Aussiedistiller, Home Distilling, Moonshine, Home Brew

RC Al wrote:The heads I do by nose, pretty easy for me these days, tails is by taste and a bit harder for me

I have read the Kiwidistillers guide before I start

What exactly are you smelling for in the heads, my stripping runs have smelt strongly of molasses all the way through as far as I can tell although the heads have smelt very fruity too in comparison to the hearts area of the run. I'm still very inexperienced at making cuts, the last few I have ended up being over cautious and having a a lot of feints left over.

Tasting the tails, I'm just looking for off tastes and keeping what tastes nice or interesting yes?

By the time Gen 5 has finished I should be left with about 35L of low wines with the foreshots taken out. I plan on mixing the lot and dividing it into two batches (or more) for the spirit runs (30L boiler) then recombining the finished product after the cuts have been made. Would you do it this way?

Thanks
Christine

I havent cut rum at all so im not too sure what the difference would be, but generally i get an acetone/apple smell out of the heads. Lots of sections of tails taste bad to me well before i get to "wet cardboard" taste, but yes keep the interesting stuff

I run 5-7l at a time currently, so i do rolling generations, get 5 gens stripped (20ish litres of wash per gen), do a small spirit run - roughly what a strip from a batch would provide and then keep adding a batch of strip (3-4 strips) and then a small spirit run, i generally have the same amount of low wines left each run, but its building up the generations in the low wines, building flavour, working good for NGW and UJ for me atm.

My procedure will going out the window a little with the 50l boiler/2" pot thats nearly finnished, but i may use the little one for the spirt runs the same way yet as it has a little employable reflux that smooths product out nicely at 70-75% abv output - prob not much different to using a thumper in product outcome, but way slower with about 850w available vs the insane output of the gas burner i just got

What you have planned is fine

Matter of working out your fermenter size vs boiler and number of runs you want to do

Thanks, I've got 60 380ml jars for the spirit run so I'll start in the middle and work my way out. The first time we did it we must have missed the smell in the heads and ended up not being able to speak after a couple of martinis, we re ran that one and threw a load way but it's fine now. I'm just worried as I don't want to bugger it up and have to run it for a third time and lose flavour.

The acetone smell in the foreshots is unmistakable, very familiar (nail varnish remover) but later it all smell good, maybe too good, that smell of esters? Do we avoid those all together?

The gen 4 strip is smelling amazing, I could drink it now as is :)) I'm really hoping the finished results live up to that

Imo learning cuts on anything but neutral is making the job so much harder than it needs to be. As stated above your trying to learn what the smells and tastes are that you need to exclude but the difference between late heads and excellent esters are very difficult to explain but if you have learnt to pick the heads without the esters present then you know what to exclude and the rest is what you want to keep...
If you have the ability to make neutral first that's what I'd recommend if not there's going to be a few mistakes made but you will get there with persistence.
As a general rule if six doubles give you a headache there's too much heads in your cuts! :obscene-drinkingdrunk:

I don't drink 6 doubles in a week!!

So what am I supposed to do with 35L of low wines then, just be conservative with the cuts?

Lol 6 doubles is product research :laughing-rolling:
Trial and error and err on the side of caution until you're more experienced at picking it.

TBird61 wrote:I don't drink 6 doubles in a week!!

So what am I supposed to do with 35L of low wines then, just be conservative with the cuts?

If you drink that little mate I would be tighter than a fishes arse with my cuts :D

coffe addict wrote:As a general rule if six doubles give you a headache there's too much heads in your cuts! :obscene-drinkingdrunk:

Six doubles in a night would give me more than a headache, it'd probably have me passed out comatose in an ugly mess.... #lightweight

(but maybe I'd wake up three days later without a headache?)

:))

Sam. wrote:If you drink that little mate I would be tighter than a fishes arse with my cuts :D

That's more or less what I planned, just I've been reading that there's a lot of good flavour in the transition areas sometimes but what I'm after is a nice product that we can age for ages rather than a few gallons of something to get legless with.

southern45 wrote:Six doubles in a night would give me more than a headache, it'd probably have me passed out comatose in an ugly mess.... #lightweight

(but maybe I'd wake up three days later without a headache?)

:))

You and me both but then, having a headache does have it's advantages sometimes!! :laughing-rolling:

Mate there is good alcohol in the transition if you redistill it but for taste wise straight off the still only the hearts of hearts are good for nuetrel.

If your going to age brown spirits on oak then you can be a little more liberal with your cuts :handgestures-thumbupleft:

Sam. wrote:Mate there is good alcohol in the transition if you redistill it but for taste wise straight off the still only the hearts of hearts are good for nuetrel.

That makes a lot of sense actually, thanks :handgestures-thumbupleft: So keep the feints and do another run on that once you have enough and keep the hearts of hearts of that too?

Sam. wrote:If your going to age brown spirits on oak then you can be a little more liberal with your cuts :handgestures-thumbupleft:

Why is that? Because the more volatile stuff evaporates off?

General question and completely off topic from a Welsh girl: The expression "Mate" is that a general term for being friendly in Australian? I'm guessing so :oops:

Anyone know why I would be getting a bitter taste. This is my second run through my bubbler. First lot tasted great and the only difference this time was that I took really tight cuts and only took the hearts and added more oak.

Mate covers from the polite end - instead of sir, ma'am to best friend you've never met and every one in between, much as an British person would use love or pet even to a stranger of either gender

Used with a slur, maaaate - disbelief or sadness.

And many other uses

TBird61 wrote:

Sam. wrote:Mate there is good alcohol in the transition if you redistill it but for taste wise straight off the still only the hearts of hearts are good for nuetrel.

That makes a lot of sense actually, thanks :handgestures-thumbupleft: So keep the feints and do another run on that once you have enough and keep the hearts of hearts of that too?

Sam. wrote:If your going to age brown spirits on oak then you can be a little more liberal with your cuts :handgestures-thumbupleft:

Why is that? Because the more volatile stuff evaporates off?

General question and completely off topic from a Welsh girl: The expression "Mate" is that a general term for being friendly in Australian? I'm guessing so :oops:

Yep do a feints run then ditch the feints of feints, you have squeezed all you can out at that stage.

Aging brown spirits there are many many many complex reactions that happen and some of those undesirable flavours at the start can end up very nice with enough time.

And I mean mate like cobber :handgestures-thumbupleft:

Sam. wrote:

TBird61 wrote:

Sam. wrote:Mate there is good alcohol in the transition if you redistill it but for taste wise straight off the still only the hearts of hearts are good for nuetrel.

That makes a lot of sense actually, thanks :handgestures-thumbupleft: So keep the feints and do another run on that once you have enough and keep the hearts of hearts of that too?

Sam. wrote:If your going to age brown spirits on oak then you can be a little more liberal with your cuts :handgestures-thumbupleft:

Why is that? Because the more volatile stuff evaporates off?

General question and completely off topic from a Welsh girl: The expression "Mate" is that a general term for being friendly in Australian? I'm guessing so :oops:

Yep do a feints run then ditch the feints of feints, you have squeezed all you can out at that stage.

Aging brown spirits there are many many many complex reactions that happen and some of those undesirable flavours at the start can end up very nice with enough time.

And I mean mate like cobber :handgestures-thumbupleft:

Got you, thank you for that, one of the most useful posts I've read

Cobber?? :laughing-rolling: I love you guys :handgestures-thumbupleft:

Christine

Today was the blending day of the first batch through the still. It was a lot easier than I thought going through it jar by jar, 38 in total. Most of it was pretty good and easy to say yes that goes in the good jar out of the tails there were just 3 jars that were questionable and 4 or 5 that were straight no's, a re tasting after a break ended up with us using just one of the questionable jars.

The heads were different, working down from the middle of the hearts there was a variety of different taste and smells, mostly very pleasant. Jar 10 and 9 were very smooth, with a strong molasses taste to them, just so nice but then jar 8 and bang.... Horrendous taste and so it was down a couple more jars before we just chucked the lot in the feints jar. The finished jar of rum is rather nice, we manage about a 2/3rds yield of very drinkable rum from this run. I have to say it does taste very special, I'm sure ageing until autumn or spring in your world will work wonders too.

Question: for white rum, do we need to age it and if so how?

Ageing the dark rum: Toasted French oak, some raisins and a little palm sugar caramel, does that sound OK?

Raisins / sultanas is a good idea, but why the extra sugar?
Sould be sweet enough.

White rum is aged on oak and then carbon filtered to remove the colour.

Sounds good Mmmmm rum and raisens :D never tried palm sugar let us know how it goes :handgestures-thumbupleft:

I was only thinking about a teaspoon of caramel in every 2L just to give it a hint of caramel. I quite like sweet drinks like SoCo etc anyway

The good thing about using raisins is that when they come out not long before Christmas we can make rum and raisin chocolate and ice cream with them

If well aged with medium toasted oak you'll have plenty of caramel anyway.
I have taken to drinking the heart of hearts white with a teaspoon of dark brown sugar and a lime with the juice squeezed and a handful of crushed ice... Absolutely delicious and can be drank while the rest of your rum ages :handgestures-thumbupleft: