What'd ya'll make today?

[distiller_dresden]

I'm restarting a wash I thought would be ready, 3 weeks, but it's stalled, for everyone's reference here goes:

1.25 gal cherry backset
1 gal blueberry backset
1.5 gal 100% prune juice
40oz date syrup
1.5 gal corn syrup
1122 at 62F

I balanced PH at pitch to 4.8 and the PH is now 3.27, so corn syrup will drop PH of your wash like a mofo. I used it as an experiment because it's all fructose/glucose and already 'invert' it's simple for the yeast to access and doesn't need converted by it.

I've brought PH back to 4.6 and already fermentation swirls have begun, but I'm going to add a 16oz bottle of cherry con and 32oz water to thin it some, and let it finish now.

[dieselduo]

Making a blood Orange DIPA and using the spent grain for a gumball head whisky

[Dedant]

Wheat bran, corn and rye run through the pot still yesterday. Not sure how to do stripping/ spirit runs and learning about cuts . Airing for 24 hrs so now I’m about to blend reject or put on oak what I save.
I have a wine must in the 30lt fermenter and a bunch of wine to run off a brandy .
Tomorrow will be a corn,rye and malted barley whiskey wash in the 50lt
What do you do with the feints?

[Alchemist75]

Buddy showed up at my place last night with a 7 gallon batch of pear wine that ended up too sour for his taste. Few pounds of pears and 8lbs of sugar I guess. Stripped it down last night, took a little taste of the low wines and it's bursting with pear flavor. I reckon it'll be real good after the spirit run, almost certainly fit to drink plain though he's talking about making a pear simple syrup to produce a species of panty dropper. Won't be much of it but there's some good pear ode duh vee in the works.

[Oldvine Zin]

Sounds like your stillin break is over and you hit the ground running. I’m still waiting to come up and have you show me how to run a plated still. Maybe later this spring? Otis

You are welcome to come by anytime I have the flute running. Man after yesterday and today this stilling stuff is hard work, well maybe just all the clean up involved in doing large batches.


OVZ

[distiller_dresden]

Wheat bran, corn and rye run through the pot still yesterday. Not sure how to do stripping/ spirit runs and learning about cuts . Airing for 24 hrs so now I’m about to blend reject or put on oak what I save.
I have a wine must in the 30lt fermenter and a bunch of wine to run off a brandy .
Tomorrow will be a corn,rye and malted barley whiskey wash in the 50lt
What do you do with the feints?

Save your feints by 'species' or batch. For instance, my rum feints all go together, my fruit brandies I keep the feints, but separate. Grains by grain. Also, I like to choose the best jar, or a blended jar equaling 1/3 of my not-cuts heads, then I run tails out until I get foggy water. I save all tails and that 1/3 of heads, and mix them, again by species. But one cook I'll have cuts, then another gathered volume thats 1/3 of kept heads, and the tails up until the fog starts. Then I have thumpers and use the feints in the thumpers, or others add the feints in their next cook of whatever that species is. I've learned you can do this with tails no real issue, but heads start to build up over time and then I'll pull more heads than normal after a few batches like this and it reduces my hearts - which is why I don't do that much head saving. The unsaved heads I usually discard.

People will say other stuff, like use it to make a neutral. If that's your thing, I guess? I have a pot with two thumpers and like rich flavors I get, I don't go in for neutrals. I used to love vodka and I have in mind and am sure there are plenty of arguments for making neutrals, just that's not my thing. I love rum.

[OtisT]

Yesterday and today I toasted enough American white oak staves for 20 barrel heads, badmo style. I also ran one toasting batch of Apple, Plum, and Cherry sticks for future use. Thinking of putting toasted fruitwood sticks inside some of my barrels before sealing them up. That fruitwood sure smells nice when it’s toasting up.

Otis

[MichiganCornhusker]

My plan now is to let that sit in there for 2 or 3 months, bottle it...

Or, maybe one month!
I tasted my homemade bourbon barrel aged stout this weekend and it tasted pretty amazing so I decided to pull it out after about a month in the barrel.
So far the results are way better than I even hoped for, even warm and flat. Will see how this ends up in a month or two in the bottle.

I wound up refilling the barrel with just over 3 gallons of a "scotch" that I distilled many months ago because that's what I had on hand.
Quite a while ago I bought 3 or 4 hundred pounds of barley from a local farmer and malted/kilned all of it.
Then I brewed it all up as a 100% barley spirit. The barley wasn't the best as far as points per pound but I did end up with gallons of spirit at about 125 proof, just waiting for this barrel to be free.

