Aussiedistiller, Home Distilling, Moonshine, Home Brew

G'day Guy's,
Well it looks like I'm to a good supply of strawberries and doing a sugar check with my refractometer shows just under 10 brix (1034). Now my wife put and icecream container and a punnet in the freezer to see if the brix rises like my manzano chilli did. I have asked the wife if i slip her a $50 note could she try and get 5 box's which should be around 10kg's of strawberries.
This should be more than enough to do a 30 litre ferment and after doing several strip runs in my old 2" potstill I'll have enough to do several spirit runs in my minme. where I'll do a tinture in some 90% to add to the thumper altering it down to 40% of course.

After a few months on french oak it should be an interesting drop to say the least.

Cheers Bryan

10 brix, is typical for retail strawberries here. I would add 100gm/kg of sucrose to extend the wash.

The science being;

Most of not all of the strawberries aroma is in oil phase and will be carried on the ethanol during distillation. With just 10 Brix, there is not a lot of ethanol in the final charge into the still. This is what they do in Germany for their Schnapps. Most of the flavour components are in aqueous phase, so they tend to get left behind in the still. The trick the Germans use is to do two head cuts, and cut off the first 10% of the bottoms (vapour over 100C) and blend. A lot of the aroma oils have very low boiling points and will be in first head cut. The major flavour components come off with the first portion of the tails. They blend the 3, and then oak mature, to reduce any fusel oils coming across in the blended first heads. Also a lot just add commercial strawberry flavour to the final product :-(