Whiskey & Wood

[blind drunk]

It's the corn Try wheat, barley, rye and millet. Cheers, bd.

[King Of Hearts]

Well scotch is smoother and uses neither corn or sugar.

[loneswinger]

I have had that book. You have to understand that economy and maximizing alcohol production is very important in commercial distilleries. The only reason they even make a heads cut is they use the early part of the run to clean out the oils (tails) left in the still from the previous run. All heads (through continuous recycling) will eventually end up in the casks and then ultimately into the bottle in a scotch distillery. The demisting test shows whether or not there is the previous run's tails in the distillate, once clean, they collect to hearts.

Yes the amount of reflux will affect flavor, and the amount of heat will affect reflux, the organoleptic results are debatable for us though. For the distilleries, some reflux is necessary, especially at the end of the run when they are squeezing out the last drop of ethanol (distillate down to 1%, so the stuff in the boiler down to 0.1%) they don't want too much tails to come through or too much water to be diluting the feints. We don't have this problem, we can throw whatever alcohol down the drain we choose. There is probably not a single distiller on here that collects down to 1%. 20% is a more typical end of the spirit run for us.

Also, sulphur compounds are not normally an issue for us, but copper will facilitate some positive reactions so that it might be a good idea to throw a copper scrubber or two somewhere in your system.

Also, running 1500 Watts (4L/hr) through an open 2" column (20"/s vapor speed) is by no means running it too hard, there will be plenty of reflux for what I want.

Also, my distillate is not harsh!!

I will just close with, there is no single right way to do it. You can get something different by running things differently, in my experience it all comes out very good once aged. I like to push it harder than some as full bodied and flavorfull whiskey is what I am after. 20"/s is still below the level that droplets from the wash make it into your condensate.

If I want to get drunk I will drink the hooch from the reflux still.

-Loneswinger