StillSmart

how much do you throw away??

i keep reading that people only throw "100ml" away with the t500 but i don't think its enough?

after all, if you run an airstill, your advised to throw away the first 50ml of every run and that equates to about 400ml overall.

i actually run the foreshots into wine glasses and deffo throw the first glass which is about 100ml, and then i take another glass and see how it smells and it usually smells bad so i end up throwing that too..

so... for the people that just do a run without stripping, how many ml of foreshots do you throw away?

al.

It's all relative I suppose, depends on how clean your ferment was, how the column is refluxing, etc etc. It's a cop out but if it's working for you then stick with it!

I've only done the one run with the T500 so far, I took 100ml and the final product was very good compared to the air still, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't have been even better with 200ml taken off.

I think also I should say for the benefit of any newcomers that there are two things at work here. The foreshots are the very first part that comes off, they are the bits you really don't want to have in there and must be discarded. This is probably very little, but there is no way to be accurate so we err on the side of caution and chuck a fair bit out to be safe. The next part is heads which isn't as nasty as foreshots but does contain off-tastes etc that you might not want in there.

So what I'm saying is that when I advise people to chuck 50ml from an airstill, what I'm basically saying is that probably 5ml is foreshots which need to go, and the rest is heads which I just don't want to keep. A T500 should be more efficient, but even so like you say there may be some heads which are worth throwing out for taste reasons. If you're getting a neutral result, you're winning!

from a sugar wash 50ml per 25l of wash should be fine mate.

The main worry is for folks like myself who save the heads and feints to re-run them. So you save up all the stinky heads from 10 spirit runs - if you didn't chuck the fores you would have 10x the quantity of nasties in there - so you run that and get some nice product but again save the heads - to this you add the heads from 10 more spirit runs - you can see how any nasties could become quite concentrated.

There is very little nasty stuff in a sugar wash that would harm you - but the accumulation and concentration of these could result in something that could be detrimental to your health - I err on the side of caution and chuck about 400ml per 30L charge of 40% strip - this is about 100mls per 25L of wash.

50ml of a 25 litre wash should be ok............

i go on smell and taste and the first 200ml that comes out of the t500 with a 25ltr wash smells like something the wife uses to take her nails off!....im even hard pushed to keep the next 200ml as that dust smell that good either!

now it may be me having a sensitive nose but thats what i do and thats why i asked on here about other people findings..

al.

Don't mix up fores and heads, after the foreshots there is around 10-15% of the total alcohol from the still charge that you can expect to be in the heads - after this there will be feints that don't quite make the cut and would be nasty to drink as well.

If you collect 9 jars of spirit after the removal of fores during a run I would expect something like this...

Jar one - strong heads keep and re-run
Jar two - late heads\feints - keep and rerun
jar three - feints - maybe hearts
jars 4-7 hearts
jars 8 feints - slight tails - keep and re-run
jars 9 heavy tails

jar 3 could be hearts, jar 7 could be feints - there are many variables - I usually count on around 50-60% of the total collected being good.

I don't use even sized jars as above - I use a large jug that's capacity 10% of the volume of alcohol in the still charge, I fill it and it goes straight to the feints keg to be rerun another time (dont even give it a sniff as it will definitely be all heads)
I then switch to very small jars and collect lots of these until I'm into the hearts. i switch up to large jars and collect, when I think I'm nearing the end of the hearts, I switch back to the small jars. this means you don't contaminate a big jar of spirit with a tiny amount of heads or tails, and makes the cut easier to identify later on the cutting bench.

Basic question time here folks. How many times to you need to take foreshots out?

I'm currently taking around 300ml off at the start of a T500 stripping run using an alembic head and binning them.

But then I'm taking another 200ml or so at the start of when I run it through again as the spirit run using the reflux column, and binning them too. Are these likely to be methanol? Or can I just consider everything that comes off at the start of the spirit run to be heads?

Grateful for any input here.

Hi Andymac, you only need to remove them once. Once they are gone, they are gone. If double running don't make any cuts on the first run (collect everything), then only make cuts on the spirit run.

Thanks Capt. That was kinda what I thought, but good to be sure.

It would never have occurred to me to not take them at the start of the stripping run though. Doh!