Is it safe to drink that?

[kaziel]

Hello folks and new years greetings . Recently my buddy give me 25L of infected wine to distill. From the looks of it I would say that it was infected with Candida mycoderma. The infection was not to big. Wash was clear with maybe 1-mm thin film on the top it was not gooey or anything - rather tasteless maybe with a scent of autolysis of yeast. I've run that through my VM still hitting 96% with no problem - wine was 8% only. And here's where the story gets interesting - on all of my previous runs I've had feints/heads smelling like solvent/medical stuff nasty but you can smell it on this run feints had only a bit of solvent smell + so much moldiness some sort of powdered unpleasant smell. After smelling it I've started coughing like crazy. Rest of the run was pretty normally smelling maybe just a bit moldy out front - tails were normal BTW. And Q now - is it safe to drink or better use it like technical alcohol? Should it run it again? Any comments suggestion will be appreciated.

[NZChris]

The autolysis stink might come over a bit, but it should be safe enough. Have plenty of copper and double distill like a Cognac. If you collect in small jars, you might be able to cut the autolysis out on the spirit run.

Just re-read your post. The above is irrelevant LOL. I don't like the sound of that moldy smell being in it.

[kaziel]

I smell that today and moldiness is almost gone. I've collected like ~2L of 96% stuff with plan to distill that twice when I've collect more of faints heads. After today's check I'm pretty sure that i can drink that after second run. Will post update after a while when I'll gather more low wines to distill.

[NZChris]

Acetaldehyde is probably the worst thing in it, but it's quite volatile and should be mostly gone if you take off a healthy foreshot.

If they've tried to rescue it by using a lot of SO2, that might be a pain to get rid of. That's why I suggest lots of copper.