Dephlegmator and bubble plate column observations.

[aqua vitae]

So you retain the congener flavours at the same time that you reflux and cut much them out as heads and tails?
Not speaking of the wash flavours here (never had).
Come on Barney.
You admitted that you cut the stuff that gives much of the hangovers (that is not ethanol), it's the harsh flavours from that stuff that I talk about.

The cake saying in other words; you can't cut the heads away and still keep the flavours from the heads. Same with tails.

[Bagasso]

So you retain the congener flavours at the same time that you reflux and cut much them out as heads and tails?
Not speaking of the wash flavours here (never had).
Come on Barney.
You admitted that you cut the stuff that gives much of the hangovers (that is not ethanol), it's the harsh flavours from that stuff that I talk about.

The cake saying in other words; you can't cut the heads away and still keep the flavours from the heads. Same with tails.

The problem I think lies in the wording. Everything that is formed during fermentation other than ethanol is a congener and if it can be tasted then it is a flavor congener.

In the fores cut you cut out methanol. Of course the fores has a little bit of everything thats in the wash but it has a higher concentration of that nasty that you want to get rid of. The thing is that methanol tastes much like ethanol so it really isn't a flavor congener but it does need taking out.

You keep saying heads and tails as if they each were something indivisible but they are not they are a mix of compounds with different boiling points and stilling helps seperate these compounds. I mean even those heavy whiskies that you say you enjoy have cuts made to them. So they do, as you said, retain the congener flavours at the same time that they cut much of them out as heads and tails.

I would say that what this set up does is compress the late tails letting what would be late hearts/early tails spread out and tharefore taken as clean drinkable spirits. I have not gotten the impression that fores and heads cut are made any different than a regular pot still but I could have just missed that.

Edit to add: I would just like to say that it has been my experience after having imbibed in 500ml of both heads and tails at 40% (on different nights of course) that there is no hangover in the tails. A little cotton mouth perhaps but nothing that I would call a hang over. I blame ethyl acetate for the morning after blues but thats just theory on my part.

[aqua vitae]

The problem I think lies in the wording. Everything that is formed during fermentation other than ethanol is a congener and if it can be tasted then it is a flavor congener.

Yes that's what I mean with congeners.

In the fores cut you cut out methanol. Of course the fores has a little bit of everything thats in the wash but it has a higher concentration of that nasty that you want to get rid of. The thing is that methanol tastes much like ethanol so it really isn't a flavor congener but it does need taking out.

Harry once wrote that methanol also forms an azeotrope with something in the tails so it's a myth that you only remove methanol in the foreshots... But thats another subject.

You keep saying heads and tails as if they each were something indivisible but they are not they are a mix of compounds with different boiling points and stilling helps seperate these compounds.

No they are not indivisible, I agree with that.

I mean even those heavy whiskies that you say you enjoy have cuts made to them. So they do, as you said, retain the congener flavours at the same time that they cut much of them out as heads and tails.

I would say that what this set up does is compress the late tails letting what would be late hearts/early tails spread out and tharefore taken as clean drinkable spirits. I have not gotten the impression that fores and heads cut are made any different than a regular pot still but I could have just missed that.

Yes they do cuts and cut out the worst of the congeners that would make the product taste bad, some would think it's too harsh anyway and some like it.

Increased separation means that the tails gets more concentrated at the end. As it's only a little separation that takes part in tray columns with just a few plates some of the early tails will still smear in the body as you say whileas the little heavier and really heavy tails don't show up until the very end. Some of those little heavier tails is good in a fullbodied whisky but when they gets concentrated together with the very heavy tails it's harder to collect only them and they are likely to be sacrificed with the tails cut.
It's also quite a waste to try and collect them if you gone through all trouble separating them more effeciently (building a still with more separation than a pot still).
Same goes with foreshot/heads. If you reflux during the collection of it they will get more concentrated and smear less into the rest of the run. An early hearts cut could collect the same amount of heads congeners into the run as you do with a pot still but again, why use a tray column if you intend to do that?

Edit to add: I would just like to say that it has been my experience after having imbibed in 500ml of both heads and tails at 40% (on different nights of course) that there is no hangover in the tails. A little cotton mouth perhaps but nothing that I would call a hang over. I blame ethyl acetate for the morning after blues but thats just theory on my part.

