Home Distiller

just pitched my yeast in the rum wash and its about to bubble my airlocks right outta the buckets. This wash always ferments with a Fury. Sitting out on the deck now enjoying the quiet and loosing track of how many bubbles a second.

Odin wrote: I prefer my vodka's from grainy stuff.

Same here.

that mix of red wheat I made finally finished it's rather, heady ferment. Sure glad I use a 6 gallon carboy or my airlock woulda puked on the 5 gallon.

Ran the 2nd batch of single malt strip yesterday, has a very nice sweet ester behind it. Doing the spirit run from those 2 batches soon and then oaking it up.

Damn Odin that's a mighty fine offer and would definitely be at the top of my list of reasons to make it over there. And Jimbo, that's some mighty interesting likker you made, at least it sounds interesting. I'm glad you found a good use for the sweet feed

Looking for plane tickets to Holland! LOL, I wish!

Edit to add...Just noticed midwest shinner's tag! Might have to rethink this!

Richard7 my tag is actually a saying i stole from Hunter S. Thompson, rip. He was my all time favorite author and quite a lover of the hard stuff himself. To stay on topic, I'm working on malting up about 10lbs of corn which is a first for me.After soaking and drying in a bucket for the last 3 days i spread the corn on some trays with damp paper towels and plastic wrap over em. Haven't made up my mind what i will use it for yet, possibly 100% corn whisky... Any other suggestions?

"Anybody visiting Holland will have free access to my stock!"

I occasionally have to use Schiphol airport and usually spend a day or two doing the tourist thing.


Put an experimental Bombay gin through my mini-pot today. Very nice in tonic water, but a bit rough straight. Time might help with that. Juniper berries, coriander seeds, grains of paradise, cinnamon stick, licorice root, mandarine peel, newly dried orris root and a small strip of fresh lemon zest. Not many flowers around here to colour it with at this time of year. I found some borage, and have them drying.

My wife showed me an overgrown pot of irises that she had been given, so a couple of roots have been raided and peeled and are drying for next year.


A portion of my Absinthe is coloring up a beautiful pink from the frozen boysenberry I dropped into it yesterday.

Got on with my faux chartreuse using herbs from the garden and put them in a gin head I fashioned out of a cheap colander, works very well. Will probably get on with an all feints run tomorrow from all the previous runs I have done in the last three months.

A mini-pot run of Bombay gin with less coriander than the first and the added feints from the first. The early tasting isn't as palate cleansing as it's non-feints predecessor.

Yesterday's experiment with colouring Bombay gin with borage gave not the slightest hint of blue.

Made a new bait board and rod holder setup for the boat. Winter fishing around here produces some big fish.

Runnin a stripper on another Gumballhead (sugarhead made with spent Whiskey Grains) from the Bonfire AG below. 10.5 gallons squeezed out from 16 lb sugar on 37 lbs grain, plus 1.75 gallons feints at 72% added in. Gonna be a big yield on this one. Already into gallon 2 or 3 and the temp is still really low in my boiler vapor. Gonna pour a container of corn meal in the carboy with the stripper and let it macerate till I get around to the spirit run Gotta love a little corn flavor.

Damn Jimbo you sure did put that sweet feed to good use. You're gonna have more bonfire whisky than you can poke a stick at

Now we need to make a bonfire to sample that. I think I might get in on that recipe, sounds delightful.

In the voice of Borat.... "Is very nice" oh hell, here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBduNcf1eQc" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow

Oh shit, I forgot to say in my post. I have a certain very slow cooling water trickle I run on my leibig. I started this run, and noticed some vapor escaping from the neck of the carboy where the leibig sits. I felt the glass and it was hot. WTF??? AHHHHHH, I forgot to stuff the little 18 inch long strip of copper scrubbie up the liebig. That little piece or scrubbie makes a HUGE difference in cooling. Went from HOT output to cold. No change in flow rate of cooling water. I highly recommend everyone stuff some scrubbie up their leibig. hahaha. that sounds.... well you know.

Jimbo, I don't potstill, but if I ever do, I will remember your advice and get my leibig ready to be stuffed.

It really does make sense. The cooling in the leibig will do a much better job if it has a metal that will conduct the heat,

But, I should add, I am way to drunk to be posting!

Loving life, everyone keep it safe!

I'm bottling rums.
Got 3x 2L bottles that are over a year old and have bin sleeping on just a wee bit of toast/charred oak
Also have 2x 4 L of white that's a year old to play with.
Gunna make me some of buccaneer Bob's dunder essence using some of my year old (sealed) dunder, it's a bit too light to make black rum with but should make some nice golden with it i recon.
Need to free up some of my demi-johns and growlers so i can start a few more neutral flavour experiments!

Is your scrubbie on the vapour path or the water jacket, Jimbo?

I did have a copper coil shoved up the vapour path of my new liebig, but blew it into the garden when cleaning it after it's first run and haven't got around to replacing it. I've done a couple of runs without it and haven't seen any sign that I might be losing any product.

