Home Distiller

Finished my first fermentation of bourbon made from 750g of cornflakes in a 23l fermenter. I fermented to 11% abv with a tiny 4g sachet of EC 1118. I distilled everything down to 5l of 35% low wines after removing the initial 600ml fores/heads.

23l of cornflake mash

600ml fores/heads removed

Collected 5l of low wines at 35%.

Spirit run of them 5l low wines yielded 3l of 55% abv split between 15 jars.

The first jars came off at 79% and they dropped to 40% for the last 15th jar at the end of the run.

I tasted them all and I didn't want to discard any of it. Every single jar impacted its own unique flavours and none of them tasted like something I didn't want in my final product.

I tasted the cuts 4 times over a week and I still came back with the same conclusion

I'm used to taking cuts on my neutral and I rarely ever have trouble distinguishing between what's good and bad in the cut jars.

When making bourbon, is it normal to take one large fores/heads cut then keep absolutely everything else from the spirit run? I know you would never do thos with a neutral. But is it more normal with whisky and rum washes? Runs where you actually want the flavour of the mash in the end product?

I done some research and it appears a lot of bourbon distilleries don't actually take cuts. Some people on here stated that Jack Daniels don't actually take cuts.

Just want people's opinion on this. Because as said I broke my spirit run down into 15 jars and I was happy to keep them all.

Mix up a test blend and see what you think of it. You don't have to make tight cuts if you don't want to. It's your drink, you get to decide.
I'm not an expert, but I read a lot. My .02 and how understand things.

Cheers

Saltpork

It is quite normal for many desirable and different flavors to show up throughout the run even down into tails as well.

Only you can decide how tight to cut. It's based on what you like the taste of, and how soon you want to drink it. Too tight, and it will be thin and one dimensional when aged, wider and it will taste grungy white, but will be more complex after proper aging.
With time and experience, you can figure out where your balance lies.

first off, this sounds like a sugar shine, not a bourbon ( bourbon is made from all grains, no sugar at least 50% corn)

as far as cuts go, it is subjective and if you like it, you can drink it. I find myself making tighter and tighter cuts for my white dog, but I lean further into tails than the heads.

not sure what you're making "neutral" on but if you are used to doing "cuts" on a reflux still, it's nothing like a pot still. There is not a "distinct" line, what you're tasting and liking is the heads and tails smeared gradually through the whole run.

Not sure how JD does or doesn't do it but they also age for years which can work wonders.

AppleWood50 wrote: ↑Mon May 09, 2022 6:06 am When making bourbon, is it normal to take one large fores/heads cut then keep absolutely everything else from the spirit run? I know you would never do thos with a neutral. But is it more normal with whisky and rum washes? Runs where you actually want the flavour of the mash in the end product?

TLDR answer: if it tastes good to you, keep it!

Your mileage may vary, depending on what type of rig you're running, but keeping EVERYTHING would be a rarity for us home hobbyists. You'll see it written here on the site often: it's about quality not quantity. I don't take fores on stripping runs. I keep everything down to 10%. Then on spirit run, typically 200 mL in my 35L (regardless of how full it is), and then I run it down to ~20%.

For me, I average roughly 25/50/25% on my heads/hearts/tails cuts for both whiskey & neutrals. Again, this is me: if there's ANY hint of that acetone smell in heads, it ain't going in. Tails I'm slightly more forgiving on, especially if it's a whiskey & if I know I'll be aging it.

Check out Jimbo's Wheated Gumball thread. The concept of doing a gumball (aka sugarhead) on "spent" grains is now part of my standard procedure. It helps keep your paws off the all-grain while it ages.

Also, I would recommend on your spirit run to run it down to ~20%. Everything below xx% might not make your cuts, but there's flavors there you can recycle into your next batch. 2 ways to do this: keep all your feints (I use a 5 gal corny keg) & do an all feints run***, OR keep your feints for next run of similar recipe batch on the SPIRIT run. You'll get a higher quantity. ***= for me, I try to separate "genres" of spirits. I don't mix tequilas with whiskey or neutrals. Haven't made a rum yet, but that would be another one I'd keep separate.

