Hey, I'm new here

[Quintus GenV]

Hi everybody, I'm Quintus.

So I myself started using a still around the times that the gooberment locked us down back in C19. It used to be my fathers still, but now he just gets product from me. He was initially using the still with a sugar wash to create a spirit to make a Plant Herbal Nutrient Extract for agricultural purposes, and buying the amount of Vodka he uses gets quite expenny very quickly. He didn't need something that tastes good, but he always threw away the foreshots if anybody was to decide to take a little taste of his potions.

Should also mention that the still was homemade by a friend of my dad's, that let it go when he made himself a bigger one. The still is completely stainless steel, using 1 heating element, packing 2 collumn thingys with marbles, and recently started packing a little copper in, although I haven't found the copper to have really mada any noticeable difference for me yet. My still can hold about 100 liters, I tend to only get a 10-15% hearts cut, and I give the heads and tails for my dad to make his extracts. Foreshots is used to clean up around the farm.

Anyways, I started making a little gin using that by putting some botanicals in the collumn and running the reflux quite a bit, making my gin come off the still at around 75-80%. Played around with that, only doing a few runs a year really, until the start of this year. I have a few projects that I have started with now, enjoying the learning process, but can't really learn quick enough.

I am from Southern Africa, so we harvest our wine grapes in Jan/Feb/Mar. I kept some grapes for a wild ferment to make some brandy myself, and this is really where my whole deep dive started. One of my wild ferments ended up not tasting half bad (tasted it before distilling as a red wine), and with different cultivars ripening at different stages, I ended up making red wine in many small batches with different wine yeasts, which I will bottle end of the year/next year probably, and any batch starting to show sign of vinegary hints, I distill into my brandy creation.

After my grapes were done fermenting, I realised fermenting stuff isn't that difficult, and so my journey to create a whisky started, and boy ohhh boy was I wrong. So yeah, trying to create a drinkable new make spirit for aging is my current project I am putting all my time into at the moment. And I have used this site in the past to peruse other people's questions and answers, and so I thought I might start asking a few questions myself.

So let's start with the grain. We grow wheat ourselves on the farm, and without our permission rye grows between the wheat. So those 2 grains are what I have to work with. I am not trying to make something using added sugar, and I don't malt the grains. So I use alpha and gluco amylase enzymes in a 100 liter pot, which I will heat with gas, load with 20kg grains and 60 liter water, which after cooking and seperating liquids from solids gives me around 50 liters at a gravity reading of 1.060-1.066 rather consistently, with the rye the yield is lower at around 1.054 using the same recipe. I don't really know if this yield is decent at all, I just sort of saw these ratios somewhere and rolled with it.

Fermenting is going well, FG of my wheat wash is around 0.098, and rye 1.02-04. I use wine yeasts, and currently trialling different yeasties, although my distilling prowess is probably holding back my wash's potential.

So up to know for the theoretical whisky, I am doing a stripping run, then loading my still with 60 liters at roughly 20% for my spirit run, all the different yeast batches started dripping at 81-84%, I tend to turn the reflux off when doing a spirit run, and (I charged my still with 100liters of 30% for the brandy, started coming of at 78-80%, and got my hearts between 65-70%, giving beautiful flavour.) My hearts for the grains are coming off at 74-76%, really harsh bites actually, without any real flavour. So I am a little stumped, although I know I am doing something wrong. Threw 100liters at 10% in the still this morning, interesting experiment if nothing else. Don't know if I can edit posts, but might change this final paragraph tomorrow then.

But yeah, a big thanks to everybody always posting on this forum, you have been a big help thus far, and I am excited to join in the discussions.