First Whiskey

[alpine]

Yesterday I did my first spirit run and I think everything was successful, so I figure I'd post about it.

Equipment:
In addition to the regular home brewing equipment (Mash tun, chiller, test equipment, etc...) I have a MilHi 8 gallon CM still. I only run it in potstill mode - I don't have any cooling lines hooked up to the reflux jacket. Did the cleaning and sacrificial runs. I also replaced the silicon tri-clamp gaskets with teflon ones from morebeer.

The Wash:
I made 5 5-gallon batches of 9% "beer" over 6 weeks, fermenting one batch at a time in a plastic homebrewing bucket. 50% 2-row, 50% malted wheat. My efficiency was pretty bad, but I knew that going in. Mashed at 154 dF for 90 mins, batch sparged and then cooled. No boil. Pitched with WLP 070 from gallon starters. Fermented hot and fast - 78 dF for ~72 hours.

Stripping:
I'm using a 1500W hot plate so the stripping runs took around 5 hours to complete. I didn't make any cuts and ended up with about a gallon of 45% low wines from each 5 gallon wash. The first run I collected a lot of data, checking the temp and % ABV every 250ml or so. That was useful for monitoring the later runs. Felt like I might have been leaving a bit too much behind - the Scotch distilleries talk about a 3:1 reduction.

Spirit Run:
I started with just shy of 5 gallons of 43% low wines. Figured this was close enough so I didn't dilute. For the first 2.5 L, I put 500ml each in canning jars I got form Wegmans. After that I figured I was in the hearts, so I started putting each 500ml fraction in a 1 gallon jug. These started out around 82% and I got another 3.5L before the ABV dropped below 70%, which I had decided earlier was going to be my cut-off point. After that, I got 2L of tails. This run took over 6 hours to complete. I stopped when the still head temp was at 97 dC and the distillate was cloudy and very slow.

The heads-hearts cut had me a bit nervous. The first two jars were pretty obvious, but the rest all smelled and tasted ok. I wanted to err on the conservative side, so I kept the first 2L (4 jars) out as heads. In the end I had 500ml of foreshots, 1.5L of heads, 6.5L of 78% hearts and 2L of tails.

Aging:
I took a propane torch to 1 oz of american medium toast oak cubes and created some char. I boiled those with another ounce of non-charred cubes. I diluted the 6.5L down to 7.5L of 65% and mixed it with the 2 oz of oak in a 3 gallon carboy. Now I just need to keep my hands off it for the next few months. I'm worried that I used too many oak cubes, but I'm sure I'll be sampling it enough to know if it's getting too oaky.

So by the end of the day I should have 14 750ml bottles. My raw ingredient cost was about $150 - 2 sacks of malt, yeast, DME for starters - so that puts me at around $12/bottle. Took me 6 weeks, and hopefully I'll have something ready for the 4th of July. I think next I'm going to do a rum. It should take a lot less labor since there's not mashing involved. After that I'm going to try a single malt with peat-smoked barley.

[superdaveva]

That's a lot of hearts, out of 10 gal charge I will get about 2.5 gal hearts before I dillute.

[MitchyBourbon]

Yesterday I did my first spirit run and I think everything was successful, so I figure I'd post about it.

Equipment:
In addition to the regular home brewing equipment (Mash tun, chiller, test equipment, etc...) I have a MilHi 8 gallon CM still. I only run it in potstill mode - I don't have any cooling lines hooked up to the reflux jacket. Did the cleaning and sacrificial runs. I also replaced the silicon tri-clamp gaskets with teflon ones from morebeer.

The Wash:
I made 5 5-gallon batches of 9% "beer" over 6 weeks, fermenting one batch at a time in a plastic homebrewing bucket. 50% 2-row, 50% malted wheat. My efficiency was pretty bad, but I knew that going in. Mashed at 154 dF for 90 mins, batch sparged and then cooled. No boil. Pitched with WLP 070 from gallon starters. Fermented hot and fast - 78 dF for ~72 hours.