Just my way of doing things. Keep reading -- you'll get lots of ideas & figure out what works best for you.

Good info above. Smaller still charges tend to jumble fractions throughout the run, making it difficult to gain the separation of flavors that help in making cuts. Also, cereal cornflakes come with added fat, sugar and salt, things that an all-grain bourbon don't have.

FWIW, a good number of bourbon distilleries make minimal cuts, (some say no cuts), barrel virtually everything off the still and let time and oak sort it out.

As a new distiller, it’s usually a good practice to make tight cuts as you gain knowledge of the flavors in the different fractions, then venture into wider cuts. You may find your sense of smell to be better than taste when you’re making cuts, especially for tails. There are some tails jars that seem to taste fine, but when you rub it in your hands, let the ethanol evaporate off and take a sniff, boom, dirty socks. I like saving these “almost hearts” jars for my next run.

Also in my (somewhat limited) experience, thinking of cuts as simply two transition points (heads / hearts - hearts / tails) is fine for making neutral, but maybe less so for making flavoured spirits. I'm sipping on some white dog that is made of a fairly tight hearts cut with a little of 2 jars of tails blended in. But those two jars weren't the early tails. I skipped a couple of jars to reach them. The ones in between didn't add anything interesting.

A 600ml foreshot is about four times what many of us remove from a strip and would have removed a lot more 'nail varnish' than necessary, then shutting down with 35% low wines is quite early and would have left a lot of the fusels in the backset, so I'm not surprised by your result.

Do what you like always makes sense. So does "taste some of what you made early after you get some experience and see if your tastes don't improve right along with your skill."

Interestingly though, you didn't make insanely loose cuts, much less no cuts. That 600 ml cut on the stripping run is pretty dang big for people that make stripping run cuts (overwhelmingly most people don't). And because science is weird and counter-intuitive, that cut included things that would be in a typical spirit run heads cut as well as things that would be in a typical spirit run tails cut.

Just as a super rough guess your fores/head cut was probably about 20% of the total alcohol from your wash, you probably left roughly 5% in the boiler which is also effectively a tails cut, and you stopped your spirit run with about another 5% in the boiler for yet more tails cut. So your "zero cuts" jars represent about 70% of the total alcohol (this would be easy to quantify if you took gravity readings of the ferment). Tight cuts would keep 40-50%, Jack Daniels is somewhere in the high 90s% (they literally can't make cuts, but do have some processes that effectively act like a super tiny cut). Typical hobbyists and craft distillers will keep about 60-65%. So you're in greedy cuts range, nowhere near the JD range, and I imagine almost all of us here would be able to identify it immediately. And I don't mean that to be snooty, there have been a few distillers over the years who swear they love their super wide cut booze, though they are in the vast minority.

Edit to add NZC was posting up the same tree at the same time I was posting, which is always encouraging. Cheers

NZChris wrote: ↑Mon May 09, 2022 12:22 pm A 600ml foreshot is about four times what many of us remove from a strip and would have removed a lot more 'nail varnish' than necessary, then shutting down with 35% low wines is quite early and would have left a lot of the fusels in the backset, so I'm not surprised by your result.

Interesting thank you. So on a 23l ferment with finished abv of 11% what would you have cut out on the stripping run to remove fores and heads?

Just trying to get an idea of how much I overshot on removing the heads and fores with the 600ml.

zapata wrote: ↑Mon May 09, 2022 12:36 pm Do what you like always makes sense. So does "taste some of what you made early after you get some experience and see if your tastes don't improve right along with your skill."

Interestingly though, you didn't make insanely loose cuts, much less no cuts. That 600 ml cut on the stripping run is pretty dang big for people that make stripping run cuts (overwhelmingly most people don't). And because science is weird and counter-intuitive, that cut included things that would be in a typical spirit run heads cut as well as things that would be in a typical spirit run tails cut.

