On a Bourbon Blog I visit occasionally this article was posted. Fact mixed with fiction is just so counter productive. Anyway, I found it entertaining at best. I'm sure this will help some consumers make their rot gut commercial spirits more palatable.
Really tired of the 'go blind from heads/tails' myth which even gets repeated on this board. There just isn't enough methanol in grain/fruit fermentations/distillations to cause this. You'd die off ethanol poisoning long before you ingested enough shine to go blind.
seamusm53 wrote:Really tired of the 'go blind from heads/tails' myth which even gets repeated on this board. There just isn't enough methanol in grain/fruit fermentations/distillations to cause this. You'd die off ethanol poisoning long before you ingested enough shine to go blind.
There's a whole load of BS in that Blog - as OP said.
Nothing in it shows the slightest sign the "Blogger" has any understanding at all !
There is a whole lot of bullshit, urban myths, lies and mistakes everywhere, everytime. By accident, on purpose or good faith.
I think about half the information you get is wrong.
So I want to know as much as possible about as much subjects as possible, to be able to check and correct information.
Ans sometimes something that seems odd is viable and worth exploring.
As a side note to this thread, it is no mystery that in Italy traditionally many home grappa distillers would just collect almost all the product, if not all the product including foreshots, for consumption, but unsurprisingly never drunk it young, because the taste isn't good.
You leave it 6 months - 1 year in the bottle, and the taste improves, and only when the taste is good you drink it. This is the old "unschooled" school of distilling grappa (not that I would drink any of that).
I think part of this improvement depends from the fact that the lightest components evaporate and fill the empty gap in the bottle, thus preventing - if the bottle is sealed - the further evaporation of the better components, beyond the first bit.
It is basically right to say that the composition of the "angel share" is much richer in lighter fractions than the product itself, so the angels get the worse part of the distillate, and I suppose they must have headache often.
I have read in this forum a user putting capped bottles on a bain-marie treatment at 50°C or so, in order to have the lighter vapours (the part which eluded separation by distillation) evaporate fast.
I don't see anything radically new in this blogger's technique.
The blogger tries to exploit the principle by controlling or measuring the amount of evaporation, the amount of gas escaping from the bottle, thus achieving a "head evaporation" in a more "precise" way.
A still does the same just much faster, and also the bain-marie treatment does it faster in any case.
You can cook pasta in a water kettle left in the sun. It takes more time, but it does it.
I prefer to use the pot for pasta, and the still for separation of fractions. And I like the idea of the bain-marie at 50°C or so for further cleaning, which I will certainly experiment with as soon as I can.