Mash at 148 and you will improve you efficiency.
Stripping:
I'm using a 1500W hot plate so the stripping runs took around 5 hours to complete. I didn't make any cuts and ended up with about a gallon of 45% low wines from each 5 gallon wash. The first run I collected a lot of data, checking the temp and % ABV every 250ml or so. That was useful for monitoring the later runs. Felt like I might have been leaving a bit too much behind - the Scotch distilleries talk about a 3:1 reduction.
Does your hot plate cycle on and off? This will cause a lot of smearing, not a big deal on a stripping run but it will make cuts very difficult when you do a spirit run.

Spirit Run:
I started with just shy of 5 gallons of 43% low wines. Figured this was close enough so I didn't dilute. For the first 2.5 L, I put 500ml each in canning jars I got form Wegmans. After that I figured I was in the hearts, so I started putting each 500ml fraction in a 1 gallon jug. These started out around 82% and I got another 3.5L before the ABV dropped below 70%, which I had decided earlier was going to be my cut-off point. After that, I got 2L of tails. This run took over 6 hours to complete. I stopped when the still head temp was at 97 dC and the distillate was cloudy and very slow.

The heads-hearts cut had me a bit nervous. The first two jars were pretty obvious, but the rest all smelled and tasted ok. I wanted to err on the conservative side, so I kept the first 2L (4 jars) out as heads. In the end I had 500ml of foreshots, 1.5L of heads, 6.5L of 78% hearts and 2L of tails.

Aging:
I took a propane torch to 1 oz of american medium toast oak cubes and created some char. I boiled those with another ounce of non-charred cubes. I diluted the 6.5L down to 7.5L of 65% and mixed it with the 2 oz of oak in a 3 gallon carboy. Now I just need to keep my hands off it for the next few months. I'm worried that I used too many oak cubes, but I'm sure I'll be sampling it enough to know if it's getting too oaky.

So by the end of the day I should have 14 750ml bottles. My raw ingredient cost was about $150 - 2 sacks of malt, yeast, DME for starters - so that puts me at around $12/bottle. Took me 6 weeks, and hopefully I'll have something ready for the 4th of July. I think next I'm going to do a rum. It should take a lot less labor since there's not mashing involved. After that I'm going to try a single malt with peat-smoked barley.

Sounds like you got your ducks in a row but you may want to look at modifying your heat source so that it doesn't cycle. If you have already done so.

[alpine]

Good idea about modifying the hotplate. I think I'm eventually going to switch over to propane but I'm a little nervous about an open flame in my garage. Think I'll get a nice box fan and CO2 detector first. It would be nice to speed things up a bit.

[HDNB]

hate to sound like the safety police, a gas torch inside a building sounds like a suicide mission. CO gas will kill you in minutes, with or without a detector beeping at you.
if you lived through the fire it (the fire) would be an un-insurable loss.

consider installing a submersible heater to ramp up the warm up time?

[HDNB]

oh, and maybe insulate the boiler (and column)? i used some fibreglass pipe tape and then covered that with the silver bubble wrap insulation all taped into place with aluminium foil tape... seems to have modulated the heat nicely and improved warm up dramatically.
i am using a 1500w plate and it cycles a bit, but i don't notice any change in output...maybe smearing... but i'm using a 15 gal boiler and making broad cuts so it doesn't bother me enough to re-wire yet. (but i am going to take my own advise and install a submersible to help warm up times!it takes 3 hours to heat 37L)

[alpine]

Forgot to mention that for washes #2 through #5 I used a half-gallon of backset from the previous stripping run. My pH was consistently on the high side for both the mash (5.5ish) and fermentation (finishing in the mid 4s), and the half gallon made only a slight improvement. Next time I think I'll use a gallon of backset and add gypsum to the strike and sparge water.

Drinking a glass now and it just keeps getting better. Taken on a light copper colour from the oak cubes.

[firewater69]

Sounds like your doing good, from my experiance you'll get a better product using less oak over a longer period than trying to speed things up with lots of oak. I use a 1"x 1" x 5" stick per quart. then forget about it for a while.