Have you stopped brewing?

[HangOver]

Hi All

Been a bit quiet on here so I thought I\'d ask what you have all been up to and what are you brewing at the moment?
I\'m currently waiting for a wash to clear made with Essensia Super6 Ultra-Pure yeast.

Its virtually clear now. I syphoned it into a second container for clearing once it finsished fermenting. Not nearly as much sediment as turbo or tomatoe time will tell what it distillis like.
I recently bought some Bodines bourbon flavouring its pretty good expensive though at AU$13 makes x2 700ml bottles. I dont drink a lot of bourbon though so it\'ll last a while.
Also bought some Jack Daniels barrel chips they have been sitting about 15 days so should be ready to try now. Might give it a go tonight.

If its not too good i\'ll mix it with the bodines flavouring.
So what have you got on the boil?

[Jimmy]

I\\\'m still waiting for this damn cornflake wash to finish, I think it might be as done as it is going to get - I will check it out later. I have a slipped disc at the moment so I\\\'ve been avoiding doing anything too strenuous like lugging fermenters around! Sadly with the pills I am on, I can\'t drink so that has put a bit of a crimp on my hobby for now.
I also made some interesting flavoured vodkas with syrup - one was from Ikea (Lingonberry) and the other is Polish raspberry syrup that I found in the local Co-op (we have a lot of Polish nationals around here so we get Polish food in the shops).

[pi55ed]

Hey Jimmy,

You are right\' all gone quiet, i thought everybody had fell into a deep coma.......
I recently had a tomato wash finnish, used a desert high alc\' yeast and got a 18% result on completion...... it also cleared like a nuns conscience \'very clear\'....

Will run through still in a while........... ( HOW ARE YOU ALL.... ???? )

[umpa]

Hi, I am still waiting for my re-used yeast to finish, I\'m getting a little low on shine too !!!
I might start another turbo up, I have loads of essence\'s and a few bottles since robbing the bottle bank - errrr I mean recycling

[pi55ed]

Speaking of bottles, anybody know where i can get some champagne bottles (used) to make some elderflower champagne..

[umpa]

I have been after some too for some mead. I ended up using beer bottles

[HangOver]

I recently had a tomato wash finnish, used a desert high alc\\\' yeast and got a 18% result on completion...... it also cleared like a nuns conscience \\\'very clear\\\'....
18% is pretty good you\'ll have to let us know what it distills like.

I\'ve used a couple of turbos and the tomato wash and the tomato wash distils by far the best, probably the least yield but I\'d rather quality to quantity. Obviously I dont drink it stright from the still but it seems pretty easy to smell how good the distillate is even when its distiling, the smell is a dead give away. When I say good I mean how many times you need to distil or filter it before its drinkable. The turbos IMO need AT LEAST 2-3 distils and carbon filtered several times before its drinkable. The tomatoe wash, (bakers yeast) after distiling twice and filtering twice was easy better than the turbos and the best result up to now.
I got carried away there just wanted to know how it distills lol
I would\'t bother too much with the essencia super-6 yeast it doesnt smell as bad/off as the turbos but its not as good as the tomato. I distilled a wash tonight and I can see it will need at least 1-2 more distils before filter. Not very impressed.
As for the Jack Daniels chips.......
It was soaking for 15days or so so I tried it just the chip soaked spirit, chip soaked spirit with bourbon flavour and just bourbon flavour.
IMO if you are a bourbon drinker you will really like the chips & flavour mixed but the flavour for me is quite strong and overpowers the taste of the woodchip soaked spirit. The flavour its self isnt bad either but the way I see it is if all you can really taste is the flovouring why bother with the extra cost of the chips?

As I\'m not a big bourbon drinker anyhow I preferd the wood chip spirit by itself. As you can imagine it has a very woody smell but its nice and mellow to taste, as I use a mixer its really quite nice when mixed.

I never drink bourbon straight so I cant really comment on it without a mixer.

To cut it short I like the JD chips and once used I will certainly by them again.
Jimmy:

Hope your back gets better soon my sis gets slipped disks so I have seen how painful it is so dont go lifting before your ready.

On the bright side by the time your cornflake wash is finished you will have had time to grow more corn :-)

[Jimmy]

Do you know, that post (by HangOver) has cheered me up no end - thanks! Good to see a fellow convert to the tomato wash, and also someone else who likes the chips. Of course you can vary the amount you put in to adjust the taste, and I have also heard that if you freeze and then slowly melt the jar (or whatever you have them in) then you can simulate aging over months in a matter of days or weeks. I haven\'t tried it myself, but apparently if you put the jar in the freezer overnight, then each morning put it in the sink or on the porch or somewhere it can defrost and then repeat a few times, it works well. Personally I keep trying to age with the chips long term, but I have only managed a month or two before I run out of other things to drink and give in!
Cheers for the kind words about the back - much appreciated. It hurts like hell but hopefully I am on the mend now, and they give me codeine so it\'s not all bad!