Maybe when this come out I'll do that quad, it does sound nice!

[thecroweater]

Put down a neutral wash, first one in a damn long time, at least several years. I'm going to try a few infusions with various native fruits and botanicals, heck might even have a crack at gin

[SaltyStaves]

Rum wash. Six parts Bundaberg Molasses to one part Jaggery. Both ingredients are easily the best I've ever tasted.
Really hope I can find the same Jaggery again. It had no off notes or weird flavours to it (as can often happen with Jaggery).

[Desvio]

Couple months ago the wife was throwing out a few boxes out outdated Honey Nut Chex cereal, so figured why not, going to get something out of it. Through the whole ferment it smelled amazing, but took almost a month to ferment, maybe they used real honey... Fast forward to today and it finally gets a stripping run and not only does it still smell good, a little dip into it mid run and the taste is spot on, with a good hint of honey and corn. Spirit run in a few days, thinking this is going to stay white.

[bronctoad]

Nothing too special today, for a lot of the old timers , but I've now done my first gumballhead
on my first AG sweetfeed. Just finished runnin the AG... WOW! this is tasty right off the pipe
can't wait till it airs for a couple, and cuts. I got me an ear to ear permagrin going on
A BIG THANK YOU to all of the past and present great contributors for making HD the awesome site it is

Bronctoad

[thecroweater]

Far canal bloody TPW is still nowhere near done and the weather has been nice and warm. I a feeling the BIL's yeast ain't worth two squirts of feral goat piss

[Honest_Liberty]

Finally getting around to running my chapitalized Concorde. ~7 gallons at 9%. I'm going to do a single run as it doesn't have as strong a flavor as I'd hoped

Running it through the ss brewhaus pot still with copper scrubbers

[distiller_dresden]

Far canal bloody TPW is still nowhere near done and the weather has been nice and warm. I a feeling the BIL's yeast ain't worth two squirts of feral goat piss

I'm just curious what your abbreviations/acronyms stand for? Well, mostly I don't understand what you're saying (far canal bloody TPW?) but I assume TPW is something fermenting in outside temps, and you don't like a yeast, but what's BIL?

[ShineonCrazyDiamond]

Bwahahahaha. Even the other Aussies don't know what each other are saying. Australian talk is all about context, llol.

But TPW is Tomato Paste Wash. I.e, what we call birdwatchers.

Edit. And BIL is brother in law

[The Baker]

And farcanal is a two word expletive of which the 'al' part is 'hell'.

So yes, crow and I know what each other is saying.
Very rude, crow!

But it's true, someone can call me a bastard and I can take it in friendship or start a punch-up, depending on context and specially on the way it is said.
Geoff

[thecroweater]

Got some rum done , impressive yield for the sugars that should have been present. I would say I got as much as could be got. As for Aussie linguistically quirks like far canal , say em out loud and hear that penny hit the floor

[BillyPrefect]

First ever all grain. 7lbs of cracked corn from the bottom of the bucket of UJSSM, 3lbs of flaked corn, 3lbs of flaked wheat, 2lbs of crushed malted distillers barley.
Hydrometer showed 1.070 before I added the bakers yeast. Here's to hoping.

[jonnys_spirit]

Worked on the HBB run - Squeezed mash#3 and racked into two carboys to settle. Mashed in mash#5. I’m adding the clearing step to this run now because i had some scorched trub on the element in strip#2. I’ll let this settle for a week and strip next weekend. Mash#4 is still in the fermenter but just about done. I’m giving them two weeks in the fermenter and one week settling in carboys. Start a new mash every weekend and strip a charge every weekend - running two fermenters.

Cleaned and pre toasted two barrel staves for some wine and for some whiskey. Still need to cut em and final toast.

Cheers!
-jonny

[jog666]

Spirit run of UJSSM.
Just swapped jar 24 for jar 25.
Im only filling the pints to roughly half so maybe I can get better cuts than I have before.

Also working on the Toasted Pecan. Nothing major like cutting & toasting but trying to analyze the 3 different jars.

[Hilltop]

Been awhile, Spring is creeping in, or so I thought. After a few weeks of warm spring weather I got the itch and boiled down a bag of dried molasses 42 % added enough white sugar for 8 percent potential hit it with US 04 and some yeast Energizer and it took off. Then winter came back so I added a submersible heater but the temps dipped mid 20s one night. I'm thinking the wash is completely stalled so when my rooster crowed enough for me to see outside I checked it and on top I was 45 degrees yet I see bubbles coming from the heater area. Today as the temp hit 70 I checked it and she's chugging along with a nice head of foam. We will see but I have some sweet corn frozen I'm itching to get going.

