Low wines with off flavors - help needed

[shadylane]

When mashing with only the natural enzymes in malt there always some maltotriose a trisaccharide (three-part sugar) left.
In my shed the final gravity is around 1.007 to 1.005 at best.

[G0DAX3]

The Maillard Reaction requires sugar. If fermentation is complete there is no sugar.

actually it involved carbonhydrate and amino acid, somme unprocess complex sugar can still be ther, he said is mash was at around 85% efficiency.

With a copper still I'd be careful raising the pH or the next questions might be about blue distillate.

have only run with ss still, get my coper from buble plate and mesh. it just more affordable to raise ph then to proceed to a benedict test.

[NZChris]

actually it involved carbonhydrate and amino acid, somme unprocess complex sugar can still be ther, he said is mash was at around 85% efficiency.

The Maillard reaction also requires higher temperatures than are normally produced in a pot still.

[G0DAX3]

from your other topic look you are still trying to get more wheat flavor in your wheated bourbon and try achieved it by switching your pale wheat to a "torrified" one.
by beer brewing experience a toasted grain did nt provided more flavor of this grain it add an other flavor probably what you experiment...

dont know you grain bill but try switch half of your wheat for "spelled/triticum/epautre/ble gaulois" ( sorry dont know you call it ther)
it work great for beer and is used in many speciality canadian wheat whisky.

but im really not an expert in grain run, i stick to basic feed grain (COWB) i keep all the pricy speciality grain for my beer....

[PalCabral]

I think you are overthinking this one Pal. If the beer tastes ok and you are not scorching during the stripping runs I am not sure worrying about the taste of the low wines is something to spend time on. For whisky and bourbon I think it is desirable to pull as much flavor as you can out of the beer into the low wines. Then sort them out during the spirit run.

I do question whether you are digging deep enough if you are stopping at 5% at the spout. You may be leaving some interesting flavors behind. My most disappointing batch was a UJSSM batch that I cut too tight. It was pretty bland white and while oaking helped it was never great.

I also suspect that dark wheat malt. Munich is a roasting process and it could easily be showing up as something burnt along the way. Am a bit curious that it is making your tongue numb...that is something I associate more with heads than with tails.

I am not great at describing flavor. You will know for sure how Whiskey low wines smell and perhaps taste. I don't have the habit of tasting my low wines but I do sniff, I rely more on my nose than my palate when it comes to distillates. Low wines from corn, wheat and barley have a sweet slightly fruity smell to it, I would call it a grain wine for lack of a better descriptive. The smell and off flavors are a total contrast. The smell gets pungent, and I wouldn't call it smoky or burnt but there's a cooking gone wrong quality of the smell. The flavor is bitter, and of course watery considering the low ABV, but totally lacking of sweetness, fruit, or anything remotely attractive. The bitterness is acrid and even though it is at 8% ABV it pricks and curls my tongue. Yes, the beer was good but these low wines tails are not from this world.

It's a huge risk to take 5-6L of perfectly healthy Whiskey low wines and mix it with 2L of acrid water in hope that it will be possible retain some flavors from the "acrid water" during the spirit run. It's 30-40% of the total that smells and tastes truly awful. In the best case scenario slow distillation will enable me to separate the good flavors from the bad, all the acrid stuff will be in the tails of the spirit run and I can discard them then. Worst case scenario, the bad flavors will "eat" up the hearts and make it smaller, smaller hearts, bigger tails. I doubt there's any good flavors to be picked from this stuff. I just can't take that risk.

[PalCabral]

Have I got this right?

After having successful runs, you changed one ingredient, didn't like a smell during the strip and blamed it on scorching even though there was no visual evidence of a scorch.

No. You read the first post again, Chris.

[NZChris]

When you find out what the problem was, please post it.

[PalCabral]

I don't think this is a maillard reaction but I cannot exclude it. The ferment was clean and dried out the beer.

But I hear the opinions to use the distillate regardless of what it smells like. I will keep the stinker but separated from the rest of the low wines. Then mix a small part of it together in accurate proportions to smell and taste the result of it. Maybe I'll even give it a run in my mini to see if I the flavors remain or are removed by a second distillation. It's the benefit of having a smaller still after all - why didnt I think if that earlier?

