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The room its in smells like honey granola. I think it is gonna be my best yet. Best part is the guy I got it from has a lot and I mean alot that is un sellable due to being cloudy,too dark,or crystallized that I can have. It's all edible but unsellable. The cloudy is due to too much wax particles too small to get picked up by their filter. Told me to bring my own buckets and I could have all 2000+ gallons of it. I'm looking for one of those ibc square tote thingy's now,lol.



Edited to add: What I used for this batch is grade a honey.

JB, i think you will like the result. when i subbed in some honey backset i got what i thought was the best UJ out of 26 different generations. It was fairly one-dimensional flavour, a one hit wonder... but it was a great flavour.
if you indeed end up with 2000lbs, you should start your own thread in recipe development and do some experiments, i read countless times of people have problems fermenting honey and not getting what they want. I guess i was lucky, mine went off with a hitch.
good luck with it, i think honey-corn whiskey is a hit. Perhaps you will too!

HDNB did you put it on oak or leave it white? I'm thinking applewood,but it'll have to be chips as I don't have any apple wood fingers. It's either that ,oak ,or pecan wood.since its apple blossom honey its gotta be apple wood. Kinda poetic justice in a bottle.

Edited to add og 1.068 sg now 1.036

jb-texshine wrote:HDNB did you put it on oak or leave it white? I'm thinking applewood,but it'll have to be chips as I don't have any apple wood fingers. It's either that ,oak ,or pecan wood.since its apple blossom honey its gotta be apple wood. Kinda poetic justice in a bottle.

Edited to add og 1.068 sg now 1.036

Wow 2000+ gallons of honey. You should grab it all of it and sell it to us! I'd love to try an all honey run but it's crazy expensive around here.

i went Oak. I tried Apple chips on a few early experiments and it was very suble flavour with a light golden color. Can't say i have any appreciation for apple but if you like apples... i'm sure either would work just fine!

Antler24 wrote:

jb-texshine wrote:HDNB did you put it on oak or leave it white? I'm thinking applewood,but it'll have to be chips as I don't have any apple wood fingers. It's either that ,oak ,or pecan wood.since its apple blossom honey its gotta be apple wood. Kinda poetic justice in a bottle.

Edited to add og 1.068 sg now 1.036

Wow 2000+ gallons of honey. You should grab it all of it and sell it to us! I'd love to try an all honey run but it's crazy expensive around here.

You know what's crazy expensive. $23 for 500g of the cheapest store brand crap honey. Lol

Mu ujssm + honey is down to sg. 0.999 running it Friday night.

Jb - how did it go?

Scribbler wrote:Jb - how did it go?

It went great. First impression: You don't wanna drink this white. Not so smooth off the still but ill taste again later. Definitely a honey ish taste,but different. Also has a slight Smokey taste that I can only attribute to the honey. Also I split the ferment for a 1.5 run to get ageing proof. I'm going to put it on apple wood for a bit.i suspect it'll be the best I've made after that. All in all, I will be doing it again.
jb
every jar had a speck of oil on it though, so...dont use that as a guide for making cuts.

Ummmmm.... A little worried about the colour change. Any ideas on what could have caused it? It's a ujssm first gen (replaced corn with wheat, oats, and barley....

Two weeks ago, it looked like this:

If that's what it looks like coming out of the takeoff, I would assume a massive puke.

Nope that is how the wash is settling out.

Huws it smell and taste? Looks like too much backset.

First gen, no Backset at all. Smells ok tastes ok... Not 'off' just really tangy.

My uj with multi grain chicken scratch looks close to that color but a lil bit lighter. If it smells good and tastes good and is fermenting good wait till its done and run it.

Sorry, it was in a drinking glass, so I just assumed it was some gnarly lookin' distillate.

Ok will do. I just got a little scared when it went from white to... Bluish purple!! I was like "where on earth is that colour coming from!!!"

I seriously thought maybe my kids had opened it up and dumped some plastic toys in that were maybe leaching colour or something!!!!!

Looks brown.

Scribbler wrote:Ok will do. I just got a little scared when it went from white to... Bluish purple!! I was like "where on earth is that colour coming from!!!"

I seriously thought maybe my kids had opened it up and dumped some plastic toys in that were maybe leaching colour or something!!!!!

What did you ferment in?

Prior to running UJ, I ran several batches of fruit-based wash recipes posted here on Home Distiller. I have finally seen the light! UJ is simple, cheap, and by far, the best tasting likker I have produced so far. I followed the recipe to a T, but cheated a bit with the output (I kept the hearts from my 1st 2 runs and made some incredible Apple Pie Shine that people are still talking about). I only had time to take UJ to the 3rd generation, leaving this last batch clear, except for a quart I experimented with by aging it with a charred Oak Barrel spiral I located on Amazon (by the way, this also turned out great, highly recommend!).

If you are a novice, like myself, forget about mashing and blending fruit in a concrete mixer and buying the expensive additives and extras that these types of recipes call for. Go to the local feed store, buy a sack of cracked corn and distill yourself UJ's neutral. From there, if you want fruity tasting likker, mix UJ up with one of the recipes on this site after the fact (I 'm sure it was the chef, but my distilled fruit based recipes did not really taste like the fruit I utilized in mixing them).

From here on out, I only plan on making that sweet UJ corn likker, hopefully taking it many generations beyond my last attempt.

Just my 2 cents. Thanks

scribbler, that does have kind of a mauve hue to it eh?

maybe some colored corn kernals in ther? mine always looked golden yellow leaning towards brown if i had too much backset.

Well... I think I found the culprit. Found this spoon down at the bottom when I was emptying the fermenter. Could be a coincidence, but I just don't want to take a chance on running this.

A plastic food grade spoon left in a fermenter should not cause any problems.

NZChris wrote:A plastic food grade spoon left in a fermenter should not cause any problems.

i'd agree.

i just re-read your recipe. thought we were talkin' UJ, but i see you added wheat oats and barley.

try soaking a small handful of your source grain in some water. bet you get the same hue in the water.

Thanks folks for the ideas.

I will try that soaking test - this batch is ready to run - I racked it into a carboy and added a quarter cup of sugar and put an airlock on it. So it should keep. I can also put it outside where it's below freezing.

I also put a half gallon of the (lees?) creamy pasty yeast and grains in a 1 gallon jug, added water, and a tiny bit of sugar. - hopefully this will last to restart it later (if the colour issue turns out ok). Q: can I stick this outside where it is just a few degrees below freezing and expect the yeast to survive?

The rest, I tossed...

At home sits a big rain barrel full of the grain mix. I just asked my parents in law to soak some in a glass jar.

Fingers are crossed - I really hope I can salvage this!!!

(If not, the grain is free, so all it takes is time to try again)

Btw: my fermenter IS blue (which is totally freaking me out) but the material is HDPE - sooooo...... I dunno...

Any chance the fermenter was actually LDPE but mislabelled HDPE? Even if that were the case, would an LDPE fermenter leach colour like that? How reliable are those category stamps on the bottom?

I'm getting paranoid maybe if the mill used the wrong plastic for a mold, or the wrong stamp template... They might make a thousand of those and never know, because to most folks it's just a "cheap plastic garbage bin"


But yeah - I'm going to do that soaking test. Hope it's gets that colour! If not, I am hesitant to risk it...

So - one thing I've noticed: the grains tend to settle pretty fast on the bottom, and for MOST of the ferment, only the top layer is super active in adding flavour.

Any benefits in agitating the grain bed?

I'm thinking a 3.5 ft long stainless steel auger (maybe two or three inch diameter) set to run for a half hour every six to eight hours?

Just to keep it mixing?

This is the first time at attempting the recipe. I've been reading through everything thus far. I've got my grain in the fermenting bucket, I added Turbo Yeast Pure X-Press. This is what I picked up at the brewing shop in town. I'm just wanting to make that it will work in this recipe? I've seen a lot of people go back and forth about not using turbo yeasts. I didn't see anything about 'pre-soaking' the yeast. What I picked up was a dry powder like substance is it ok to just toss that into the wash and mix it up really good? That's what I did based on the original recipe and just want to make sure I'm off on the right foot. It's only been about 6 hrs since I bucketed it. I'm hoping to see some bubbles forming in the AM. Just trying to put my mind at ease while I continue reading on about all of this.

That's one way to do it.(just sprinkling on top of wash) it will take a little longer to get started. Turbos can produce some off taste but some like them. Regular bread yeast is a lot cheaper and works well. Next time try rehydrating the yeast in some water.

Scribbler wrote:So - one thing I've noticed: the grains tend to settle pretty fast on the bottom, and for MOST of the ferment, only the top layer is super active in adding flavour.

Any benefits in agitating the grain bed?

I'm thinking a 3.5 ft long stainless steel auger (maybe two or three inch diameter) set to run for a half hour every six to eight hours?

Just to keep it mixing?

The active fermentation will mix hell out of it without you stickin' your fingers innit.
I could quote Rad at this point but...naaaaah.

tp