StillSmart

I really enjoy pottering around in the shed on a Sunday morning for a few hours.

With my one heated 25 litre fermenter a settling bucket and boiler of the same size I can make a lot more drink than I can consume and have a healthy stockpile ageing.

Some others seem to prefer making one large batch less frequently and I get the impression that the air-stillers are at it every day.

Are you a "little and often" person or a "bigger the better" type of guy?

I have four 25lt washes going all the time but I let them work away for about two weeks each and they are spaced in pairs to give me two to strip at a time. This gives me a stripping run every two weeks and a spirit run once a month.

My low wines are stored in a SS beer keg with a drain tap fitted and I keep them at 50%. When the storage keg is full it gives me just over 80lt at 30% and I can do two spirit runs as I am planning to do this weekend.

The stripper is running at the moment. My routine has been somewhat upset by Christmas and I have 4 fermenters finished and ready to go so I'm stripping them all today and putting on two new washes tomorrow and two more on 07 Jan then back to the normal routine.

AM

I do a bit of both YHB, for neutral it it pretty boring running the VM so I try and only limit this to one or two weekends a year.

I'll do 100+L wash, I can then do 2 x 45L strips from this, this fills 1 corney keg + 1 DJ.
I'll repeat this with another 100Ls of wash, so I have 2 kegs and 2 DJs of strip. This is enough for 2 spirit runs.

Each spirit run takes a big chunk of my day (8 hours or so) so I'll do this on a friday\sat or sat\sunday. But the result will be about 22L of 64% hearts (when let down for storage) so a chunk of spirit.

I then use this for doing gin, that I will do in small batches every 5-6 weeks. So I'm distilling much more frequently than I am putting a wash down.

In contrast, if I am doing rum or corn whiskey where I am using backset as a component in the wash, I'll do smaller washes and be stripping every other week to keep it going over multiple generations, Spirit runs on the pot still are much quicker and what I prefer to do these days.

Whereas I'm just a lazy git, who makes it up as he goes........

Lots of big ideas and dreams, but I stand by my watch word........procrastination

I am still using an AirStill only, so very frequent for me. Close to daily. It takes four elapsed days to fully process a 24L wash, three if I push the stripping runs earlier and later. Gotta get that plumbing in the basement done one of these days.

chill wrote:I am still using an AirStill only, so very frequent for me. Close to daily. It takes four elapsed days to fully process a 24L wash, three if I push the stripping runs earlier and later. Gotta get that plumbing in the basement done one of these days.

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Same with me as Chill, using a Airstill is very time consuming, that's the reason I want to build a still. 4 liters a time takes for ever. so little & often that's me...at the moment...