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My stocks of white dog UJSSM and neutral for gin are getting depleted, so I just bought enough sugar and grain to make enough of both to last a couple of years. Big ferments, long hours in the shed, get the hard work done then experiment with the feints in my leisure time. That neutral for gin spir...

There is good and bad advice for cooling all over the net and the forum. Good advice makes use of physics, poor advice ignores it. Hint, heat rises. Hint, closed loop cooling systems have often been discussed on this forum and using Google should find you some useful threads. Cooling water from my s...

You can get orange into a drink by suspending fruit or peel above the liquor. See Liqueur du pendu.

Welcome to the forum and NZ Don.

Keep your distilling money under the mattress until you’ve done homework. You can build a much better still for the same money as an airstill.

I’ve done quite a few Glayva style liqueurs using mead dregs and various whiskeys and honeys. Most were successful. My daughter likes UJSSM and honey, but I’m not a fan of it. Any liqueur made with honey is difficult to get clear so I don’t put much effort into clearing them. If anything does settle...

PatchOnKnee wrote: ↑Sat Apr 20, 2024 7:02 pm. The listing states that it is 100% natural cork.

Where do they say that? I can’t find it. Have you got a link?

Chuck it in the feints collection

You want to use it for contact with hot solvents, so it needs to be better than ‘food safe’.

Can you provide a link to that statement?

Right, ok so you wouldnt swap out the demerara for white... No, I wouldn't. If I had already found the flavor profile that I liked and wanted to reduce the intensity, I would have a guess for the next batch, then use a calculator to work out how much of the original ingredients to reduce the recipe...

There's no need to, the drawings had been around for many decades before I found them and are now available online. It's built out of what was available in the local scrapyard on the day, so posting pics won't be much more help than the original drawings. I have seen one built using two kegs.

Yes. That's where I got the idea from. Built it when I was a newbie. So are you thinking ferment 2 or 3x your still size and strip until you have enough low wines and load all those low wine in the preheater on your last run to get them up to temp too? I quite often start a spirit run of a differen...

Yes. That's where I got the idea from. Built it when I was a newbie.

Double distillation using a preheater is the most energy and cooling water efficient system I know of. I've just watched a Moonshiners episode where they have built a "heater box" which is a primitive, but effective, version of what I use. The next strip starts producing a few minutes afte...

Going back to water, whilst it's clearly nowhere near as important as when brewing beer or cider, I have found that adding a campden tablet and leaving it overnight really helps before adding the ubiquitous epsom salts and citric acid. Obviously everyone's water might be different, but we have high...

"astronomically low" isn't a number.

Baking soda is not the best chemical for adjusting pH.

1.090 is quite high. You do have some alcohol in it, so maybe just run it and get what you get?
Use the high SG backset for the next generation?

I do them outdoors with no cooling water. Don't treat them as 'practice' runs or keep any distillate. Chris do you do your sac run outdoors with no cooling water? What's your heat source? Whatever it is for that still or cleaning run. I have stills with internal elements, plus stills that run on fi...

It sounds like it's 'use what you've got', the same as Poitín and prohibition era moonshine, etc..

I'm sure that I've made spirits that fit the descriptions, especially when morphing sour mash generations into rum generations and vise versa

I do them outdoors with no cooling water. Don't treat them as 'practice' runs or keep any distillate.

If you had the flavors correct but too strong, swapping the flavored ingredients for others sounds like a mistake.

You can dilute flavor by adding white sugar to the ferment, or neutral to the heart cut.

Five gallons is a lot to have under an element, especially when it's barely covered. Watch out for stratification.

I'd rather err on the side of too much flavor, then dilute it with neutral to get the intensity I like.

...however i want a bicardi style with a bit more ruminess if ya like. Have you looked up how Bacardi makes their white rum? It isn't white rum straight off the still, it's barrel aged, then the color is stripped out of it with a specialized carbon that I bet you can't obtain, or make, without doin...

You can include as much flavor as you want by how you run the still and choose your cuts. For Jenever, I use narrow cut hearts from a pot still. For gin spirit with less grain flavor, I reflux the feints from the pot still spirit run.

I sometimes use a 12V pump to add cold water to the bottom inlet of the flake stand, overflowing the hot water from the top outlet. A cheap 12V temperature controller is used to control the temperature in the flake stand near the product outlet, the thermocouple is in the water, not the product. Thi...

I doubt it. The entry point, G, for the vapor is too high. It will work just fine if the pre heater outlet piping is plumbed to allow removal of condensate generated in the pre-heater. STRIPPER W PREHEATER.jpg I've never seen the inlet to a thumper designed like that. What stops the thumper drainin...

Watch out for burning. It would be safer if they were put in a Carter Head.

I was thinking of fabricating one of these condensers as I have a lot of copper sheet that I found on craigslist. I could use it as a wine preheater. It would be much easier to clean than a traditional worm. It would be easier to make concentric cylinders instead of cones. condenser.jpg Very cool, ...

I don't even take the still head off between stripping runs, refilling through a valve at the top of the pot.

Your life doesn't sound much different to mine up until I started distilling. The biggest difference I can think of is that I didn't have the internet feeding me mis-information while I was researching what to do. I had to go to university libraries and hunt for actual research.