Greetings from California

[thereddon]

Greetings all,

I come here with almost ten years of homebrewing experience, focusing mainly on mid range ales and ciders.

I'd like to hone in my skills in distillation and creating single malts for my own personal use and if good enough, gifts in the future.

I'm using a Brewer's Edge mash and boil, as I use that to make my beers and I bought the handy copper still lid. I also use several wide mouth plastic fermenters and a 7 gal conical "fast fermenter" to ferment any wort or washes. I have a chest freezer turned keggerator for temperature control of serving my stuff or for temperature control in fermentations.

Hope to make some friends and learn how to use my mash & boil to its highest potential!

[pope]

Greetings! Not familiar with the brewers edge but it looks like it will turn alcohol to vapor and back again! Also in CA, always happy to see fellow Californians pop up. With your experience brewing you've got a leg up! When you're about to lauter your wort into the boiler, just chill it and redirect to a fermenter and you will be golden for making single malts. Get used to small volumes though, there's not a lot of whiskey hiding in a session-strength grain bill and making a stronger beer isn't a good shortcut, better to make more and larger volumes!

[Uncle Jesse]

Greetings from the bay area!

[JellybeanCorncob]

Hey Thereddon: This place is great for Learning anything distilling. Welcome from another California Bay Area native.
Good luck
JBC

[thereddon]

Thanks all! Looking forward to a lot of trial and error. The brewer's edge is mainly for 5gal batches, with a 16lb grain max. I've got a 55 gal rain drum now that I can store fermented liquids in if I get into a groove for running a full day's worth of mashing but that'll be down the road I'm sure. Any good 5 gal batch recipes for irish style whiskey out there? I've seen some recipes here but they sound like there's no way I'm fitting the grain bills into my equipment.

[pope]

You can just scale down. With 5 gal I'd aim for ~8% beer, you'll get ~1.5-2 gal low wines, and end up with about 2.5-3 bottles of whiskey. I say give a 100% malt a go, strip it, do a spirit run with lenient cuts, then throw it all back together and do a second spirit run. It's a great chance for you to try making cuts on the same spirit twice. Cut once, then give it a few days and taste it, figure out if you cut too narrow or wide into heads, tails or both, then take your cut and distill it that third time.

[fizzix]

'Sup, thereddon!
Full speed ahead, and best of luck with your operation.
Welcome to Home Distiller where your dream of "good enough" liquor is achievable.

[Twisted Brick]

.
Welcome aboard, thereddon, from a SoCal distiller.

Your brewing background gives you a head start on the learning curve, as well as the stuff you gotta buy to support what can become a 'stilling habit. You may want to use the recipes contained in the Tried and True section to learn how your still operates, then apply the full-frontal assault on all-grain.

Best of luck to you.

Twisted Brick