I used turbo yeast "Prestige 48 h Turbo Pure Alcohol Yeast 18%" (not so turbo, it took more than a month) and cheapest Vevor 50l distiller with thumper.
The wash - classic sugar wash, 25l water, 8.5kg granulated sugar and this "Prestige turbo yeast". Nothing aggressive, took more than a month to ferment (final gravity was 0.996).
Stripping run gave around 6.4l of 54% product (took out around 2.5 dcl of foreshots, this is where taste and smell improved a lot), stopped collecting around 28%.
2nd run gave around 3dcl of heads (this is where taste changed, but at 1.5dcl it wasn't unpleasant, just different than the heads), took around 5.5dcl of tails and 4.2l of heads (73% alc). Foreshots will be used for diesel heater, but I don't think I'll just discard heads and tail as I could've do better job (not to extract more alcohol, but there is more taste-y stuff).
...and this is where I made mistake because I was rushing things, but it's a learning curve. For next steps I diluted alc to 48% (kinda sweet spot for me), used essences, wood chips and rapid aging in ultrasonic. At the moment, I run it on 28C and 3h (planning to do 12h run, but have to do pauses because even with heating off, after 3h water in ultrasonic bath was around 55C.
3l of slivovitza essence + 12g light french oak chips (biiiiig calculation mistake, should've been 4l) - not bad, but it needs another 0.5-1l of 45-50% alcohol
2.45l of Still Spirits "Shamrock Whiskey" essence +7.5g of heavy charred American oak chips - too much of everything, definitely needs another 0.5l of neutral 45-50% alc.
rest (approx. 0.9l) I've split by 2, added "Regents Whiskey" essence (calculated by volume) and in one half added medium light American oak chips (this one is very promising) and in another half single 1cm3 cube of "oak slivovitz barrel" (interesting but too much of sweet tones for my taste).
Don't want to give final verdict, but so far :
1) I'm very satisfied how my first distillation went (based on basics I've used and cheap equipment)
2) Not happy with essences, they're too aggressive, I was expecting more subtle results, especially where I was using 5% more alc than advised (should be 20-30%). But, in fairness, i'm using rapid aging technique, so we will see after 12h of ultrasonic.
Overall - very happy
next mash will be sugar wash + few kgs of potato skins, turnip skins and oats