Home Distiller

MuleKicker wrote:

Photonic wrote:Well...

the taste was like sucking a tea-bag!

you might want to be careful who you say that to..

Oops.

manu de hanoi wrote:thanks for sharing the results here are mine :
http://homedistiller.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6749" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow

Thanks, I saw your thread and it encouraged me to get on and get mine checked

Well... The tea added a great colour to the spirit AND a lovely smell, but even after a day (yes, I caved in and tasted some after just a day) the taste was like sucking a tea-bag! I assumed that I ignored the rule "less is more" and went overboard with the number of tea-bags, so next time I'd use l...

Thanks Olddog. I wondered about the tannins - I've only ever used tea for winemaking, to add tannin and have no idea about how it would affect the spirit. I ended up going with 5 lapsang souchong teabags for a litre jar along with my usual amount of charred oak shavings (about a handful). I hope it ...

I've been trying to replicate a smokey taste to my product and the nearest that I've come to what I'm after is ageing with shavings of charred oak. That seems to give it a light smokey taste, but it still seems pretty thin. Then it occurred to me that a tea - Lapsang Souchong, has a deep smokey tast...

I've had a couple of requests via PM asking if people can copy these results to other forums.

I have no problem with that, so please feel free. I'm glad that they were useful to people.

+1

Too much will give you a satisfying colour very quickly (in my failed experiment I got a great scotch colour in just 12 hours but after a couple of weeks it just tasted like wood and left a nasty aftertaste).

Less oak and more time was the way forward for me.

Yep, it turned out to be a non-starter. Besides the standard refracometers used for Brix/sugar scale, one company offered an ethanol refractometer, calibrated to measure ethanol content, they also do them for methanol content, but both types can only measure if the mixture is a pure water+ethanol or...

I was still curious, so after blending what I considered to be hearts, I left the heads (still in their little glasses) out to carry on airing with a filter paper over the top. After another night, that delicious smell had dropped away. They still smelled sweet like the rest of the run but underneat...

I wonder if some of the preservatives in commercial jam may stop the yeast from doing it's thing. I did find a recipe for Jam Wine here if it's any use to you http://www.winesathome.co.uk/forum/archive/index.php?t-109.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow It'd be really ...

I accidentally managed a Rum and Raisin flavour yesterday by adding some stripped sugar wash to a couple of handfuls of dried fruit (the kind of stuff that you get in the baking aisle at the supermarket - (Seedless Raisins, Sultanas and Mixed Candied Citrus Peel), cinnamon and cardamom with a touch ...

Yep, when I was looking into distilling, I read about freeze-jacking and how some people only drink the output from a bottle of cider to work around the cuts issue, and also tried the "ice in a wok" method and soon realised that there was very little control over what I was making (not to mention th...

LOL.

Yes, it could have been ugly, and I (now) am sure that I won't use the heads but they smelled like the best bit

I'm intrigued by flavouring low wines still as it seems an interesting way to get flavour throughout the run.

Thanks guys.

Thanks to both of you. :D I previously oaked at 60% ABV. By partial removal of heads, I meant that I could have been more brutal on my first run. I know that I got rid of most of the nasties as this is part of the sample that I sent for analysis, I also couldn't detect any real change in smell/taste...

I left some of my pot-stilled wash (sugar) on different oaks from a whisky barrel (charred, plain and toasted) to see what would happen. I guess I panicked and stopped the oaking too early as there was such a dramatic colour change in the first 12 hours I thought that it would carry on and over-oak ...

Mine finished too. Like yours, it didn't smell of vanilla and mine just tasted like a rough wine. I was tempted to add some vanilla extract to the still, but I decided to run it as it was and was pleasantly surprised. It's airing at the moment, but I diluted a sample of the middle of the run to 45% ...

+1 to what Dndrhead said.

As far as I know, reusing forshots can cause a build up of harmful fusel oils, especially if you keep reuse the foreshots from that batch.

I use them for removing marker pen and labels from bottles.

So was it Oudh that you were mixing them with?

i think the link from stillton has some spam thing attached to it. the ad box follows my curser and i can't open the mum file. realy wierd.gman There's a "close" tab on that box, then you have to wait for the counter to finish before you get the file. I'll try attaching it here, but I don't know if...

Yep, it looks good from this angle. Something is happening on the surface.

If you are worried, you could always take a reading of the Specific Gravity and see if it is dropping.

Well, 2 days in from the start of mine and it has already dropped from 1090 to 1040, which is the fastest I've known so far. Maybe that is due to the addition of a teaspoon of standard yeast nutrient. But, as nice as it smells, it doesn't exactly taste of vanilla, more like a cream liqueur of some s...

I have a bottle of Birdwatcher's wash (but using wine yeast) ready for the lab next time I send some in. I plan to also submit a bottle of the All-Bran one. Thanks for the link to MUM. I think another thing that is interesting to see is that the alcohols with a boiling point higher than ethanol are ...

If you want to see the fusel oil analysis of a wash that had liquid carbon added to it then you can here: http://homedistiller.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=12350 As far as the wash that you've made goes, add the clearing agent and you'll see a change in about 2 hours. I found the racking off tricky...

Indeed. I always throw the foreshots (I'm not that desparate for 55ml of spirit, even with the tiny yield that my still gives). The other fusels are interesting. I always assumed that I could smell acetone in the foreshots and even in the heads (when I collect in small glasses). I now assume that wh...

So, I swabed the sides of my fermenter up to the 20 liter line with vinella extract (1 oz.). Fired up a 50/50 All bran and Graham Cracker. Took off just fine. 2 hours into it, it smells a lot like flan (custard/pudding). I usually keep some vanilla sugar on the go, so I sacrificed it to my fermente...

As many of you will know, the instructions of an AirStill (Easy-Still, Mr Distiller, Smart Still etc) recommend that for their "Triple Distilled" yeast that you do not need to make cuts, nor throw any foreshots away. Despite moving on from Turbos, I decided to test what they said. I made a wash of "...

I ran a gallon trial of this recipe, using Bran Flakes but instead substituted baker's yeast for standard wine yeast (I have loads of it here)... Rad, you sir are a genius. I ran it through my airstill, threw the first 50-60ml into my foreshots (fuel) bottle and stopped collecting when the ABV hit 3...

I ran a gallon trial of this recipe, using Bran Flakes but instead substituted baker's yeast for standard wine yeast (I have loads of it here)... Rad, you sir are a genius. I ran it through my airstill, threw the first 50-60ml into my foreshots (fuel) bottle and stopped collecting when the ABV hit 3...

Maybe a different take on it is to use vanilla sugar in your ferment.

A few vanilla pods scattered through a bag of sugar and left for a few weeks will make all the sugar vanillary.

... I can feel a small batch coming on

Interesting results LWTC. You've inspired me to experiment :) I've got a small 4l batch to run through this evening, I was thinking of adding the rootbeer essence to the boiler to see what happens. It may be a bit wasteful as it may boil off and be thrown away with the forshots... or something else ...