Howdy,
OK be gentle with me ... I had my first runs with my new copper toy ( Thanks McStill !!! ) over this weekend and I have some queries that I can't quite find answers for. ( I've read the Kiwistiller guide a few time's over to try and get my head around it ).
The boiler is a HBS boiler, 30L ( boil a beer 2200W ) the pot still is the same as the one in the "the first one to comment gets it" post that McStill put up a couple of weeks ago. ( pelican / swan - with shotgun condenser ). :D
I have put through two 25L DWWG's that also had dry malt and 6kg's of plain white sugar as stripping runs last night, both ran well ( no feints added ). I got 5L of low wines from each one.
I ran them both down from high 60's to 20% abv and discarded 200ml of fores for each batch.
Today I measured the overall abv and it was 50% overall, I calculated on 11L of low wines to be on the safe side watering back to 40% and ran both washes back through again this morning as a spirit run. I don't have any control over the wattage of my element for a spirit run, I am assuming I am going to have to get a controller sorted to do this properly?
I started up and got it to the boil and collected in 300ml batches, it started at about 83% ( at 22 degrees ) and was flowing really fast, I was filling 300ml in 4 minutes for pretty much the first half of the run, What is a good collection rate for a spirit run for a 2 inch pot still?
By the time 20% came around I was sitting on 24 degrees at the parrot and the flow had slowed down to 8 minutes per 300ml
I'm thinking it ran wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy to fast but this is all new to me after playing with my reflux. Can good product be made at this speed or have I just smeared everything from heads to tails right through the run?
It was a good first few runs for me regardless of the outcome, worse comes to worse I will re-run it again at a later date but for now it's airing just incase the speed is acceptable and you guys think it might be worth the taste test? The Kiwistiller guide suggests only keeping from 80% down to 70% for a scotch is this a pretty close measure to what you guys are doing or do you cut based on taste alone?
Cheers
GTH