After I had put my new liebig together I had the idea of inserting a spiral of drilling swarf into the water jacket to give me more turbulence and velocity. There is no chance of retrofitting it to that one.

Hi Chris, the scrubbie goes in the vapor path. Its an 18" strip a couple inches wide bunched up to fit. It doesnt fit very tight, I use a thin dowel rod to cram it up the leibig exit. By having that copper mesh touching the vapor and touching to cold walls of the condensor it really sucks the heat out of the vapor fast. My leibig is ridiculous long, almost 4 feet, I sized it to fit off my boiler down to the top of a carboy sitting on the ground for stripper runs. Also have a 14 guage piece of copper wire spiral around the leibig inside the water path. With the scrubbie in there, and the cooling water on a low trickle the leibig is only warm for the top 6 inches. Here's a picture before I soldered it all together. http://homedistiller.org/forum/download ... p?id=17057

Very nice, Jimbo.

Damn Jimbo, I've never seen your still before, that's one long goddamn liebig. And that bit to the left in the corner of the photo, is that your riser and flange? Some damn shiny copper that's for sure. Very nice! Great success!

Being short on herbs to colour my Absinthe green I dropped a boysenberry into a portion a few days ago. It turned into a very sexy pink.

I didn't think the Missus would like it. She watched it louche and asked for a taste ...



... I got to eat the boysenberry. Wow ... that was a flavour punch. I'll do a raid of the freezers tomorrow and try and find some more berries.

Raspberry Eau de Vie

Took 5 pounds to get me around 4 oz @ 60%. I have everbearing raspberries so it'll take me another 10 pounds or so in order to get a complete flute of Eau de Vie! That'll take until September I think, so the distillate sits waiting for additions downstairs.

It makes you appreciate how high the bar is set in France or Germany, where they will even distill 200 pounds of mountain ash berries to get a bottle of true Volgebeerschnapps.

I'm also fermenting serviceberry and it seems to have an abundance of souring bacteria on it, which isn't a bad thing actually - the peppery/planty taste of the serviceberry makes it almost like Tequila - I suspect the distillate will be very distinct.

Just wrapped up another Rum run with some feints added in for a 1.5 . Took her down to like 15% and I have 2 1/2 gallons of likker. Most of it is going to go back into the jar for a spirit run, but hell I'll keep a little to spice up and enjoy.

also just about finished malting 20 lbs of corn... this time it was a success. Hopefully I'll be mashing something special soon.

Very nice Black Eye,you get that molasses used up yet? Today I've got to get my bags of bananas out of my ferment bucket and let em strain. I will likely let this clear for a week before running though so tomorrow i will but putting a 2nd run down on my approx. 2 gals of rice vodka low wines

Just about, got a 1-1.5 gallons left. Should be enough for one more run, then I'll do a spirit run with 5 gallons.

Made the cuts on my all feints run, didn't have enough jars to get down to my usual gravity but collected around 2ltrs of product at 70%. Will add the water to get it down to 40% tomorrow

Finally got everything together and running a batch of UJSSM. Feels good just to get the equipment out again and just "fool'n round" with it gets it back in your blood.

Ran a Sweet Feed today and airing the jars covered with paper towels thank God as the fruit flies think I did a pretty good job with my cuts!

Running Odin's easy gin now.
Not working out quite as expecte tho.
Detuned as much as possible but still came over a bit on the high side initially, and had to dilute to 20% to cover my element enough so may be lacking a bit of flavour.
Interested to see how it gos once diluted and aged a bit.
Put 4L of 43% in there and am meant to get 400ml of 80% for each L almost 2hours in an im at 1.2 total. At my current rate of production i'm looking at around about 45 more min to get my quota; i suspect this still is not detuned enough - consequently i'm collecting in 200ml increments so i can figure where the gin 'tails' are.

Ran a spirit run on my first rice neutral(also made a trip to the asian market to get some legit supplies for sake or more rice neutral), decided to run it on my pot w/ thumper since my valve for my CM mod on the other pot still is quite finicky. Turned out quite nice imho, but probably could have got higher abv% and better heads compression had I used the CM mod pot. Ah well, since I didn't have to screw with that CM valve I was able to build my first parrot, which is complete except for the stand as I didn't have a big enough bit to drill the hole in my piece of wood and my dremel crapped out on me. The hard parts done anyway, the stand will be a 2 minute job once I have the right tool, then I just got to clean er and she's ready to go Also got a new double coil condenser for my reflux column started but had to mess with the run after I started it, so will have to finish that tomorrow. A decently productive day overall though I'd say.

It's been a slow week for me. Was able to reflux the single malt last weekend and run it through the new parrot I built. That sure made life easy! Proofed it down and put it on oak. Then ran the pot to strip some of the wheat mix I'm working on while the rest of it clears off for this weekends run.

Nothing much. I am going on holidays by Friday! Well, I do still have like 15 liters of cornflakes wash left. With some oats. Anyone interested?

Odin.