Just as a super rough guess your fores/head cut was probably about 20% of the total alcohol from your wash, you probably left roughly 5% in the boiler which is also effectively a tails cut, and you stopped your spirit run with about another 5% in the boiler for yet more tails cut. So your "zero cuts" jars represent about 70% of the total alcohol (this would be easy to quantify if you took gravity readings of the ferment). Tight cuts would keep 40-50%, Jack Daniels is somewhere in the high 90s% (they literally can't make cuts, but do have some processes that effectively act like a super tiny cut). Typical hobbyists and craft distillers will keep about 60-65%. So you're in greedy cuts range, nowhere near the JD range, and I imagine almost all of us here would be able to identify it immediately. And I don't mean that to be snooty, there have been a few distillers over the years who swear they love their super wide cut booze, though they are in the vast minority.

Edit to add NZC was posting up the same tree at the same time I was posting, which is always encouraging. Cheers

Again great advice thank you. Same for everyone else I have taken all the advice on this thread and I'll use it to make my future runs better.

Just out of curiosity. How do the big bourbon brands get away with taking no cuts based on a health and safety perspective? Surely things like acetaldehyde, methanol, acetone and all the other by products are toxic to be consumed?? As a hobbyist id always take cuts of course because I want to make something far better than commercial products. Just curious how they get away with it. Surely taking no cuts is dangerous!

AppleWood50 wrote: ↑Wed May 11, 2022 12:33 am Just curious how they get away with it. Surely taking no cuts is dangerous

Do a search of Methanol, if that's what you are referring to as dangerous. Someone posted a link here that had a really good explanation as to how the methanol thing works and how it is distributed throughout the run help with the link

Sporacle wrote: ↑Wed May 11, 2022 12:54 am help with the link

Suggest this you read this one for starters....there are others....cant find the other good one i was thinking about, maybe someone else will post one up.
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=77287

AppleWood50 wrote: ↑Wed May 11, 2022 12:33 am Surely taking no cuts is dangerous!

Ethanol its self is a known poison and carcinogen, what do you call dangerous.?

AppleWood50 wrote: ↑Wed May 11, 2022 12:29 am

NZChris wrote: ↑Mon May 09, 2022 12:22 pm A 600ml foreshot is about four times what many of us remove from a strip and would have removed a lot more 'nail varnish' than necessary, then shutting down with 35% low wines is quite early and would have left a lot of the fusels in the backset, so I'm not surprised by your result.

Interesting thank you. So on a 23l ferment with finished abv of 11% what would you have cut out on the stripping run to remove fores and heads?

Just trying to get an idea of how much I overshot on removing the heads and fores with the 600ml.

I thought I'd already told you that?

Don't get confused by fores, foreshots, heads and tails. They are words used differently by distilleries in different countries. On this forum, a foreshot is usually, but not always, referring to a small foreshot taken from a stripping run that removes some excess ethyl acetate and acetone before doing the spirit run.

Heads are the rejected early take from a spirit run, tails are the rejected late take from a spirit run. Reading comments on forums, you could get the idea that heads and tails are some kinds of compounds that will spoil your drink, but they are really just names for your discards and they contain all of the same VOCs as your heart cut, but in different concentrations in relation to ethanol and each other. If you look at a graph of the VOCs that come over during a distillation, some start high and finish low, some start low and finish high. Our job is to choose a heart cut that we like from what we have collected during the run.

Saltbush Bill wrote: ↑Wed May 11, 2022 1:09 am

Sporacle wrote: ↑Wed May 11, 2022 12:54 am help with the link

Suggest this you read this one for starters....there are others....cant find the other good one i was thinking about, maybe someone else will post one up.
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=77287

AppleWood50 wrote: ↑Wed May 11, 2022 12:33 am Surely taking no cuts is dangerous!

Ethanol its self is a known poison and carcinogen, what do you call dangerous.?

So essentially if we was to make a 11% sugar wash and distill it out without taking cuts it wouldn't actually be anymore dangerous than a normal bottle of the same product which had cuts done on the run?