Last year I mixed many grains , did several rice and all grain. This year I'm gonna dabble with rum and my favorite corn recipe. I just prefer this over all grain.

5 gallons yellow sweet corn thawed or fresh.

2 gallons yellow corn malt ground

50lbs white sugar

1 gallon corn backset

2 cups oyster shell

Yeast nutrient if ya wish.

2 packs US 04 till day temps hit 80 then a higher temp dry ale yeast.

I boil ten gallons of water let cool a sec then dump into a 55 gallon barrel over my sugar and sweet corn once temp drops to 150 ish I toss in the malt, oyster shell and a little yeast nutrient cause I have it.

That's now my go to as I've made it every way I think one can. That fresh corn flavor really comes through and I have found unless making an all grain corn that through the years I was using way to much grain with corn sugar washes. Fresh sweet corn is the key. The yeast pulverize most of it and the malt leaving little straining and then only the last of the barrel.

I will use this as my base recipe from now on and add other grains in as well especially a little oats. I'm gonna work this corn with oats and barley malt as well as I made a fine drop of it last year.

I'm engineering a 2 inch copper tube for activated carbon or white oak charcoal as well. At first I was going to make it a stand alone deal for filtering, but now am thinking of adding it at the end of my condensor with the white oak charcoal inside. I tried a pound of the activated stuff with coffee filters packed in the top and bottom seems to work fine. Off topic but Im open to ideas on this one.

It's time to get ready to outdoor shine guys and gals. Dogwoods are fixing to bloom and a wild yeast corn is on my list this spring as well.

[The Dark Alchemist]

First spirit run of UJSSM. 12L in the boiler, down to 200ml cut 13... Smelling and the odd taste @ 70% fantastic.. Looking forward to the end result......

[rubelstrudel]

First rice spirit. Ferment was unusually painless and quick. This is going to be a pretty authentic japanese rice Schochu since I used Koji (rice malt) for sacharization.

[Durhommer]

So I just realized I need multiple ferments going at once getting ancy waiting on this sugar wash being a noob not knowing exactly what I can handle I only put up 6 gallon beer DEFINITELY need to get to work on more mashes I'm thinking maybe 18 gallon mashing that way I can have a good day of running

[Durhommer]

Anyone ever have a ferm come up early its not stalled no sweet taste taste like a wine just cornmeal sugar and bread yeast going by my pappy the taste is ready to run its been under for 3 days not sweet at all now what ya think run it?

[OtisT]

Anyone ever have a ferm come up early its not stalled no sweet taste taste like a wine just cornmeal sugar and bread yeast going by my pappy the taste is ready to run its been under for 3 days not sweet at all now what ya think run it?

If it’s not sweet, I would say it’s done. Do you have a way to measure your FG to confirm it is done?

I’ve occasionally have ferments that finish really fast. I consistently see 4 day sugar wash ferments. I’ve had a few 3 day ferments and I had one ferment that finished in 48 hours. (I think maybe I slept threw one day. . Can’t say I know why these few have finished so fast, but they did.

Otis

[The Booze Pipe]

I put together an all grain rice mash. It went real easy with the enzymes and started fermenting immediately after pitching yeast! Also have a sour mash sugar head coming out the pipe right now, corn & wheat.

[Durhommer]

NOT BAD !!! my uj potluck came out pretty nice today 7 gallon washed down to 3 and i stopped

[fizzix]

Went out and got a sack of cracked corn from the farm co-op for $8.00...
Hit the brew shop for 50-pounds of 2-row; $41.25...

5 gallons:
Cooked the corn Shineon Crazy Diamond's way (Rolling, boiling water poured on 6-pounds corn meal. Wrap blankets around the bucket for 3 hours minimum).
Later when down to 155°F, added hi-temp enzymes and turned the corn sludge to slurry.
At about 150°F, added 4-pounds of the 2-row and mixed well. Insulated 2 hours or so, removed blankets and cooled the wort.

At room temp, added:
•Low temperature enzymes
•TBSP gypsum
•TBSP Epsom salt
•1 crushed B-complex vitamin
•Brew sock of crushed oyster shell

(Repeated process 2 more times.)
Aerated the piss out of all of it and added bakers yeast, and now have 3 beautifully bubbling 5-gallon buckets.
Let's see what happens.

I don't know how you folks monitor mash temperature, but I use an Inkbird ITC-308:

InkBird ITC-308.jpg