Long form:
I've run a 5 gallon pot still to make a reasonable drink with ujssm and I'm looking to upgrade to something that I can circumvent the stripping process. The way I see it is like this:
- I run my pot still to strip by running it until the total distillate is about 30% alcohol, this takes about 65% of the water out of the wash
- I then run 3 batches of low wines and make cuts to get a product around 80% alcohol before diluting it, this takes out roughly 60% of the remaining water out of the low wines
- by my math that means i'm taking roughly 86% of the water out of the mash, meaning to do this in one run I could (by my math) run at around 89% alc on a boka and get similar results.
According to the reflux calculator running a .6m column can produce 92.6% with a reflux ratio of 5 (which is pretty slow at 150ml in 15 minutes). So running it super slow for fores, and then opening it up to 89-90% and holding it there for the rest of the run means a 3 hour (or so) session with the still. But this means dropping the reflux ratio below 1, is that even possible? Since I'm now taking more than I'm refluxing? or is that does that just mean I need for every 1.25ml of condensate I'm letting .25ml fall back into the column?
The extra long form
- The plan for first run is to compress 150ml of foreshots, separate the rest of the run (adjusting reflux to run at 89-90%) into jars by temperature or 500ml (whichever is smaller), making notes on when the cuts were made,then saving feints for use in the next run.
- The second run includes the feints from the first and I'd like to separate heads into thirds, the first half, then the remaining heads into early and late heads for blending, and once I hit the hearts temperature liked on the first run begin collecting. stop at my tails cut and divide them up the same as I did with the heads. Early, middle, compressed late. The reason for the special treatment of tails and heads is to better find what temperature I want to make those cuts at or how much volume I want to bleed over into hearts if temperature proves a crappy metric for my cuts.
- Third run is a lot like the second, just moving zeroing in on the cuts I like based on temperatures and volumes I recorded in the previous two runs.