Vinegar steam alone was insufficient to thoroughly clean the still. Although soda will clarify a murky spirit, it is a waste of time. The soda taste horrible and needs to be cooked out, but if the still isn't clean then your're put back to square one, and reproduce a new murky spirit. One beneficial side effect of cooking spirit off the soda water however, was that I was left with a cleaned stainless steel cooker. A very tough yellow/brown film which was bonded to the sides of my pot, and couldn't be scoured off – was removed by this soda. Sorta like soda is used in toothpaste to remove plaque – but faster.
As
DeepSouth &
Danespirit mentioned, sodium hydroxide is mean stuff. It dissolves animal tissue and should easily deal with the oils trapped in the packing of a riser. I used all the lye I had though, while cleaning a sewer line this last winter. Rather than rush off to the nearest Home Depot which is 45 miles away, I used some sodium hypochlorite instead. Laundry bleach is a disinfectant that is only slightly lower in pH factor than lye.
Pouring a generous mixture of bleach with boiling hot water into the riser and letting it soak for a couple hours resulted in a bunch of nasty gunk finally being washed out.
In the interim of dealing with cleaning maintenance, I was left with a quantity of spirit that I can't use (since it turns cloudy when cut with water). I experimented with a couple bottles of opaque liquor; adding about 3 times more than normal charcoal to one bottle, and a big tablespoon of dry onion skin flakes to the other.
Clarification is occurring quickly, with pronounced changes in just 3 days. The lipids in suspension are being bound up by the charcoal or flakes (homemade / ground up in a coffee mill). The refinement, maturation, aging or whatever you want to call it is occurring faster in the onion bottle, probably because of the increased surface area of the particulate. Even at this early date the two bottles that started as the same spirit have distinctively different taste. At first the intention of the experiment was to see how they clarified and then recook them. From past experience I know that the smokey flavor of my homemade charcoal-ed twigs will begin to overpower and over darken the liquor in that bottle. The same thing may happen with the onion flakes bottle too.
For now though it taste very good for a spirit that is only 4 or 5 days old! The sharp jagged taste edges of the new white dog have been partially rounded off (quickly too). The taste improvement is subtle and not particularly reminiscent of onion. The ouzo effect liquor (50% ABV) in this bottle should become crystal clear in another week – at which point it would need to be filtered to remove the sediment.
I don't know if I should be freely giving these new revelations away just yet. I perceive that oaking and this onion flake infusion might work well together, also. Many questions about taste and color control remain. I'm no herbalist or organic food nut, but the crisp, flaky outer scales of onion and garlic skins are supposed to be very healthy. Both are full of powerful antioxidants. Onion skins are especially full of
flavonoids like
quercetin which
“is under study as an agent for lowering LDL cholesterol and blood pressure, fighting allergies, reducing inflammation, enhancing muscle growth and function, treating depression, some forms of cancer, and other conditions”. Quercetin may work fine upon free radicals in a test tube but, researchers haven't decided yet if or not, it has the same effect inside the body.
