kimbodious wrote:I only use my CCVM for neutral so I have no interest in tails.
You said that already. If you do simple moonshine sugar washes without adjuncts, if you don't use grain molasses or fruit brandies, then ditch all feints. But if you want whiskey rum or brandy on a CCVM, or even a real vodka, say a wheat mash, then tails are the secret to taste. For example, if you were to sample and bottle every half pint of hearts from your next run, tell me if they all taste the same? No they do not. With molasses on my CCVM I get from clean heads thru floral then vanilla to liquorice at the end of hearts that come from the tails. Those tails have great hidden pleasures trying to push thru. All mashes especially fruit base have amazing weak tails. Taste it on your next strip run. It's why you collect low wines, not just for tasteless ethanol, but for tasty feints. If you are still not hooked, then save fuel, stop your strip at 40%.... even better, don't strip at all, just reflux your sucrose beer for pure tasteless ethanol.
With CCVM how is it possible to extract more ethanol from feints. We got it all in the hearts. Maybe the recycling of feints is for potstillers, but I don't think so. Most rum distilleries use reflux stills yet tails and feints, even the Dunder get recycled. All potstill whiskies keep the feints with low wines. Great blended whiskies include 96% refluxed grain where feints are returned, all Bourbon, even those refluxed start with backset because an efficient still like CCVM needs to push extra flavour into the water that comes over with ethanol hearts.
I've read good threads here on treating feints based on the chemistry of low wine esters, acids and ethanol in equilibrium. Carbonate helps esters and acids convert back to ethanol. Pot perm strips out fusels rendering more but flavourless ethanol. A few crystals in pond water can make it safe to drink, useful when travelling abroad.
To those of us who can use CCVM to produce whiskies or rum, and a superior vodka or gin, this thread must embrace what good reflux columns might achieve that centuries of patent potstillers also strive for. CCVM may be excellent because it is simple. Can it also make improved product? Potstillers learned over centuries how to get the best from their copper worm technology too.
Why waste streams of heated water to strip hundreds of quarts of beer, then repeat the whole thing just to throw out more than half of the precious stuff just for the few quarts of hearts. The best whiskies in the world tell us they use heads tails and feints to improve the hearts. Can we try, too?
