Making pure whiskey

[Odin]

Hi guys & galls,

I have always found "Making pure corn whiskey", Ian Smiley's book, very inspiring. It is not just a book with clear instrucions on how to build stills (which I am less fond of, since I am not much of a builder), gives detailed information on making a corn wash (even though we cannot get really tasty sweet corn over here), and goes into fractionating a whiskey. Now THAT's the part that intrigued me.

How can you make whiskey using an LM rig? "Well," Ian says, "that's easy. Make a wash, distll it LM style, take a small fores cut, then seperate heads, collect hearts, go for tails. Collect heads&tails in the feints receiver." Nothing new so far. But the magic, he stated, came with run number two. "Do not just run that beer as before, but add the feints." And after that: make it a normal LM run, seperating fores, heads, hearts, and tails as before. But since there is twice as much heads & tails, and you are compressing them in the column, the tastes that normally get out with the heads and tails, now will spill over into the hearts fraction.

Making a full flavoured whiskey at 96%. Or stating it differently: drinking whiskey as much as you want without getting a hang over.

I have done some research on the forum. Many know Ian's book. But nobody seems to be doing his fractionating style of whiskey making. And when I asked, most of the answers I got were like this: "you can make a whiskey with an LM, if you take out most of the packing and open up the needle valve." "De-tuning the system" was a sentence I read a lot, when inquiring about anybody using Ian's method. But the answers weren't about Ian's 96% method, they were about turning your LM into a sorta potstill. And that was not the technique Ian Smiley used.

So, having a great new LM in, I decided not only to test the new rig, but to test Smiley's take on making a whiskey with a fractionating still as well.

I saved heads&tails from yeserdays run, which I added to a fresh wheat base for the wash. One liter of feints on 32 or 33 liters of 10% UJ-style wheat wash.

I fired the LM up, stabilized, drew of fores, stabilized again (30 minutes) and began to draw off heads. End of the story? I now have 1.5 liters of feints and some 3.5 to 4 liters of 50% pure wheat whiskey. Ian Smiley style. So does it work? Can you use a LM, fractionating at 96% and getting over full flavour? Yes, you can. I personally find that very exciting news!

How does the whiskey taste? It tastes great! Sweet, refined, intense, wheaty. It is great as is. I just added brita filtered water and shook the big bottle it is in. I didn't micronize it, I didn't bubble it, I didn't give it an ultrasonic cleaning run, I didn't give it any time to age (stopped stillin' it just a few hours ago), and it tastes great. I don't even feel like putting this stuff on wood. It is so good as it is.

Anybody into taste and having an LM? Please follow the above instructions or read Ian's book. You will be amazed.

Odin.