StillSmart

Well its just typical,but my microwave has died ironically tonight, cooking some mundane excuse for food before I had chance to try this.

So new microwave is on order. Now twiddling my thumbs and itching to try this when the new microwave turns up.

sweet feed after 3 runs through the microwave
alan

alan wrote:
sweet feed after 3 runs through the microwave
alan

Hi Alan

What chips did you use? Lovely colour you have there.

Hi Uber its a mix of 95%JD and 5% dark oak
alan

So what abv are you going to cut that back to..? What abv is it at now...

Its 65% i will cut i back to 45%.alan

I went to bottle up my latest batches of this test last night.

Once again the higher strength batch (72%) was less than crystal clear when filtered through cotton wool and when I diluted it back to 40% it was downright cloudy.

Meanwhile the 40% batch was crystal clear, no issues and tastes great.

I've never had a spirit go cloudy after filtering and/or dilution. Anyone else have this problem?

AM

Hi AM mine went cloudy at 40% cut down from 65, i uped it to 45% and its clear again alan

Curiouser and curiouser!

Both of my test batches came from the same spirit run and the 40% batch was diluted before putting on the JD chips so the difference between them, that appears to be the cause of the cloudiness, is the strength of the samples.

AM

First i have read or heard about cloudiness Aiden I have about 15 jars sitting I will do check them out tonight and post what i see

Happy Stillin

FS

PS one suggestion by Pintoshine is to microwave at 125 proof 62.5 abv its was suggested this was the perfect balance of ethanol/water to pull the best from the woods.

Aidan, have you used 72% ABV on JD chips before? I have never used these chips with anything stronger than about 50. Perhaps the higher ABV is extracting something different, oils?

Chuck

I'm satisfied that it was caused by the strength being too high. The cloudiness is removed by a second pass through the cotton wool filter and a wine filter paper liner.

Next batch will be 62.5% as suggested.

AM

@FS (great thread BTW, its getting more interesting all the time too)

re: one suggestion by Pintoshine is to microwave at 125 proof 62.5 abv its was suggested this was the perfect balance of ethanol/water to pull the best from the woods.

As far as I know about maturing whisky (and that's not very much yet), in a traditional aging process the ABV% is decreased; either linearly (angels share) or deliberately-in-stages (introduced dilution); over a long time period. This is so that the attendant flavour profiles at various ABV%s are added to the final spirit for a comprehensive product.
Do you have any idea whether the 62.5% 'balance' reference will achieve similar with microwaving etc (excepting, of course, the obvious timeframe differences)?

Quick follow up on the 72%ABV spirit that I microwaved and which later became cloudy:

This morning I went to my workshop where I had left the nuked spirits and found the jar like this..


Filtering with cotton wool and wine filter paper removed the sediment that had settled out from the spirit and left if crystal clear again. Surprisingly, the flavour and mouthfeel have not suffered at all - go figure!

From this I am now convinced that the original spirit strength was too high to put through the process and would recommend no higher ABV than 62.5% as also recommended by pintoshine on MD and other forums.

Lesson learned

AM

There have been several people who have reduced the abv and tried this procedure.. Some because they were paranoid about microwaving ethanol and others because that's all they had at the time... It seem to work in.

Now how is the taste profile I have read of a few (2) woody tastings but they left the wood and chips in for a week or more after he was happy with the taste profile. Once it's done and you like the taste get it off the chips, chunks, staves or dominoes. If you read any forum anywhere you will read about overoaking so I somewhat overlook this issue by saying taste it between cycles after the 3rd one anyways.

Color means nothing were after taste in the end...

Happy Stillin,

FS