I'm not seeing it. The chemistry behind esters and baking soda says that a pot with alcohols and acids (what you have in your boiler) yields esters (not counting those that are created during fermentation) and that, in the presence of an alkali, esters can be hydrolyzed (what would end up in your thumper).Bourbon_Greg wrote:Anyone ever used baking soda in a thumper when the still has the mash? It seems this would be OK to boost the ABV and compress the heads when trying to get a neutral.
The question is, how much time would the bicarb in a thumper have to work on the esters? In Tomb's post he is thinking about the entire heat up time before the temp is high enough for the esters to boil out of the solution but in the set up you describe the esters would be driven into a thumper that is hot enough to drive them off before the bicarb has much time to hydrolyze them.
Also, esters are just one type of congener that keeps distillate from being neutral so, unless you have a column on the thumper, and you are running it correctly, you will not be getting anything close to neutral out of it.
Using bicarb isn't about compressing heads but about breaking down the compounds that makes heads what they are.
Then there is this graph which, if correct, shows that heads are made up of different things depending on what the ABV of the still charge is: