adding salt or calcium chloride to a wash..

[Fil]

... to increase the water vapor point?

any point??

[Anavrin]

Think the idea is as the boiling point of the water becomes higher, there will be less water and more ethanol in the column vapour, which is the case any way and probably won't make much difference.

I'm not sure if a read somewhere that adding salt helps increase the hearts collection by holding back the tails longer, but I might have just made that up.

[Fil]

Cheers

late night browsing + late night sampling = ill advised ebay punt..

so i now have a kilo of calcium chloride..

And i cant seem to find the original pages that inspired the purchase

i think it was suggested for use during stripping runs for providing the most hi wine for a spirit run??

[Almanac]

Be vary wary of adding salts to a stainless steel boiler - corrosion

AM

[Anavrin]

Did you not mistake it for calcium carbonate? Adding calcium carbonate to your low wines is supposed to reduce the amount of heads by reacting with ethyl acetate and splitting it into ethanol and some other compound that does not boil off, thus reducing heads and increasing hearts in one foul swoop

Apparently calcium carbonate works almost instantly and can be added in the boiler, where as calcium bicarbonate (baking soda) needs to be added a few days before your spirit run to have the same effect.

It's not something I've tried myself yet but it's on the radar for something to try one day.

[Capt-Cudellez]

I believe this came from here....http://homedistiller.org/distill/dtw/salt

By HDs own admission, a lot of the info in that section is outdated or anecdotal complied from the old bulletin boards.


Like this for example http://homedistiller.org/distill/polish/methods A product filter made out of upvc anyone. no thanks

[Fil]

Spot on Capt' yes that was it, and on double checking it is sodium carbonate that i ended up taking a punt on.. Where i got the idea of calcium chloride from

so its a myth then, not an advisable practice.. ha, i thought that could be the case due to the total absence of anyone else talking about it..

It was a dodgy batch of beer that got me started thinking about this side of things and once i started reading online i ended up chasing links all over the place.. by the time i realised distilling a hopped beer was more work in post run cleaning than it could be worth i was hooked

[chill]

I've made hopped whiskey before and it is an acquired taste that I have not acquired.

Adding a base will facilitate breaking the ethyl acetate (major component of heads) into ethyl alcohol and sodium acetate (a salt that won't pass over into the distillate). But you need enough to split up all of the molecules. I am not sure this is financially worth it for the amounts that we have and it seems to me to affect the flavour in a way that I don't like). See viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3050

Chuck

[Capt-Cudellez]

so its a myth then, not an advisable practice.. ha, i thought that could be the case due to the total absence of anyone else talking about it..

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I didn't say that I don't know, was just saying there is other dodgy advice on that part of the site, but you are probably right that as no-one else seems to be doing it these days, its probably not a huge advantage (if any).

Also most types of still can remove all of the alcohol from a wash, so I don't really see the point of manipulating the temp slightly with salt, when the end result is the same.
also....

I have done the old calcium carbonate trick mentioned above, although I know it cant pass over in the distillate and is left in the boiler, it changed the flavour and i found it unpalatable - was only slight and was okay to do fruit macerations with, that masked it. but I'm not keen to do it again - (your mileage may differ)