that no matter how well you refine your process, you will struggle to make neutral spirit as clean as shop bought with it.
A commercial distillery will have 10's if not 100's of thousands of pounds invested in there stills, and a £150 cost of the airstil tells the story.
You can make good spirit with it and many people do.
You can of course improve your spirit massively by changing a few simple steps, first, 6kg of sugar is too high for a 25lt wash, try and keep the sugar to around 5kg and if you can avoid using the turbo yeasts, there are much cleaner fermenting washes that you can make much cheaper using bakers yeast, see the lentil wash thread in the recipes section, its also really important to fully clear the wash before running, especially with the airstil.
Then the next part is once you've stripped, make cuts during your spirit run, collect in small jars, say 100ml each and let them air for a day or two.
Then the most important part is to test the cuts you've made by smelling and tasting them, you will be able to smell heads in the first few (sweet like pear drops) there will also be a few jars after what you cant smell that will also contain heads but you will need to water them down to drinking strength 40% and taste them to decide, do this with all cuts before tasting, the clean alcohol in the hearts will be much easier to determine, it will have a nice clean(ish) heat to it in the mouth, the last few that contain the tails are easier to spot, they will taste dry like damp cardboard, the hardest cut to find is between the heads and the hearts.
Once you have all the jars your happy with, combine them all together, I would suggest a carbon filter is necessary for neutral spirit produced on the airstil to get the best results.
I wont say never use a turbo yeast again, you can get half decent results if you use only half the pack, keep the sugar down to 5kg and don't let it get too hot during fermentation, its most important as a beginner to learn how to make clean cuts.Statistics: Posted by Anavrin — Sun Jul 19, 2015 2:58 pm
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