StillSmart

new water heater arrived, and was installed with only one huge leak due to a badly pushed on speed fit fitting whoops stared on the wiring, and installed a 7 drawer system using garden gravel trays..






if tomorrow evening goes as well i may get a mash on over the w/end

Screwed around trying to respond to a PM from Anavrin. Could somebody that knows him/how please see that he gets this response. I can't send through normal channels. Thanks.

Hi Marc: Let me know if this gets back to you. Not too familiar with this.

For an alcohol to qualify as a rum, it must be made from a "sugar cane" based product. Sugar beets will not qualify. There is a lot of latitude in making rum that might not be present in the production of other alcohols. Molasses is necessary.

What I use, is what you would probably consider to be a poor quality brown sugar. The "poor quality" comes from the amount of molasses that is present. Nutrition does not need to be added for fermentation. I use bakers yeast. I ferment in a 90L tank.

I do double distill. Wash to low wine, low wine to high wine. If using a column, spirit run I keep at around 80% so that rum characteristics will come across still. No packing in still, no equilibration and push the still a bit.

To use a white sugar wash will give you an alcohol, but technically not a rum.

Rum should get its color from wood. Some companies or people add caramel for flavor and coloring. I only use wood.

If you feel you have made a good neutral, rum will be a walk in for you.

Hope it helps. Cheers - John

Being far, far away from my shed, what I did today - was to buy a bottle of Bacardi Oakheart.

This made me realise how good my Rum is.

I will not be able to sample my stuff for a couple of months, but drinking this awful stuff made me one happy little bunny.

If anyone is interested little bunny in Chinese is 小兔子 (pronounnced Xiǎo tùzǐ)and a happy little bunny is 很开心小兔子 (pronounced Hěn kāixīn xiǎo tùzǐ )

Jeez Brian Cabin Fever's gettin to you

AM

Thanks Brian: My vocabulary has just increased by about 8%. But running around telling a bunch of Chinese that I am a happy little bunny..... Not sure what the reaction would be, actually.

Probably the same reaction I get when I try to say anything in Chinese, they just fall about the floor laughing.

It has been a long time since I last brewed a beer and I have never brewed one with the intention of turning it into a whiskey.

On Saturday morning, I did just that.

4Kg Pale Maris Otter
250g Crystal Malt (55)
250g Chocolate Malt
500g Roasted Barley
72g Distiller's Whiskey Yeast (StillSpirits)

I have always batch sparged my beer with an efficiency of around 65%-70%. Normally, I mash for 90 minutes and then leave the sparge water for 10. This time, I mashed for 2 hours and sparged for 1. I was pleasantly surprised to find my OG at 1.062 giving me an efficiency of 85%

After only 3 days, the gravity has dropped to 1.014. I'll be leaving this until at least next weekend where I will be racking off to a secondary fermenter and adding about 1.5Kg of cherries (from my garden - currently frozen with stones removed). At this point, I have no idea what he potential alcohol will be, but it should ad a few percent.

Can't wait for this to be finished so I can start distilling it.

Chocolate cherry malt whisky...
That sounds interesting.
Robert.

Racked off a 30.ltr fifth generation sweet feed wash, it should be ready to strip on Tuesday saved all the grain for my mate to use as ground bait for his carp fishing, Also racked off a vodka star wash
going to bottle up some blueberry vodka later.
Alan

When I throw the grain out of my fermenters for the chickens,I always expect drunken chickens.
I seems they can hold their alcohol.
Whilst the fishes portion has been diluted by their environment,and may be alcohol free?
Robert.

Just discovered Young's Double Chocolate porter.
It is a drink to die for.
But to get back to the subject of the heading,today I fitted the latest laptop with it's third HDD,'cos it ate the others,and I hope this one may last while.
It causes serious unrest to be told that that all of the stuff that you have entrusted to a small electronic box has disappeared for ever.
Don't get sloppy like me,Do a back up,like now.....
Robert.

The failure rate of disk drives is 100% - its just a matter of when.

I had a drive go on me a few weeks ago, work computer. The IT department told me that it was unrecoverable. I did a bit of research on the web. Lots of reports of a hair brained scheme to recover data. Nothing to lose so I tried it.

Put failed drive in airtight plastic bag. Put Bag inside freezer for 48 hours.

It worked long enough to make a copy of all the files I needed, don't know why it worked but it did.

Now have automatic back-up to the Cloud.

I've just acquired two identical 750GB hitachi deskstar disks (leftovers from a job so free ) I'm going to set them up a a Raid 1, which is where one disk is a mirror image of the other, couldn't bear to loose all my photos, music and other stuff

You loose some performance in terms of speed with a Raid 1 plus you loose half your total disk capacity but your pretty well protected against a single disk failure, good for storage but no quite so good for your OS as the windows can still crash, affecting both disks

finished off doing the slant plates on my boka and cleaned the coloum up
viewtopic.php?f=15&t=3245&p=22019#p22019

Just done my 1st ever batch a 25 l sugar wash ended up with just short of 6l? At 40% after watering down and a 70cl bottle of heads n tails (I hope) binned the 1st 100 ml then cut every 100 ml not experienced enough yet just hope it's ok gonna filter it then try it will update later.