A few specific questions.

[EastTNbrew]

I am currently on day 3 of my very first fermentation of UJSSM. I have my still ready and have been reading everything I can find on the distillation process. I read every bit of the thread on "better cuts" (thank you all for being so precise; I am a math teacher by day, so I love precision), and am still not sure where to cut the foreshot. I have a 5 gallon mixture of corn, sugar, yeast and water and a 20l pot for my still. So... when it comes time to distill and make cuts, will the foreshot be 1 of my pint jars? Is that too much or too little? Also, I read that before doing the cuts, it is advisable to put coffee filters over the jars and leave them for a day and then do whatever process one prefers for making cuts. Finally, since I'm using a pot still, it seems that I need to do a stripping run first (with just a foreshot cut, and the rest in one jar), then make another run with that "product" which I will separate into my pint jars and make cuts. Thanks for any help!

[acfixer69]

Your first run will be a vinegar clean run. Follow that with a sacrificial alcohol run. After those are done read Kiwi's topic on pot still cuts. That should get you started.

[EastTNbrew]

Thanks - so I read around the site about vinegar and sacrificial runs and it seems I can simply send water and vinegar 50-50 through, then either cheap wine or my first ferment batch. Then the next batch of fermented corn-sugar-water-yeast I'd run through and be making product fit for drinking, which I should distill twice, making cuts on the second of those runs. Is that right?

[Bee]

Yep. That's right.
Where I'm at, a 1.75 liter bottle of Calypso rum is the cheapest alcohol on a $/unit alcohol basis. It's $10 and works out to $0.014 per ml. The cheapest wines I could find were all about 4 cents/ml.

[acfixer69]

Correct, assuming the sac run did the complete cleaning. Only you can determine that. If you feel it's safe at that point you can follow any distilling protocol you chose.

[EastTNbrew]

Thank you both!