StillSmart

Hi all

Like many, I've just started out in the home brewing route with a small 4l smartstill. Followed the excellent guides by aidanmac and mozr which really helped.

First two spirit runs went okay but just after I started the third I was distracted by a small plumbing emergency at home and missed some cuts, I ended up with 150ml fores and 400ml of heads. I guess I could just chuck the extra heads into the heads demijohn and bin the extra fores, but I wondered if I could just put it all back in and just start again. Any advice appreciated.

Cheers

Welcome to the forums Laviscus, yes just run it again and all will be sorted.

Brill, thanks very much. Don't like to waste any of the yeasties hard work

Another thing to try: Collect your heads until you get 2L. Then add 2L of very hot water to that and stir in baking soda until no more will dissolve. It should bubble and fizz. Loosely cap to allow gas to escape and let sit overnight or longer. That should break down some of the ethyl acetate and hence result in extracting more alcohol from the heads portion.

Chuck

Interesting, will definitely give that a whirl. Do I then run it like a normal spirit run with fores, heads etc or like a normal heads run? Cheers.

I run it like a heads run. It won't hurt to toss a bit of fores. You will get more heads than usual and very little tails.

Chuck

@laviscus
as usual, +1 what Chuck said....
also (re 'emergent events) you can turn the still off at the time and then back on later;
ie resume your original/typicaL cuts...it'll take a bit more power usage (lowwines reheat, etc) but wont unduly change your expected output fractions.

Great, thanks for all the info. I did turn it off after I missed the heads cut but just wanted to be sure I could start again rather than just carry on.

I was curious as to how much electricity it used so I ran the still with my meter attached and came out about 1.6kwh (pretty stable at 355watts) from cold to finish. Even with a restart that's pretty cheap by my reckoning.

I'd seen a suggestion about pre warming to 50 degrees on the stripping run and that came in at 1.36kWh, not much money saving but shaved about 40 minutes of the run time. Seemed to smell the same and produce the same abv.