last night I ran my first distill run using UJSSM
This was also my first ferment btw.I let this ferment for ten days, bubbling at the airlock stopped after day 5. I didn't have a beer hydrometer to know the SG of the beginning mash so that sucked.... and the one i ordered and finally received in the mail didn't have inclinations below 1.000 arg. But.... the finishing SG was way above the 1.000 mark by measuring the scale I'm thinking .994 .992 (i know this was probably not calibrated for beyond 1.000 but its what i had at the time.)
Racked off the wash keeping the corn in the bottom scraped off old dead corn ,added new corn, and added my new water to keep yeast alive (have some other questions for that but thats a different topic)
Everything seemed to go well.... My temps seemed higher than I expected.I have a boiler thermometer and a top of column thermometer,Its probably overkill but I think its cool to know whats going on. To produce at 1-2, 2-3drops a sec my boiler temp was ranging in the 198-202 range and then started receiving product at the top of the still at 180ish but mostly in the 188-195 range the lower wines came thru in the 200 -205 top of column range. (i think most of my foreshots came thru around 165-170 range because I produced a small minute amount but went ahead and collected the 150ml as the recipe stated) maybe i need to hold the temps longer at the lower temps to see if i produce??
The top of still thermometer is regular kitchen thermometer not sure if its a specific "steam" one maybe need to look at a different one. or just go by feel instead and keeping the drip rate right???This run came out well I think, The highest I was able to collect was a pint of 65%. then a pint of 55% and and about two pints of 40%. Even without the hydrometer you could definitely tell the difference in cuts, obviously Im no master stiller making cuts but I was a little apprehensive about this part but could def the difference where the good stuff was .... and the not so good stuff. i could have made some finer cuts i think by tatse but most of it is going back into the next run anyway so it was for me to play anyway.
Anyway just wanted to thank everyone out there for all of there informative posts and asking the questions i had. Definite thanks to Uncle Jessie for your recipe and all of your knowledge! I have a batch of Birdwatchers brewing right now and the sour-mash going also.
Oh by the way my garage was about 50 deg when i was stilling so my bucket of UJSSM was waiting for the warm backset had cooled off to about 60 also. so before i added the sugar/backset i brought the bucket in to warm up so it wouldn't be such a temp extreme when i add the backset so i set the bucket into 80 deg water in the sink to help level out the mash temp. within 30 sec of being in that water it started bubbling again even without the added sugar!!! yeast is an amazing thing!!!!!
