I‘m fermenting cherries since a couple of weeks now and the fermentation almost came to an end. Now I have to decide how to run these batches.
Batch one is 40 liters of cherrywine 8% abv, made of mashed full cherries and ec1118 yeast. Wine was collected after fermentation by siphoning the liquid and pressing the mash a little, to get more juice out of it. This juice has nicely settled now and will be siphoned again... into the boiler, just before distillation.
The rest of pressed out ferment was mixed with sugar, water and again ec 1118 yeast, plus a little DAP. I call this batch two. It‘s done now and has about 25 liters of 14 % abv.
I read a couple of threads about kirsch/wasser/eau de vie/brandy and it becomes clear that I should run the first batch on a pot still taking loads of small cuts. I don‘t have a pot still, but my modular VM reflux still could be put together as a pot still with a dephleg, which gets me there somehow.
Here I shall get the true Kirschwasser from. If I run it slow, abv climbs hopefully up to the 60% abv range, we‘ll see.
Now batch two. Running it through the still in VM reflux mode, not in azeo range, more in the 80s, to get some cherry taste carried over. Again, small cuts. Instead of siphoning, I could run the whole mash, grappalike, but I‘m afraid of scorching the 2.4 kw electric low density heating element.
I‘m thinking to mix the results in a way to get the most out of it, which means most liters and most flavour in the 40 abv. range.
Here comes the questions:
Is this stupid or not?
Did someone else do this before? Resulting in...?
Would it be better to keep both batches alone for themselves, instead of mixing, specially for me as a beginner (with a good nose)?
Thanks for taking your time and sharing your thoughts
