An experiment in "microstilling"

[NormandieStill]

I'll try to make this less verbose than my usual posts.

Back story: I'm making a batch of oated wheat whisky (or vodka depending on the final cuts). When I made up my first batch, I was using 20L fermenters and made up 15L batches (15L water + 4.5kg grains). When I squeezed out the very first batch, I kept the squeezed grains and made a gumbalhead with 2.5kg of sugar and 15L of water. I had intended to do the same with later batches, but the extra workload of sanitizing a bucket to throw the grains into once squeezed and the extra mess and clean-up this seemed to create meant that in the end I only did this once.

Fast forward to now. I had stripped my first two mashes and found myself with a small sugar wash that I didn't really know what to do with. I squeezed the grains (again) and ended up with about 12L of clear wash. Enough to cover the element in my 30L still, but not enough to keep it covered if I ran far chasing flavour in the tails. So after toying with the idea of a pot stilled one-and-done, I decided to treat it exactly as I would have a larger wash but using my 5L stovetop "gin still".

I stripped the wash in two batches, giving me about 2.5L of low wines and a bit of left-over mash. I then did a low power spirit run with the low wines and around 500ml of left-over wash for some added flavour. This gave me about 3L of wash in the boiler at around 30% abv. I heated up a little too fast and the initial drips turned into a torrent before I could get the temp down, so my foreshots cut was about 150ml when done. After that I collected in (what I thought were) 100ml samples and ran the whole thing down until there was basically just water coming out (21 jars after the fores). I tasted the odd drip as it ran and my idea of where the heads to hearts transition fell, matched what I found when blending the following day. The jars aired overnight and I picked up the following day.

This evening I quickly ran through the jars sniffing cautiously to roughly map out heads / hearts / tails. I then skipped the very headsy jars and started sampling every other jar from my rough hearts to tails transition (proofed down) and then up from the mid-hearts to check the cross-over jars. Jar 6 started to smell less headsy, and when tasting seemed not unpleasant with a certain sweetness, but in the end I erred on the side of caution. My final blend was jars 8-15. Jar 13 was the last clean hearts jar, but the following two seemed pleasant without any real sense of tails and a slight (very slight) graininess. This gave me somewhere around 400ml @ 73% abv, which showed that either my sampling had been really significant or I had been averaging about 50ml per jar... which now I think about it, was the decision that I first made when marking up my jars as 100ml seemed excessive! I proofed down to 56% (because I that took it to about 500ml and I couldn't fit any more in the bottle).

The resulting blend has a faint hint of toffee and a very slight fake fruitiness. There's a very faint hint of haribo banana sweets so some esterization clearly took place at some point. It is quite drinkable at 56% without any burn. My wife was very impressed (and a little scared) at how smooth it was considering the abv. The rest of the cuts went into the feints jar. I'm now really intrigued to see how the wheat whisky turns out. I wouldn't plan to "microstill" again, but it was an interesting experiment nonetheless.

And that still ended up pretty verbose, despite no small effort on my part.

[jonnys_spirit]

I love the microstill for test spirit runs and a quick 750 or two! One strip on the big still gets two spirits in the micro and i’m soldering up an RC for the micro to do micro feints runs as well. Nice tool in the kit but it ain’t everything haha!