Spice Distillation for Blending

[gundog48]

Until very recently I was a brewer by trade, now I have started work at a gin distillery. I've been distilling at home for quite a while and am starting to produce some spirits I'm very happy with, especially the rum I've been making. I like to spice my rum, but I'm not convinced that the way I'm doing it (just boiling the spices and blending in) is doing it justice, nor is it doing a decent job at extracting the complexities of the spice or providing a clarified product.

At work, we tend to make a spice concentrate which we can blend in. This is done by charging the still with alcohol and hard spices such as juniper, cassia and peppercorns, while the botanicals like orange peel go in the basket. The still is normally heated, to around 70C, then left overnight to steep before distilled over. The distillate has a concentrated spice flavor which can then be blended into the main batch.

My rum spice blend uses cloves, cassia, peppercorns orange peel and vanilla and I think it would be a good candidate for this treatment. The only issue I have is one of quantity, as I need 1 gallon of liquid in the still at minimum, and I think diluting it down to make up volume would also dilute down the flavour. I think I'll scale up my blend in roughly the same proportions and see what happens. I'll put everything apart from the orange peel straight into the still, the peel can sit at the top of my column between the top of the packing and the dephlegmator, hopefully acting as a kind of botanicals basket.

Has anyone else tried something similar before? The idea of a nice clear, stable spice blend really appeals to me.

[yakattack]

Sounds like a viable option. By chance do you mind sharing your spice proportions for your rum? I am about to blend my last run and want to spice some. I'm a huge fan of caption Morgan private stock ( special spice blend. Think lighter kraken black spiced run)

Yak

[NZChris]

My fix, was to build a small still out of a saucepan and steamer. It takes a maximum charge of 1300ml and it is running at the moment with most of the botanicals in the boiler and the peels in the steamer, double the herbs to make a gin concentrate.

[SaltyStaves]

My only spiced rum was a masceration directly in the finished aged rum. The cloves, cassia, pepper corns sloughed off their outer coatings and left me the headache of very fine particles that were impossible to entirely filter (helped less by the fact that I'd also added sugar).
So I definitely won't repeat that trick.

I like the idea of having a concentrated tincture that I can add to the finished rum.

[NZChris]

I like the idea of having a concentrated tincture that I can add to the finished rum.

With a small still, it is easy to take a portion of the rum, add more botanicals than you think you need, then run it to make an essence for blending back.