Home Distiller

Hi

Made a complete blunder with my Apple Brandy this year, i tried to carchoal filter it with some sugar maple charcoal. Im left with a serious campfire taste and smell in spirit. Does anyone have any advice on how to potentially knock this taste out of brandy.

many thanks in advance

Busybee

busybee wrote:Hi

Made a complete blunder with my Apple Brandy this year, i tried to carchoal filter it with some sugar maple charcoal. Im left with a serious campfire taste and smell in spirit. Does anyone have any advice on how to potentially knock this taste out of brandy.

many thanks in advance

Busybee

You have very tiny particles of charcoal in suspension. Let it sit quietly for a few months, it will settle out, age, and be much better.

MichiganCornhusker wrote: You have very tiny particles of charcoal in suspension. Let it sit quietly for a few months, it will settle out, age, and be much better.

I would also keep in in a cool environment, I don't charcoal filter but if I have a lot of sediments I try to refrigerate it. Once it's settled then siphon.

if there is too much smoke (burnt stick) taste to it i very much doubt time will be your helper unless you want to talk years. drop that sucker down to about 80 proof (40 ABV) and run it fast and hard. you shouldn't need to re-cut but it never hurts to check

Ive cut the original spirit which was at 60 abv. with distilled water. Put it back in boiler at 30abv ran it hard and fast like suggested. The front end of distillation which comes out at about 80 abv. has limited burnt stick flavor. Once the run gets down to 60 abv the campfire taste really reappears. Ive ran it twice after initial mistake. Ive cut out all distallit below 60 percent and both subsequent runs. I might try running the tail end of the runs which are heavily smoked flavoured through a brita filter to see if it can make any difference

Checked your boiler? That sounds like scorch.

Tried a brita filter, it has removed all the smoky flavour. Small victory, lol. It has also removed alot of its original taste. Next year i will be more careful when experimenting. I will use a small portion of batch when trying something new.

thanks everybody for you imput

Bottoms Up

Busybee

It has also added a bunch of dissolved plastic that you should probably dump what ever you ran through the filter.

Britta filter is not the way to go busybee. You've tainted the alcohol with whatever chemicals are in the plastic. Carbon filtering works but you have to have proper equipment to do it. Save the alcohol for sanatizing gear but I would really suggest not drinking it.

Yak

BRITA products include water jugs, kettles and tap attachments, all of which use silver-impregnated activated carbon and ion-exchange resin disposable filters as their primary filtering mechanism.[3][4] The activated carbon used in BRITA filters is produced from coconut shells.[5] The company manufactures its pitchers from styrene methyl methacrylate copolymer.

Ethanol is a solvent its what you can't see that matters