StillSmart

Did you save any of the beer to add to the spirit run? I got a good tip from Kiwi to make sure the still charge is acidic (by adding beer or dunder) and give it a long 100% reflux to get some ester generation happening.

I also like adding some treacle to the boiler these days.

Running alongside the stripping runs I had a 55 litre dunder/molasses wash fermenting so I'm hoping to get 2*20 litre charges from that and 10 litres of 'beer' - 5 litres for each spirit run

A good day. Two T500 runs for 3 gallons of 93%. Did major heads compression (about 45 mins) and threw away 500ml from each run. I tend to get rid of the heads so it made sense just to lump the foreshots and the first jar of heads together as I'd not be keeping it.

Then also cut the runs short when I could smell/taste the burn of tails coming through.

I'll put this to one side for a bit and crack on with stripping the high molasses content one.

Stripped the 100% dunder/molasses wash.

I wasn't expecting much as I'd only been able to calculate the OG due to the dunder/batched sugar addition and the FG wasn't that great (1020) despite leaving it for nearly 2 months.

Did 40 litres in 2 runs and got 2 gallons of 50% average and 1/2 gallon of 20 tails. Collected down to 10% low wines.

Next job will be to re-run it in pot mode slowly and take cuts. This will be the first run I've done and not used the column to finish it off but I'm looking for taste and not neutral.

I've got about 10 litres left of the wash so as suggested by CC I'll throw some of this in on the final run.

The smell is fantastic so I'm hoping for some nice sweet rum. The plan is to put it on bourbon chunks for a month of so (to emulate finishing in a bourbon barrel) and then put it into my used rum barrel.

As mentioned in the filtering thread my 'hearts' returns on the original wash weren't much in quantity but...

Cut some of the final hearts down to 65% last night and quite simply - wow

The hearts had been stripped, cut with filtered water, run through the column, foreshots discarded, cut back again with filtered water, run once more through the column with heads compression and severe cuts to produce just 3 litres of 93% from nearly 55 litres of wash.

Compared to a commercial vodka even after triple distilling there is a noticeable perfume (to call it a smell would be very wrong) and there is a slight taste but it is just so smooth for such a strong spirit.

Ace

Brought a hip flask of the cut back product with me to a friends house.

It went down very well General comments were around the smoothness of it - and given it's 65% that's a very good sign. I was presented with a couple of hip flasks to fill for next time.

I think I've made something decent

Well done mate, enjoy!