It will have to be a judgement call whether to use or not. I've got two more stripping runs to do, so there will probably be more of acrid low wines. I was down in the distillery today and although fresh air has reduced the smell in the room it's there in the container where I keep it. Can't tell much from the flavors, honestly, they are bitter and watery.

from your other topic look you are still trying to get more wheat flavor in your wheated bourbon and try achieved it by switching your pale wheat to a "torrified" one.
by beer brewing experience a toasted grain did nt provided more flavor of this grain it add an other flavor probably what you experiment...

dont know you grain bill but try switch half of your wheat for "spelled/triticum/epautre/ble gaulois" ( sorry dont know you call it ther)
it work great for beer and is used in many speciality canadian wheat whisky.

I think you're referring to Spelt, GODAX. I will make one more batch and switch back to pale wheat in this just to see if the off flavors go away with such a simple change. I have been planning other changes to the mash bill - for example using Emmer wheat. Spelt is actually on my todo list in another related project.

[PalCabral]

Try a scorch test on tinfoil before charging your still.

Try a run in another still, or even a small saucepan, no condenser, just smelling what is coming off until you get to the scorch. When you smell it, don't stop, keep it going until it gets really bad. Probably best to do this experiment outdoors.

I did the scorch test as you proposed, Chris. There was a smell, obviously, but not the smell I am getting when I distill the wash. I used about 300ml and boiled it until it hardly covered the bottom of the sauce pan. The smell of boiling wort was sweet and what you should expect. None of the acrid, feet smelling type. Maybe a too small size? But still. Hmm.

I ran another stripping run today, of the same batch and recipe. Followed Dancing Dan's advise to heat up slowly, I went from 45 minutes to 2 hours and 15 minutes to get the first drops out. I also removed all copper modules, no dome and no copper riser. Went all SS, with some copper mesh only, And although there was the smell I have learned to hate, not at all as much. In fact, I believe all of the 9L of low wines is usable. Interesting.

[Homebrewer11777]

Maybe you had a previous batch scorch (that one with all the rye perhaps) and left a deposit of something bad tasting somewhere in your still. Then when you ran this batch you finally cleaned that scorch deposit right into your late hearts. If not a scorch residue perhaps it was a cleaning residue...weren't you recently proposing some sort of summer cleaning for your kit?

[PalCabral]

Maybe you had a previous batch scorch (that one with all the rye perhaps) and left a deposit of something bad tasting somewhere in your still. Then when you ran this batch you finally cleaned that scorch deposit right into your late hearts. If not a scorch residue perhaps it was a cleaning residue...weren't you recently proposing some sort of summer cleaning for your kit?

Considering the length I've gone through to clean my equipment, I am at loss what could possible be leaving off flavors from the still. Since my one scorch, I've done at least three vinegar and spirit runs, PBW'ed twice, replaced gaskets and element. This is why I ran this last run without copper, just to see if there was any change. And there was, but I couldn't say if the difference was due to the slow heat up or the removal of copper dome and riser.

It's a relief in a way that the scorch test indicated that there's nothing in the dark wheat malt creating the off flavors I'm finding. The smell and the taste of the boiling wash in my sauce pan was in line with what I would expect a boiling wash of this character to smell and taste like.

Since I keep detailed notes of my distillation, I noticed a pattern. I've looked back and I see that the foul smell is not connected to a specific ABV off the spout. Rather it occurs, consistently, after 1 hours to 1 hour 25 minutes into the distillation, ie after I've started producing. I believe I may have noticed it more in the last distillations because I am now running bigger batches. Before I used to run 25L batches, now I am running 33-35L batches, meaning there is more distillation to be done at the point when the smell and off flavors start appearing. In my earlier runs, I may just never noticed because I was in the very end of the distillation at this point.

[PalCabral]

To round this topic off, I have now run two stripping runs of 25L wheated Bourbon washes. One version 1 with only pale wheat malt and one version 2 with dark wheat malt (basically munich style toasted wheat malt). Same still configuration, same heating and running process, same wash ABV.

In neither run I experienced the off flavors I was talking about in my first post. In both instances I was able to collect 7L low wines without any funny smells or flavors, cutting off at below 5% ABV off the spout. So the test was inconclusive as to repeat the problem but conclusive in that it confirmed the scorch test I did earlier: the problem is not the dark wheat malt.

But I am no closer to understand what gave the off flavors in my first two runs. The 2 differences between these last two runs and the two previous runs where I got the off flavors are 1) that I was running a bigger charge in those stripping runs, 34-35L charges instead of the 25L in my test and 2) I was running the first two runs with the copper helmet, which produces a heck lot more reflux than the copper riser do.

Not at all certain if these 2 differences can have anything to do with the production of off flavors, but since I'm in the dark with the reason I will stick to 25L charges for my stripping runs for now. It fits with my mashing size anyway, so it's not a big inconvenience.