Hi Maheel, I drink a lot of gin, and when I'm experimenting with new ingredients, I macerate them in a test tube for a couple of days to see how they work.
From this I can get a pretty good idea how well the flavour imparts to the spirit and if its a strong or subtle note, so I can roughly judge how much to add to a recipe. I normally vapour infuse and occasionally do a distilled maceration - now the undistilled test macerations are never as good as the distilled product - spices are too hot and herbs are too woody, this is taken out of the distilled product in the heads for the oily hot stuff and at the end of the run for the flowery part of the botanicals. I use cut spirit in the boiler so there is no real heads or tails, but I still leave stuff out when blending on the cutting bench for a better product.
Get on and get your micro still set up, or do a bigger batch in your current still, it will definitely be better in my experience
McStill wrote:My new "superflute" :roll: has a space above the dephlegmater for a gin/herb basket
McStill, I got all worried about botanicals going to mush and blocking the column if too finely ground, I added pressure relief to the boiler, and a good piece of advise I got was to make the gin basket intentionally an imperfect fit, so if the worst happens the vapour can still bypass the basket and you get a bit of warning with the output dropping off.