Hello from the Land of Smiles

[JethroC]

Hello All,

I'm based in South East Asia with a very small licensed craft distillery in the region and I am a long time lurker on HD, which has been a great help over the last few years as I learnt the basics of distilling. It is now time to join the forum proper and participate in some of the conversations.

As a distillery our focus is on white spirits, with no ageing, using local ingredients. We ferment a lot of sugarcane juice and are getting more into molasses. Our equipment is cobbled together from equipment we bought locally and then heavily modified with off the shelf steel parts and the use of a local fabricator.

I have really enjoyed and learnt a lot from the threads on continuous columns and various people such as yumyrum, Bolverk, LWTCS, pope, etc, (as well as threads on the SD forum). Our own stripping column project over the last 9 months has gone from 10"-> 5" ->10" and now back to 5", I'll be posting about that in a few weeks after our latest tests. Although I am very interested in equipment design and tinkering, going forward I am more interested in making spirits, and letting professionals worry about designing and making equipment that works!

My favourite drinks are gin and rum, although as I've got into making vodka, I appreciate vodka more than I did before. Over the years I've drunk a lot of baijiu, shaojiu, and a bit of lao khao. I eventually came to have a grudging respect for baijiu and its complexity, although I can't ever recall having drunk it and not having a fearsome hangover the next day!

For making gin I have to show my respect for Odin and the Odin's Easy Gin thread which launched me during the pandemic into making my own gins. So far we've only won a silver at the London Spirits Competition for our gin, but we are working hard on coming up with something better.

My partners and I love to mess around and experiment, always looking to improve, even if it means being counterintuitive. We do a lot of small scale distilling on a 2L pot still and a 60L still with a bokabob head that we built ourselves. Our motto is "We would drink it all, but we have to pay the bills!".

Jethro