I had planned on experimenting with different grain bills in order to hopefully find some flavours that I like however as I'm new to all this I can see that I won't really know which grain is contributing to which particular flavour.
Instead of experimenting with different grain bills, would it make sense to mash and distill the individual base malts one at a time and then blend the different distillates together in order to gain a better understanding of how these flavours work with one another? If it works then it would take a lot of the time and cost out of experimenting with different grain bills.
Would mixing (for example) 30% pilsner malt, 30% marris otter and 40% peated malt (in distillate) be exactly the same as doing one single mash with those grains at the same ratio?