Questions

[Ozarkfoothill]

New to the craft here and excuse me if I post this in the wrong area. My question is when you do your first stripping run on a 10 gallon pot and make, for example, 2 gallons. you pour it back in the pot, do you add mash that was saved to get that 10gallon or do you just run what you stripped?

[still_stirrin]

New to the craft here and excuse me if I post this in the wrong area. My question is when you do your first stripping run on a 10 gallon pot and make, for example, 2 gallons. you pour it back in the pot, do you add mash that was saved to get that 10gallon or do you just run what you stripped?

Well, you STRIP the alcohol from your wash. What’s left in the boiler is “backset”. What you’ve collected off the spout is “low wines”. Then, the spirit run is run with the low wines. If you poured the collected low wines back into the backset to re-run, you have wasted time and energy and accomplished NOTHING.

For a 10%ABV wash, you would collect approximately 1/3 the volume of the wash as low wines. And the low wines would be approximately 3 times the %ABV of the wash (believe it or not, it’s “mathmatical”).

So, we suggest fermenting enough for 3 charges for your boiler. Strip each charge and collect the low wines. This will give you roughly another boiler charge of low wines at +/- 30%ABV to run as your spirit run. Then, collect into a series of small jars (15 to 24 jars) sized to accommodate your expected volume. Make cuts from these jars, blending as you can for a flavorful “hearts cut”.
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[subbrew]

You can also do what is called a 1.5 run which you seem to be alluding to. In that case you take low wines and add some fresh wash. I try to make it 2/3 low wine and no more than 1/3 new wash/mash. This should give you a pot charge of at least 20% abv. Run this very slow but it will give more flavor.

This is often done for smaller batches where perhaps just the low wine will not sufficiently cover the element on an electric boiler.

[Ozarkfoothill]

Thank you guys for your replies.

[shadylane]

My question is when you do your first stripping run on a 10 gallon pot and make, for example, 2 gallons. you pour it back in the pot, do you add mash that was saved to get that 10gallon or do you just run what you stripped?

If I only had one stripping run worth of low-wines.
I'd add water to 2 gallons of low-wines and do a spirit run.

[NZChris]

I work out how much wash I need to hold back so that when it is added to the stripping run, I have a minimum of 24% in the boiler for the spirit run. The heart cut from doing that is usually very close to my target ABV for aging.

This online calculator site is handy for working out that kind of thing.
https://www.handymath.com/cgi-bin/chemc ... bmit=Entry