Aussiedistiller, Home Distilling, Moonshine, Home Brew

My Mac Rum smells very vinegary and best I can liken the taste to is Wooster Sauce.
This is a Gen II wash. Put down on 23rd August. Recipe was 6 lt feed mollasses, 6kg raw sugar, 2 Teaspoons epsom salts, 2 teaspoons citric acid, 6 lt dunder from Gen I, 20 lt hot backset from Gen I strip run and 10 lt coldwater.
I didnt add any fresh yeast. The starting SG for what its worth was 1.100, and finished SG was 1.060. Final pH was 5.0. After about 12 hours it was bubbling fine so I was happy with that. It was kept at about 30 C for 7 days. When it finished bubbling I turned the heat mat off and let it sit for another week. Longer than I wanted but I was too busy to run it earlier.
Does it sound like an infection or is this "normal" for rum washes?

Cheers Phil

You might have got vinegar fly in there
You wouldn't have needs the citric acid if you were using dunder so maybe ph was to low and it stalled

I had a wash looked just like yours, less the dunder.

Tasted pretty crude, bit of oak and a year of age it came up mint :-)

Well I ran it plus added some TPW tails to give it some extra volume in the boiler as I kept 20 lt of dunder back for Gen III.
Started coming out at 75% and finished at 12%. Total of 10 lt of spirit.Got a harsher taste compared to Gen I.
90 lt of Gen III now in 4 x fermenters. Added hot backset, molasses, raw sugar, Epsom salt but no citric acid. See what it looks like tomorrow

Cheers Phil

How did you go with this?

When I put the low wines back through for the spirit run I left the funky rum out. I didnt like the smell or taste of that batch of low wines so rather than adding another post to the "tell us your fuckups" I decided against spoiling the whole batch.

Cheers Phil

26L of dunder in 40L of wash?

Backset at that level plus citric acid is a recipe for very low pH.

Did you check the pH at the start of fermentation?

Where did this come from?

Zak Griffin wrote:26L of dunder in 40L of wash?

20 lt of hot backset to dissolve the sugar and molasses. 6 lt of dunder from Gen I.

Teddysad wrote:Did you check the pH at the start of fermentation?

Nope, but it finished at 5.0

Cheers Phil

Backset is Dunder bud :laughing-rolling:

:? I thought backset was the hot liquid left in the boiler after a run, and dunder was what remained in the fermenter after racking off?
Well thats what I was referring too anyways

Cheers Phil

Easily done mate. :cool:

The yeasty leftover is typically called lees, or trub (more for beer)

Probably not a rule but I find most use the term backset for bourbon type brews and dunder more for rum. :-B