StillSmart

Just finishing up my extreme turbo plush wash. After distilling today the first distillation smelled fine. Ran it thru a second time and it smelled horrible. I have encountered this with other yeasts and different batches, so this is not a new problem.

First question is the obvious--why is this happening?

Second, should I just go ahead and drink the first distillation at 42%? Rather than chancing it being ruined by running it thru again?

These washes are going thru my smart still.

Any suggestions as to solving this would be much appreciated.

Thanks Sonny

Hi Sonny from a fellow Wet Coaster. I can't see why the smell would have gotten worse during a second distillation unless the first distillate started to decompose (unlikely I would think at 42%) or came into contact with something. How are you storing it before the second distillation? Could your still head have gotten dirty or contaminated? Did the colour change? Can you quality what sort of bad smell it has? Have you tried diluting a bit with hot water to see if that shows a bad taste too?

Ultimately, the best course of action is going to be to stop using Turbo yeasts and high sugar levels (if that is in fact what you are doing) and run something like a lentil wash. If you feel that you must use a turbo, these with 6Kg of sugar have produced a good result for me:
http://www.home-distilling.com/store/pc ... 3p1361.htm
http://www.home-distilling.com/store/pc ... 63p650.htm

For those wondering why I used turbo yeasts, it was to compare with my regular ferments as part of my education. I find that I can get just as good results using quality yeast, lentils, and extra DAP, Epsom Salts, yeast nutrient (DAP+yeast hulls+vitamins), and a pH buffer. My local water is rather acidic out of the tap and if I don't use the buffer, my ferments stall or greatly slow down. Just buffer and lentils on their own were not yielding good results for me.

Chuck

Thanks for the reply Chill.

Think it smells like a combination of diesel and gasoline. It is just stored in the collection container that it gets distilled into.

In future I`m going to just stick with Vodka Star and 5kg of sugar. Although I have occasionally encountered the same problem with that as well. I know the Smart Carbon charcoal tea bags are next to useless, but I`m still using them.

That is an odd smell, it is not ringing any bells for me.

You need some better filtration. Get some carbon:
http://www.home-distilling.com/store/pc ... on-c38.htm
And a chemically resistant funnel:
http://www.home-distilling.com/store/pc ... 54p454.htm
Or splash out with:
http://www.home-distilling.com/store/pc ... 54p733.htm
And read Gert Strand's book:
http://homedistiller.org/activated_book1.pdf
Jam cotton wool in the neck of the plastic funnel to keep the carbon in. Jam it in hard, aim for 1 drip per second.

Chuck

What kind of cuts are you making on the stripping and spirit runs.I suspect this is where you're running into problems that are quite solvable.

AM

Have you tried running the smartstill with a few pieces of copper pipe offcuts in the bottom?
All stainless can leave sulphides in the spirit.

Robert.

Spent a couple hours reading the distill posts last night. I`ve only been disposing of the first 20ml instead of the 50ml suggested. And I haven`t been bottling the next 250 of heads either. And probably running the still for an hour too long.

I will do it the right way today. Question I have is--Why am I bottling 250ml of heads? What do I do with that?

Now that I think of the better distilations, think it was the ones I neglected and it started to run all over the counter-lol,,,

So basically if I read it right, I don`t want the first 300ml.

If the smell showed up in the spirit run, while the stripping run was fine, I would look at the cleanliness of my equipment.

When we started with airstills one of the little upgrades we did was This

It may help....have you read the PDF file on double distilling on here???