Thats really taking one for the team man
What I've heard tails should give you nausea and heads give you headache but that's maybe urban myths?

[Bagasso]

Well you say that is what you mean by congeners but I'm not sure you do because you post as if the flavors of the wash are not congeners when they in fact are.

Azeotropes bring a whole other variable into the process but I think this is where the pools of liquid on the plates help with the separation in a way that packing doesn't.

Full bodied whiskys having only the bad taste cut out is a matter of taste. This reminds me of my brother in law. He has a bit of a sweet tooth and when I make lemonade I make it up to an avarage concentration of lemon/sugar to water ratio. This would not be considered a light or mellow lemonade. He always end up adding a couple of tablespoons of sugar to a glassful. It's a matter of taste but what drives me nuts is that he says that it has no flavor. I mean it's full of flavor it just doesn't have enough of the sugar flavor that he likes but it isn't plain water.

Here is where Barney is with you. Sure his stuff may not have the bite that you enjoy but it probably irks him for you to say it is light or less flavorful because he seems to feel that he has, as you stated about full body spirits, "cut out the worst of the congeners that would make the product taste bad" while keeping full flavor.

Increased separation means that the tails gets more concentrated at the end. As it's only a little separation that takes part in tray columns with just a few plates some of the early tails will still smear in the body as you say whileas the little heavier and really heavy tails don't show up until the very end. Some of those little heavier tails is good in a fullbodied whisky but when they gets concentrated together with the very heavy tails it's harder to collect only them and they are likely to be sacrificed with the tails cut.

Here is the thing that you don't seem to grasp. If the light tails are smearing into the hearts does this mean that the mid tails smear into the light tails and the late tails smear into the mid tails. Wouldn't this mean that I may be able to collect into some part of the mid tails and get a larger dose of good mid tail flavor while keeping out the late tails?

The answer is no one knows because none of us knows for sure what is in the "tails" of a particular wash because it a whole group of things that can be in there that can have different boiling points and even these change because they are forming azeotropes with water or ethanol or any other compound in the tails. Maybe the good for fullbodied spirits isn't being shifted towards the end. Maybe these come through with only the unwanted shifting to the end but, Rockchucker said it early on and it still hasn't changed, no lab test means "we don't really know" and for those of us who have not even tried one of these setups or what they can produce we can't even make a guesstimation much less form an opinion as to the fullness of flavor.

Heads or tails?
All I can say is that the heads gave me both nausea and headache with the icepick behind the eyeballs for the full hangover experience. The tails gave me a bit of an off feeling plus I was parched but it did include 500ml of likker so I was expecting something. A glass of ice water before a shower and halfway through the second cup of coffee I forgot I was supossed to be hung over.

[aqua vitae]

Well you say that is what you mean by congeners but I'm not sure you do because you post as if the flavors of the wash are not congeners when they in fact are.

Yeah I guess that can be considered a congener too, I only thought of the flavours that form during fermentation as congeners but other flavours that is there before any fermentation is also a kind of congener in the spirits, my fault.

Azeotropes bring a whole other variable into the process but I think this is where the pools of liquid on the plates help with the separation in a way that packing doesn't.

As packing is a way morre effecient when it comes to separation it's the other way around. If a packed column is run to hard (too high vapourspeed) it can create pools of liquid at the narrowest points in the packing and at the centering ring and the refluxers term for that is choking and that considerable decreases the column effiency. But thats another subject.

Full bodied whiskys having only the bad taste cut out is a matter of taste. This reminds me of my brother in law. He has a bit of a sweet tooth and when I make lemonade I make it up to an avarage concentration of lemon/sugar to water ratio. This would not be considered a light or mellow lemonade. He always end up adding a couple of tablespoons of sugar to a glassful. It's a matter of taste but what drives me nuts is that he says that it has no flavor. I mean it's full of flavor it just doesn't have enough of the sugar flavor that he likes but it isn't plain water.

Here is where Barney is with you. Sure his stuff may not have the bite that you enjoy but it probably irks him for you to say it is light or less flavorful because he seems to feel that he has, as you stated about full body spirits, "cut out the worst of the congeners that would make the product taste bad" while keeping full flavor.

