On hold

[S-Cackalacky]

I think I'll be putting everything on hold for the next few months. The weather is getting cold and my basement is a little too cool to support good fermentation. I'll be building a heated fermentation box, but won't be able to do anything about it until well after the holidays.

I'm also not completely happy with my first few spirit runs and will be using the down time to rethink my process. I'm finding that what I've made so far isn't so much to my liking. My first mistake was using backset to dilute the low wines for my first spirit run. The backset gave the SF strips a little too much added flavor. The second mistake was to use this product to make liqoures like apple pie (3+ qts), ameretto, butterscotch snapps, and some nuke aged stuff. The quart of ameretto taste pretty decent, the aged stuff is tolerable, but the apple pie and butterscotch completely suck.

I still have a 5 gallon bucket of Producer's Pride All Grain. For future SF runs I think I'll be trying to tone the flavor down a bit - diluting with water and possibly a second run through the still. I like the flavor of the SF, but the way I ran it is just a little too much of a good thing - overpowering. Once I finish with the SF, I'll be trying rum - hope I've learned something with these first runs.

Anyway, a little diapointing, but I'll move forward - hopefully with better results.

S-C