Oily after Taste

[CoppertopTinMan]

Hello,

I have finished up my second generation of UJSSM and during my spirit run the whiskey developed an oily after taste. It is identical in taste to the rest of the hearts, but it has a clingy mouthy feel from some sort of ester. It still has a high average ABV (75%) so I am hesitant to call it tails, and when I got further down the line around 55% ABV it seems to disappear and the taste transforms into what I normally would call tails. It is not cloudy or any other discoloration so I also don't believe it to be puke. I know I can run it again, but I was wondering if anyone has experienced this and if carbon would remove the oil? Does anyone have an idea of the cause?

Here is my process:

This is a 10 gal wash with about 25% backset from the first gen. Ran on a keg pot still, that is electrically heated and controlled by a PID. Probably this still 15th run and it was cleaned thoroughly and used for a stripping run the night before with no issues.

Filled the keg with around 4 gallons from my first gen and second gen striping runs combined. ABV was around 50%
I added a gallon of spring water to lower the ABV and make sure I had enough liquid to be above my element.

It ran at 170 degrees for 300ml to remove foreshots and then began collecting heads.

When it tasted clean and burned blue I bumped up the heat to 174 and collected around 1200 ML of hearts. ABV of 80%

After around 1200ml the oil appeared and continued for around a half gallon while stepping down in ABV. It was separated in 300ML jars, but I mixed all the jars with oil and it averaged a 75% ABV.

After the half gallon I got the wet cardboard taste and entered "tails", so I turned up the heat to 185 and stipped down to 30% ABV for feints run later. While in tails I tasted it, and while the flavor was crappy the oily taste was gone.

When I emptied the keg the wash was cloudy, but didn't appear to have discoloration or scorching.

[SaltyStaves]

controlled by a PID.

Are you trying to run the still by temperature? If so, you may have smeared the run and put fusel oils throughout your early jars.

[CoppertopTinMan]

No, I do it by taste and the drip on the end of the condenser, but I record my temps so that I can try to mimic good results in the future. The readings are all vapor temps at the top of my column before the condenser.

[OtisT]

I’ve made some truly nasty tastes that I believe were esters, but I’m fairly confident those bad tastes came from my ferment process, not distillation. If your ferment process is the same that you have done before, I’m just guessing your oily feel is from tails. To me, tails oil tastes bitter. If you logged jar # along with tracking power, I’ll bet the bad taste started on the jar where you increased power. Again, just a guess.

You know that a pot still is not driven by temp, and that you can’t control or set the temp of the still. A charge boils at the temp it wants to boil at, based mainly on ABV and air pressure. You can turn the heat up/down all you want but that just produces more/less vapor at the same temp.

If this batch is undrinkable I suggest you re-run your entire collection, minus foreshots. You would need to diluted again. You will loose some flavor, but hopefully with the next run you will separate the good from the bad tastes.

I recommend on a pot still spirit run that you don’t mess with the heat control once you are done pulling foreshots. Pull a small bit of foreshots again, slowly (low power), then once past foreshots turn the heat up to produce small stream and leave it there for the remainder of the run. Every Still and Stiller is different, but on my pot a slow pull of fores is around 500w and a slow spirit run is around 1500-2000w. After you get a few successful runs under your belt, then experiment with various power settings.

If you do feel the need to turn power up during a run, wait until you are well into tails, when your production rate drops first on its own. This would be well past what you may keep in your cuts, and would only be done if you are collecting tails to re-run later. Otherwise, you can just shut down once into tails.

I wish you good fortune in the cuts to come. Otis

[CoppertopTinMan]

Thanks for the advice OtisT it seems I may have been fed some poor information from youtube and I will look into refining my process. I will rerun everything, but the good tasting hearts from the beginning.

[Bushman]

Thanks for the advice OtisT it seems I may have been fed some poor information from youtube and I will look into refining my process. I will rerun everything, but the good tasting hearts from the beginning.

That is the beauty of this hobby you have a chance at correcting mistakes. My guess is also smearing.

[Twisted Brick]

Since a pot still is not correctly driven by temperature, it would definitely behoove you to ditch the thermometer on the batch you plan to re-run.

No, I do it by taste and the drip on the end of the condenser, but I record my temps so that I can try to mimic good results in the future. The readings are all vapor temps at the top of my column before the condenser.

I still outside and once ran with about 40" of 3" riser in an effort to induce more passive reflux. Despite being semi-protected, my still 'room' was breezy, causing my riser to cool which slowed output. I increased the (NG) power to get the output stream I wanted, but smeared the f*ck outta my run. I would guess the temp at the top of the column was consistent with my other runs, but you get the picture.