Yes I agree totaly with you on that. I might have failed to clarify it as good you do here. What I call full flavour might be too harsh for others. What others call full flavour might seem to light for me. I read a lot of whisky magazines and literature and have adopted the whiskysnobs scale on what is full flavour or not, but it's not ment to say a whisky is better because it's heavy, I like lots of light whiskies too (a light whisky allows more subtle flavours to be tasted that a heavy whisky might hide) and maybe I would really like Barney's product as well.

Increased separation means that the tails gets more concentrated at the end. As it's only a little separation that takes part in tray columns with just a few plates some of the early tails will still smear in the body as you say whileas the little heavier and really heavy tails don't show up until the very end. Some of those little heavier tails is good in a fullbodied whisky but when they gets concentrated together with the very heavy tails it's harder to collect only them and they are likely to be sacrificed with the tails cut.

Here is the thing that you don't seem to grasp. If the light tails are smearing into the hearts does this mean that the mid tails smear into the light tails and the late tails smear into the mid tails. Wouldn't this mean that I may be able to collect into some part of the mid tails and get a larger dose of good mid tail flavor while keeping out the late tails?

Yes probably. Reflux and plates/packing divides the different tails better than a simple pot still where it smears together more. So you would be able to collect more of the early and mid tails before reaching the late tails.

But it's not that simple that early tails is good and late tails is yucky. There is good stuff in late tails too if you only collect just a little of them that contributes to a heavy full flavour.

If you try to mimic this with a tray columns and continue to collect hearts into the heavier tails you might actually end up collecting too much of the early tails, and that can make the product harsh in a bad way.
You see with a pot still you might actually collect less of the early tails as they smear more with the very late tails which is cut away as tails.

Loch Lomond Distillery tried a pot still with dephlegmator and plates in the 50s, called the Lomond Still, to be able to make a wider range of single malts to use in their own blends.
"On top of a pot, this new still type had a short column with straight sides. Inside the column were three plates which could be turned from horizontal to vertical to allow variation in the amount of reflux. The plates could also be water-cooled or left dry, which allowed for more control of the reflux and therefore of how ‘heavy’ the whisky would be" Alex Kraaijeveld, Celtic Malts

Whileas they could make a little lighter whisky paradoxically it also got oilier (possibly from early tails because they could collect more hearts before reaching the heavy tails?) and they eventually went back to traditional pot stills again.

The bold part of the quote emphasize what I mean with increased reflux being related to increased lightness btw.

[sidenote: Lomond Still maybe is the correct term to describe what commonly have become knows as 'the flute'?]

The answer is no one knows because none of us knows for sure what is in the "tails" of a particular wash because it a whole group of things that can be in there that can have different boiling points and even these change because they are forming azeotropes with water or ethanol or any other compound in the tails. Maybe the good for fullbodied spirits isn't being shifted towards the end. Maybe these come through with only the unwanted shifting to the end but, Rockchucker said it early on and it still hasn't changed, no lab test means "we don't really know" and for those of us who have not even tried one of these setups or what they can produce we can't even make a guesstimation much less form an opinion as to the fullness of flavor.

Yes, it's very complicated and we don't really know.
Lab test have been done to compare commercial pot still whisky with commercial tray column whisky. The pot still whisky unsuprisingly had a wider range of congeners. There is also thousands of reviews that point in the direction that at least commercially pot stilled whisky is heavier than tray column whisky. One could at least guess, based on that, experience and common sense that increased reflux leads to increased lightness, smoothness or whatever you want to call it.
Increase the reflux even more until you hit 95% and you get some kind of vodka (which could be considered as the lightest grain spirit you can make)... That fact is also an indication, isn't it?

Well, the arguements is out here now for folks to read and make their own conclusions, and even if we don't agree at least that is a good thing, yes?

[Bagasso]

Of course its a good thing to get different thoughts out where others can read them. It's not about being right or wrong but about sharing the info.

It's funny how the same thing can be seen from different perspectives and the language often makes communicating more difficult. Especially in this dry text form.

For example, I was pulling your leg with the light, mid and late tales smearing. My point being that the use of the term tails in such a general way to indicate what dozens of compounds are doing in a span of a few hours or however long that part of a run takes someone is, well, just too general.

