After a lot of reading, I'm breaking my posting cherry. I'm from the West Country in England, home of ciders and apple brandy.
I've been brewing ciders, beers and wine since the early 90's, which was when I started post-school studies in Biology, co-incidentally..
After a few years as a lab technician, I found I.T. jobs paid better, so that's been my main hobby/job for over 30 years now.
I've often considered distilling, but resources were hard to come by locally until fairly recently (Amazon > Vevor 12L 'toy' pot still, sitting on a induction hob - real budget job).
My main reason for the jump-up was to try and isolate a clean source of high ABV ethanol for botanical extractions - even the lab grade stuff over here is denatured now (I work in a university - helps with getting a regular free stock of RO water, etc!)
So, I've done my sacrificial run using a bunch of old, rank wine and got around 1.8L of 80%+ ABV (bought a refractometer before realising there are such things as full alcohol hydrometers..)
I have 2x 25L wine barrels doing a pure sugar wash, aiming around 13%. I'll let them go to .996ish, then rack/filter as I do with my wines.
I'm not into drinking spirits so much, but I'm sure my son would appreciate a decent bottle of rum at for Christmas and birthdays
