Home Distiller

I recently ran a sugar head on my HBB grains and was really happy with the grain flavor coming over on my 4 plate rig. I ran it slower than normal with the intention of making something for sipping white.

After all was said and done, I made my cuts tighter than usual as I didn’t intend to age it. I was very enticed by some late hearts jars as they had some very rich honey/grain flavor. After everything mingled in the jars for a week, diluting with RO to 40% ABV, I noticed a bit of the tails smells came through. I got greedy! The flavor is spot on, sweet and grainy, but the aroma was a tinge too much to serve to my friends.

I considered re-running, but didn’t want to sacrifice flavor. So as an experiment, I added a couple single use oak sticks to a quart jar for 5 days, one charred and one toasted. I didn’t think much would be extracted since the proof was low, but I was wrong. The carbon seemed to mellow the tails and the spirit pulled out some delicious vanilla/caramel from the wood with no tannin. So now its pulled off the wood and is white/ish, but better! Any of you guys do this low ABV treatment for some quick oak flavor?

I used wood in a 45% diluted cereal distillate (one of my experiments) and you will pull out the sweet part of the wood but you have to give enough time and improve considerably. But my wood was roasted, not charred.