Feints & Pot Stills
Posted: Sat Oct 22, 2011 10:46 am
You can use feints in a pot still in various ways, from making a product similar to your original, to a “mock” neutral. I am using the term feints to include both heads and tails.
If you have enough feints that you have collected from say a single type of mash, (UJSSM, all bran, sweetfeed, etc) an all feints run will give you a product that will be “similar” to the original. However, you have to consider that what you have collected is a lot of off-products that have been deemed undesirable. They have been separated from the hearts as either head or tails. They still contain adequate amounts of alcohol and enough good compounds (esters, some of the fusil alcohols, etc) to make an excellent product. In some respects these compounds have been concentrated so often you will get a stronger flavor profile. In my experience, you need to be more sever with your cuts because of this concentration.
To my way of thinking a more practical use of feints is to combine them with your wash when doing a stripping run. It is an effective use of the feints, you don’t get the concentration of the undesirable compounds and you are also getting the benefit of the desired compounds.
If you distill as I do you are going to end up with a number of disparate feints. Right now I have feints from all barley, wheat, some rum, peach brandy and will have some from corn. Now, I could combine all in an all feints run just to see what I might get, but my usual course is to make a “mock” neutral, or vodka. I have done this several times and ended up with a very nice product that can be used as a drink or as the base for cordials and liqueurs.
The concept is based on the ability of water to “clean” up the feints as opposed to reflux in fractionating columns. By diluting the feints to 30-40%, stripping, diluting, and stripping it is possible to get a nice clean product. This is going to take 3-4 cycles through your pot still, maybe more. While this can be subjective, and you could use taste as your guide, I have found that an easy indicator is what left in you pot after a run, that is how cloudy/milky white it is. You put a clear liquid in you pot, you get a clear liquid through your condenser, but what you have left in the pot is cloudy and milky white. With each subsequent run the cloudiness will dissipate, so I will dilute and rerun until the cloudiness is substantially reduced. On the final run I’ll make my cuts; any feints left I toss. All previous runs are done as stripping runs.
As a note, with the first two runs I’ll toss a pretty health cut for fores, generally 600-700 ml each. While my feints are predominately tails, there is a significant portion of heads.
Big R
If you have enough feints that you have collected from say a single type of mash, (UJSSM, all bran, sweetfeed, etc) an all feints run will give you a product that will be “similar” to the original. However, you have to consider that what you have collected is a lot of off-products that have been deemed undesirable. They have been separated from the hearts as either head or tails. They still contain adequate amounts of alcohol and enough good compounds (esters, some of the fusil alcohols, etc) to make an excellent product. In some respects these compounds have been concentrated so often you will get a stronger flavor profile. In my experience, you need to be more sever with your cuts because of this concentration.
To my way of thinking a more practical use of feints is to combine them with your wash when doing a stripping run. It is an effective use of the feints, you don’t get the concentration of the undesirable compounds and you are also getting the benefit of the desired compounds.
If you distill as I do you are going to end up with a number of disparate feints. Right now I have feints from all barley, wheat, some rum, peach brandy and will have some from corn. Now, I could combine all in an all feints run just to see what I might get, but my usual course is to make a “mock” neutral, or vodka. I have done this several times and ended up with a very nice product that can be used as a drink or as the base for cordials and liqueurs.
The concept is based on the ability of water to “clean” up the feints as opposed to reflux in fractionating columns. By diluting the feints to 30-40%, stripping, diluting, and stripping it is possible to get a nice clean product. This is going to take 3-4 cycles through your pot still, maybe more. While this can be subjective, and you could use taste as your guide, I have found that an easy indicator is what left in you pot after a run, that is how cloudy/milky white it is. You put a clear liquid in you pot, you get a clear liquid through your condenser, but what you have left in the pot is cloudy and milky white. With each subsequent run the cloudiness will dissipate, so I will dilute and rerun until the cloudiness is substantially reduced. On the final run I’ll make my cuts; any feints left I toss. All previous runs are done as stripping runs.
As a note, with the first two runs I’ll toss a pretty health cut for fores, generally 600-700 ml each. While my feints are predominately tails, there is a significant portion of heads.
Big R
I think it can be put to some good use by the new distillers. Me included I will actually be doing this probably next weekends. I thought I mite do it this weekend. But I think I will run short on time after last nights All Bran run and running my palm sugar today and letting it air out. So I will plan to just make a weekend of it.