Is there any benefit to re-diluting one stripping run for a spirits run? How diluted can low wines be?

[HuckFinn]

Hi everyone,

Apologies for such a basic question, but the genesis of this is that I am curious if I can do a spirits run without having to aggregate so many individual stripping runs together. Although not a big deal, it does seem like it would be a big hassle to do a corn whiskey using a single still given how the wash would start at such a low ABV. For example, if someone is doing an all grain corn whiskey where their starting gravity is 1.03 and the wash is only at 5% ABV, it would take the collections of 8 stripped washes to get a kettle to total up to a 40% ABV. Then it would take that 9th distillation (spirits run) to get the final output over the 40% ABV.

Is there any sensible / practical way for a person with maybe even just 2 washes (or better just 1) to meaningfully benefit from multiple distillations such as 1 stripping run and 1 spirits run?

Perhaps for a neutral spirit things would be easy to manage at low volume as distillate would be cut down with distilled water and no tastes would be added to a heavily diluted low wines. If run in a reflex, perhaps cuts could still be decently made. For a corn whiskey, however, where taste is desired I feel like it would be very tough or only negligibly helpful to distill a wash, then water it down, and re-still it?

Does that make sense? What I am trying to understand is how can someone make a corn whiskey or anything at a low wash ABV and get to the finish line without having to do eight, nine, or some lesser, but equally obnoxious quantity of distillations?

[NZChris]

If your final wash abv is only 5%, you have a problem. Fix it.

Three or four still charges of wash should provide adequate 24-32% low wines to fill the same boiler for the spirit run.

I have done spirit runs from one or two stripping runs, but they are only ever experimental, or from rare ingredients.

[RC Al]

Patience... lols

So on a 40l boiler charge with +/-10% uj wash i get 10 or so litres at 35-40% - i run it down below 10% out of the spout - i could run that 10L straight away or get 3-4 lots together for a decent spirit run

Half the abv - slightly less than half the collected volume, so if you have a still that will run with a very low charge (5L), you could run it there and then (at a really slow rate to get the cuts good), but then you would only collect around a quarter of that as hearts - if you want to do all that for aprox 3 bottles of drinkable, go hard...

IF that sounds like a lot of bother, get into a plater and do it in one run for more or less the same amount of product. Depending on power available a pot still can be faster in the long run if you take into account the total time spent for volume produced - with gas i can finish a 40l strip in an hour inc boil up time, a plater will run at what it needs to for the whole run, but its an "instant" reward

[Kareltje]

A final wash of 5 % is not uncommon when one ferments pure raw fruit without added sugar.

I have distilled that with steam stripping and got a low wine of about 10 %. Working from that I need at most 2 more runs to get to a drinkable spirit.

Rediluting low wines with water I only do when I want to make a neutral. Then the benefit is to loose the taste.

[jonnys_spirit]

Here’s a couple items to try for this:

1. Increase initial wash abv to about 10%.
2. Do a 1.5’ish run. Add fresh wash to stripped low wines for spirit run.
3. Use a larger stripping still and smaller spirit still. Add a thumper for more stripping capacity.
4. make larger ferments (3-4x boiler charges) and use a preheater to make back to back strip runs much more efficient.
5. Make a feints cut specifically for recycling into next spirit run - in order to minimize stripped low wines requirement and top up with fresh wash.

Cheers!
-jonny