[HangOver]

just a bit more about that essensia super6, i ended up distilling it all 3 times and carbon filtering it all 3 times. Its still not great. Give it a wide berth, bloody HB shop salesmen lol
also bit more about those bourbon chips.

I finished off the last lost so set some more away to soak. This time I put in the 10g-15g of chips as per the packet, plus the chips i saved from the last bottle.

Its only been sitting a few days but it changed colour much quicker than last time, so save em up!

I put my old chips in a glass and cling filmed it before i used coffee filters to filter the spirit before drinking.

[umpa]

I made some bourben too, I chard some oak with a blow lamp and put some of my finest 40% in it and left it for a month. The result was quite drinkable. I reused the chips twice, I have a feeling I could have gotten a few more

[goinbroke2]

Just remember, a few wood chips for a long period taste great, a lot of wood chips even for a short period taste...like a wet campfire! Don\'t use too many, I put one 1\" square cube in 750ml bottle but I\'m leaving it for months. The most I would go though is two 1\" square chips or blocks or whatever you want to call them per 750ml. You\'ll see the most colour in the first couple days, then pretty much no more colouring after that.
Oh yeah, the original question...I just ran 40L stripping run tonight. I\'ve got 120L more to go then start the spirit run. My problem is the damn garden hose running the cooling water keeps freezing up in this weather. (I hate winter)
Forgot to mention too, each 30L pail(that I get 20L of liquid out of) is 10 lb\'s of cracked corn and 3 lb\'s of rye flakes, 2 table spoons of lemon juice, 4.4kg\'s of sugar and bakers yeast. Fermented out around 13-15% in a week or 10 days.

[goinbroke2]

That\'s weird..all through my post when I used an apostrophy it added a back slash??
10\'s comes out like 10\\\'s

[Phantom]

Well I\'ve still been brewing as well, but haven\'t \"been around\" because I\'ve had various computer based disasters that culminated in getting a new PC.
I now need to track down a connector cable so I can remove the hard drives of the old beast and copy over all my info, bookmarks etc.
Still sticking to turbo sugar wash as my other wine and mead making takes up enough room to get ear ache on a regular basis so I have to keep it down to 1 or 2 batches at a time.
Having just read the thread I thought I\'d point out that if you\'re using oak chips then it\'s probably better if you can get ones that are of \"known provenance\". Because just using any old oak and charring them could be a bit \"iffy\". Barrels are usually made of either French, Hungarian or American white oak.
If they\'re ones that are sold as bourbon barrel oak, or as being from casks used for JD, then they should be fine. I\'ve actually found a reasonably local timber yard that keeps barrels that have previously contained a Bordeaux, and hence are French white oak. It\'s no difficulty to get one, strip it down to individual staves and then clean the wood up (small amount of dirt from the outside and red wine staining from the inside - though that might not actually be a bad thing) - and then chop and toast them to the desired level.
While I like bourbon (Sour mash style like JD), I also try other flavourings. So if any of you want a recommend for something that\'s a little on the aniseed side, you should google for absinthe. I got a bottle of the \"55\" absinthe that\'s made by Gert Strand in Sweden (the 55 refers to 55mg of thujone, though in how much spirit/mix I can\'t remember). It worked out about £30 and makes about 14 standard bottles. He recommends that you make it at least 55% ABV, I mix mine at 60 to 65%. It has that initial slight sweetness that you get with pernod or other aniseed type drinks but you can also taste the hint of bitterness from the thujone (which is the active ingredient in the wormwood). I then drink it 1 part spirit to 2 parts water like the French do as an aperitif/digestif.

[Jimmy]

A mate of mine once drank 9 pints of lager on a work night out, then back at mine he had half a bottle of leftover fake Baileys from Aldi (not mine!) and topped it off with a *large* tumbler of absinthe.
I have never seen anything like it, I was expecting projectile vomiting but what actually happened was he just got slower and slower and slower, in both movement and speech, until eventually midway through a sentence he just stopped entirely, like an unwound clockwork toy. I wondered if he might actually be dead, but he soon began snoring loudly and saved me having to bury the body in the morning.

[Jimmy]

Oh, and the backslash/apostrophe thing seems to be a bug - I will look into it... eventually!