Baking soda

[Admiral Toad]

Browsing around I see some mention of adding baking soda or sodium bicarbonate to the spirit run to improve the cuts and indeed an old pal who was visiting from abroad mentioned something along the same lines from his experience of making hooch in Saudi Arabia years ago.
There seems to be varying advice about how much to add, some also mention adding table salt , others warn about using it where copper components are involved (copper saddles ? Copper potheads ?)
Anyone had any experience of this.

[Capt-Cudellez]

I've not tried baking soda, but used calcium carbonate. I didn't notice enough of a difference on a normal spirit run to make it worth my while. But I do treat my heads with it and store them at 30%. Does seem to make the all heads run a bit cleaner on the nose.

Making the wash too alkali will eat the copper and you will get pink residue in the boiler - doubt it will carry over in the distillate, I haven't experienced this first hand as I use a PH meter to check I'm under 7, also just bought a soil testing kit to see if that is easier as calibrating the meter is a PITA.

[Admiral Toad]

Well I've just diluted first distill to 30% ready for second run
found it's ph acidic at 5 so shoved 7 teaspoons of baking soda in which fetched it back to a neutral 7
So we'll see how that goes in the morn.

[Capt-Cudellez]

There has been chat in a few threads about adjusting pH, I found this thread from AD very useful.

http://www.artisan-distiller.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2559