Also the azeotropes and the liquid on the plates. I say the liquid helps because it may be less efficient than the packing at separating ethanol from what wants to be kept (flavor) and still efficient enough to hold off what we want to be separated (nasties). So you are right it is backwards, packing is more efficient but since what we are after is mitigated efficiency this technique is actually better from this point of view.

As far as the Loch Lomond Distillery, what I have read is that they have 4 rectifying stills (perferated column) and two swan necks and they mix and match during the blending. Here: http://www.whiskybarplaza.nl/loch_lomond_.html

I do remember reading some of pintoshines posts. Your probably refering to the one about his Uncle Leo blending of the distillate that would come off between 41 and 30 and he also mentions pugidogs rum oils. This is a good example why the generalizing of any part of a run as a single thing is not accurate. Now, while these flavors may indeed exist, the effort in going after them is a personal thing. Like the person who tried UJSM and decided he didn't like the corny taste. To this person that part that Uncle Leo made sure to blend back in to "make the oak sing" may have been just more "nasty tails".

[aqua vitae]

Oh, I did not realize you where pulling my leg

Loch Lomond Distillery abandoned the Lomond still long ago, the whisky they made with that still was simply called Lomond and the last bottles was bottled in the 70s IIRC..
Scapa Distillery is the only distillery that still have a Lomond still, but they use it as a wash still with disabled plates and no dephlegmator. So there is no real Lomond still in use.

I'm refering to a thread called "Bubble plates vs pots vs columns" at another site somewhere on the world wide web...

EDIT removed quotes, don't want to stir shit.

[Bagasso]

I didn't say that Lomond Distillary used a Lomond still just pointed out that they use perferated plate columns for part of their products.

pintoshines comments mean nothing to my tastebuds.

It kinda reminds me of the mythbusters episode where they filtered cheap vodka through a brita filter a different number of times and placed these samples against top shelf stuff. I read some people say that it busted the myth that filtering can make top shelf stuff because Jamie and a profesional taster got the order right. What they forget is that the other three tasters could not tell them apart so for the avarage drinker I would say that it would endeed seem like top shelf stuff. If it makes the the snobs cringe thats their problem.

[LWTCS]

Good observation Rock (imo).

My unqualified assertion is that the hobby sized versions of the bubble still may very well do a better job of making flavor'd likker (and perhaps nuetral) for any number of reasons...

So many gray areas.
Plenty of time.

[aqua vitae]

I removed the quotes, I don't want to stir shit and bring up that kind of discussion again, should have been obvious but I did not think of the possible consequences before I posted that...

If you don't mind Rockchucker could you please remove the quote from your post too? Up until now the posts have been on a sociable level but that side-step of mine opened up for a type of discussion that is undesirable.

[aqua vitae]

I didn't say that Lomond Distillary used a Lomond still just pointed out that they use perferated plate columns for part of their products.

Ok. Yeah they use it for the grain spirit they mix with the single malt for their own blended whiskies.

Good observation Rock (imo).

My unqualified assertion is that the hobby sized versions of the bubble still may very well do a better job of making flavor'd likker for any number of reasons...

So many gray areas.
Plenty of time.

Yep.
For hobby stillers it could be best to aim for a little lighter product that got drinkable after a few months or less.
But call it with correct terms.

[LWTCS]

Yep.
For hobby stillers it could be best to aim for a little lighter product that got drinkable after a few months or less.
But call it with correct terms.

Good call for reminding me...

Blanket statements never seem adaquately tell the entire story well enough..

[aqua vitae]

Haha thank you rockchucker, means a lot to hear that from a guy like you.
And if we all would agree the world would be a dull place

Good call for reminding me...

Blanket statements never seem adaquately tell the entire story well enough..

Sorry, my english fails me here, I don't understand what you mean?

[LWTCS]

by the way I love your thoughts please don't stop......even if I don't completely agree.

+1

Aqua vitea,
Sometimes using words that have an absolute assignment are words that do not absolutely apply to the assignment.

Words like bland, light or best and better.....

Some folks like lima beans and some folks are repulsed by them. Which is correct?

No matter. Dialog is good.

[aqua vitae]

Point taken!