Home Distiller

Okay, so this experiment grew out of a number of things coming together. My local Kroger had Madagascar and Tahitian beans on sale 2/$4, which is ridiculous, and I think someone fucked up. The other thing was having saved all the backset from my cherry brandy wash post-cook. Here goes:

1.5 gal cherry backset
3 Madagascar beans, split, scraped, added all to pot
2 Tahiti beans split, scraped, added to pot
.75 gal dunder

Simmered the above with a 1/2c of bakers yeast, let cool over night. Added to fermenter.

Then:
7lbs panela
48oz baking molasses
32oz black cherry concentrate
32oz corn syrup

Topped off volume to 6 gal, saved .5 gal fresh wash for thump charging. Added nutrients (trying a friend's custom mix, but I'd recommend 12g Fermaid K, 1 B vitamin, and tblsp of tomato paste for potassium or quart coconut water subbed in volume for same). Brought PH up to 4.3 with lime.

4g 493 EDV rum yeast, fermenting at 82F (lower than I normally ferment to not stress yeast too much, low pitch to force ester creation, also didn't purposefully oxygenate to also force ester creation, though I did stir a lot and dumping stuff in; normal o2 I use a stick blender, which I didn't this time, nor did I use olive oil to replace o2)

Pitched this yesterday 1/22 at 230p est, my house smells like cherries, vanilla, blondies, and rising bread dough at the moment, it's absolutely wonderful, maybe the best ferment I've ever smelled! The wash has developed a dense foam head right now, and the temp is at 85.4F, 3.5 degrees over the setting, so fermentation is taking off after 24 hours. This is ultimately an experiment with reference to the vanilla beans in the wash, in the past I would use split beans in my aging spirit to add some natural vanilla aside from what they'd get from oak. I am very very interested to see what happens with this.

When I run it I'll be mixing my .5 gal fresh wash with .5 gal of fermented wash, using rum feints and some cherry vodka to charge my 2.5 gal and 1 gal thumpers both for the run. Couldn't be more excited!


As this is kind of irreproduceable, its inspired my next wash (coming soon) roughly:
12 lbs mashed, blended overripe bananas
.5 gal blueberry concentrate
1 gal dunder
split panela and hq molasses and 1 32oz bottle corn syrup
5 split vanilla beans
...

Damn Dresden, I'm drooling over here!

I'll need to get my hands on some!

Let us know what happens with this.

Cheers Bud!

I love these kind of non-traditional washes, I once did something similar with cherries that were incredibly under-priced. What are your plans for aging?

AlChemE wrote:I love these kind of non-traditional washes, I once did something similar with cherries that were incredibly under-priced. What are your plans for aging?

Cherry, oak, and maple woods!

Well, it's cook day! I let it sit longer past fermenting so that the vanilla could really work through. So I mixed up half fresh wash with half fermented wash, then added 8oz of black cherry concentrate, and 6oz ea vanilla and cherry vodkas (to raise ABV in thumps), and 2 tblsp of madagascar vanilla bourbon -- it's like a slurry of the actual 'beans'. This was my thump charge with 100oz in my 2.5 gal thump, and 28oz (plus 2 more oz each vanilla and cherry vodka, second thump should be higher ABV than first) for a total of 32oz in the 1 gal second thump.

It's coming, about an 8oz jar every 15 mins is the speed, and it smells and tastes quite strongly of first, fresh white rum off the tube, then cherries and vanilla quite strong after the rum flavor begins to bow out. I simply cannot wait to make cuts after this airs for 24 hours.

Just ordered up the blueberry concentrate for my blueberry-banana-vanilla wash. This vanilla, done this way, REALLY comes through. I'm also going to reserve 2 gallons of dunder from this cook, and set up a near-identical cherry vanilla cook (I'll do 4 beans this time, due to the dunder) with more cherry concentrate (tart and black) and repeat the high quality molasses and panela and the whole recipe from above, making sugar addition adjustments to account for the concentrates I'm adding. Then I'll have about a gallon total cherry vanilla rum, and I can fill a badmo (with looser cuts I can maybe actually 'fill' it, too!).