StillSmart

Hi guy's, must say i've really enjoyed reading a lot of the post on here and also the hooch i'm getting from my airstill is quite good.

lots of parties and hangovers...lol

anyway got a question. If i want to strip my next wash do i have to filter the strip?

also do i filter every distillation?

cheers

Not the strip mate just the spirit runs.filtering may be not needed at all on triple distillation
Cheers

thanks matey. Will give it a go.

If you're still getting hangovers, you're not doing it right - more distillations and more filtering should sort that out!

With the Airstill I always filter but only the final spirit.

Having progressed from making cock-ups with early runs in the Airstill to getting pretty good results with it then graduating to a larger pot and VM still I have learned a few things about the output from the Airstill.

The Airstill is a great training still and you can produce very high quality spirits by observing a few basic rules.

1 Treat everything the manufacturers say about the Airstill with a pinch of salt - they tend to exaggerate a little.

2 Always double distill - flavoured spirits require a bigger conventional pot still to be clean enough to single distill while removing all the nasties.

3 Make careful cuts and recycle what's not drinkable yet - you're not losing anything you'll just get it on the next run instead.

4 Always filter your final spirit with a proper activated carbon filter.

Following these will ensure you get great spirits and never have to suffer a hangover again unless you drink a full 70cl bottle at a time

AM

I think that Aiden meant to type "activated carbon". Charcoal filtering (like JD) is different.

Chuck

thanks guys. all i do at the moment is the one distillation and filter. i get a clean spirit but it does have a slight harshness and faint homebrewy smell.

as indicated it's time to get serious and do the job properly.

I did the same thing when I first got my air still and would run the wash through once and flavour it. The results I thought at the time were great, until I read posts on this forum. I then decided to experiment with different washes and double destilling, well the difference was fantastic.

I thought that people were winding me up about not getting hangovers but it was all true, just make sure you get the cuts right.

A huge thanks to this forum and to those that took the time and effort to email / pm and publicly respond to my questions.

I am once again experiencing hangovers. I've really gotten into making rum of late, and unforunetly some of the compounds that make rum rummy, are tucked away in the heads\head feints. So I do now blend in a portion of these.
If I was to drink a half bottle of appletons estate VX then I would feel like absolute death the next day, rum and I did not get along.

I don't get that sort of hangover, but I'm definitely very fuzzy round the edges the next day with my rum.

Even with my white rum I add a little too much heads and swap out the air in the DJ weekly, the headiness smell\flvaour goes away, but leaves a little of the headache juice behind, but what a flavour it has. So even if you can no longer taste the heads, because you have evaporated them, or carbon filtered them to remove the smell\taste, some of the headache making parts are still there.

So make good cuts - narrower for neutral, and carefully wider for flavoured spirits.