First Observations - feedback please

[Damifino]

Complete noob at distilling. Haven't even made beer (yet). So that's the benchmark.

Santa delivered a MH 8gal reflux/pot kit after Christmas so this morning I ran 50/50 vinegar/water cleaning run in pot-still mode. Has an internal electric heating element (2000w) with power controller. The power controller is basic with a min/max dial selector. I believe it works on duty cycle rather than regulated power. At any rate, it performed extremely well along with everything from MH.

Took roughly 50 mins to heat 5 gals to vapor/condensing. Ran the vinegar/water for about an hour and a half at a near steady stream output. Disassembled cleaned everything.

Sacrificial run - purchased some extremely cheap box red wine @ $6/3liter box. 7 boxes = 21 liters roughly 5.5 gals. 13.5% alcohol. Tested it with the hydrometer. Looked about right. Roughly 95 oz of available alcohol in the wash.

55 minutes to reach vapor/condensing temp. Again running in pot-still mode. This time I turned the temp back as soon as the head temp crossed 95°. Was very surprised how fast it reaches temp once vapor reaches the top of the riser.

Running a standard liebig condenser with coolant water driven by an aquarium pump. Ice water from a fermentation bucket. Worked great. Ran a steady drip, slow enough to never stream.

Output:
Roughly 5 hours of run time from start of drip
Ran 15 8 ounce jars + a little.
Output began at 168° head temp, ended @ 201°
8oz. Foreshots (nasty) @154 proof
Final 8 oz ran @ 82 proof (bitter)
Total run of 122oz. Averaging 121 proof.
Total alcohol extracted 73.8 oz (of 95 available)
77.6% of available alcohol extracted.

Flavor:
The starting wine was crap to begin with so none of it was good. Tasted a lot like grappa, which I don't like.

Jar 1 (foreshot) was everything nasty as advertised and more.

The second 8 oz (after foreshot) was surprisingly smooth and not bad (148 proof)

Jars 3 thru 6 were not very good at all. Low flavor and mean. Very mean. I expected these to be the best of the run. ( 148 descending to 134 proof)

Jars 7 thru 13 were not as smooth as jar 2 but decent flavor. A bitter finish became more prevalent ongoing (130 descending to 108 proof)

13 to the end saw the bitterness become more dominant to both taste and smell. The last 2 ounces were really bad. Shut it down. Proof dropped very fast at the end.

Mixed the best jars with distilled water to 90 proof. Was pretty happy with it. Tasted better than any grappa I've had. It wasn't actually good but I expected much worse. My wife hated it but she only drinks very highly camouflaged cocktails. No surprise there.

We had a lot of fun. Took way longer than I expected. I barely had to touch the temp control for the entire run.. just a couple of small increases near the end

Biggest surprise was how bad jars 3 thru 6 were. I expected those to be prime. They were very harsh. Unlike anything else in the run. Any idea why? Something that can be corrected? Slow the drip even more? I'd estimate it was 3-4 drops per second. Ran it that speed the entire batch.

Thanks for any insights. Maybe next weekend can start a mash. That will be an education as well.

Thank you everyone!

[Yonder]

You’ll learn a little and read a lot. Don’t be drinking fores, they’re bad juju. Throw out your first 150ml...even the mouth breathers on tv know to do that. After the run, leave your jars open, covered with a cloth or coffee filter. Let it breath out the volitiles then start tastin. Mix a little product with an equal amount of cool water. Don’t drink 15 ounces and call it “sampling.” Then go read some more.

[NZChris]

Cheap box wine run in a dirty new still. What did you expect?

Chuck it out before someone poisons themselves with it and put a nice wash through it.

[Corsaire]

Glad the run went well, even though it didn't taste well.

You want to do a sacrificial run on a new still. You cleaned it with vinegar, but some oils dissolve better in hot alcohol. That's why we recommend doing a sacrificial run, which gets dumped.

Besides that, you'll find most people who run pot stills run everything through the still at least twice. Even the commercial pot stillers. It gives better results, taste wise.

Run your wash down to about 1/3 of the original volume. Do it hard and fast, as fast as your condenser will allow. Do this 3x, so you can fill your boiler with these 'low wines' and do a slow spirit run.

So, all in all your first run was a good one to get to know your rig. And whatever you make from now on will only be better

[Damifino]

Lol. Thanks everyone. I didn't drink any of it. Just put a bit on the tip of my finger for taste. Couldn't get the foreshot near my nose let alone taste it.

Need to buy a few things to make mash. Hopefully get theingredients and a quality pot from Amazon later this week.

[Swbrewers]

Start with crap, end with crap. You can make bad hooch from good ingredients but you can't make good hooch from bad ingredients. Give it a second run.

[Durhommer]

I have and run the same machine the wine was your sacrifice run.you want to up the size of of your condenser water resivor to at least 30 gallon your spirit run will take quite a bit longer therefore your recirculating water temp will increase quicker

[Durhommer]

I also suggest cutting up some copper pipe and putting it in the boiler on every run