I'm assuming that the byproducts, acetone, acetaldehyde ect are not really in high enough quantities to pose a health risk regardless of if cuts are made.

Does this sound about right?

NZChris wrote: ↑Wed May 11, 2022 1:20 am

AppleWood50 wrote: ↑Wed May 11, 2022 12:29 am

NZChris wrote: ↑Mon May 09, 2022 12:22 pm A 600ml foreshot is about four times what many of us remove from a strip and would have removed a lot more 'nail varnish' than necessary, then shutting down with 35% low wines is quite early and would have left a lot of the fusels in the backset, so I'm not surprised by your result.

Interesting thank you. So on a 23l ferment with finished abv of 11% what would you have cut out on the stripping run to remove fores and heads?

Just trying to get an idea of how much I overshot on removing the heads and fores with the 600ml.

I thought I'd already told you that?

Don't get confused by fores, foreshots, heads and tails. They are words used differently by distilleries in different countries. On this forum, a foreshot is usually, but not always, referring to a small foreshot taken from a stripping run that removes some excess ethyl acetate and acetone before doing the spirit run.

Heads are the rejected early take from a spirit run, tails are the rejected late take from a spirit run. Reading comments on forums, you could get the idea that heads and tails are some kinds of compounds that will spoil your drink, but they are really just names for your discards and they contain all of the same VOCs as your heart cut, but in different concentrations in relation to ethanol and each other. If you look at a graph of the VOCs that come over during a distillation, some start high and finish low, some start low and finish high. Our job is to choose a heart cut that we like from what we have collected during the run.

Thank you I now understand it a lot more. It's more about the concentrations and reducing concentrations of certain compounds to create a higher quality end product.

I'll continue my research on the links posted on this thread so far.

Sometimes, “a picture is worth 1000 words”:
Hope this gives you an idea of “my experience”.
ss

AppleWood50 wrote: ↑Wed May 11, 2022 12:33 am Just out of curiosity. How do the big bourbon brands get away with taking no cuts based on a health and safety perspective? Surely things like acetaldehyde, methanol, acetone and all the other by products are toxic to be consumed?? As a hobbyist id always take cuts of course because I want to make something far better than commercial products. Just curious how they get away with it. Surely taking no cuts is dangerous!

1. Define dangerous? If you can drink the beer, you can drink at least some of the spirit, even with zero cuts. Will you feel more or less stupid intoxicated from the not-ethanol? Will you feel more or less hangover from the not-ethanol? Yup.
2. Big whisk(e)y can make an effective fore/heads cut by using a partial condenser. Product is condensed, but the most volatile elements are vented to atmosphere. This amounts to teensy portion though and is probably roughly equal to or less than what most people would take as a fores cut, or airing out in jars for a day before making cuts.
3. Bourbon and most other American whiskies effectively make a small tails cut by use of their thumper or doubler. Look at most of the alcohols that aren't ethanol or methanol. They are very small percentage of the distillate, so their volatility is affected far more by their physical interactions than their boiling point. They are more volatile from a low ABV solution, and less volatile form a high ABV solution. (in your pot still they will come off early in a stripping run, but late in a spirit run. You probably cut most of them in your large stripfores cut). In a big whiskey distillery they all get distilled from the beer column, but concentrate in the thumper or doubler because the abv is too high for them to readily boil from. If you simply ran like that literally forever eventually it would even out once the thumper got saturated. But if you periodically dump the doubler/thumper for cleaning, maintenance, or for cutting purposes, then you've stopped the build up. How often distilleries do this is almost impossible to discover. Some claim they never do, which is almost certainly not entirely true or the thumper would be full of phase separated nearly pure higher alcohols eventually. Some claim the doubler / thumper is just recycled to the beer well periodically, which would make an atypical product when the still is restarted. Some continually overflow back to the beer well which will result in a steady constant increase of fussel alcohols in the feed which will result in a steady constant increase in both the bottom waste and the thumper. You have to deal with it somehow eventually. Exactly how this is handled is either in the realm of expertise of a master distiller, or is handled by accident when someone decides you gotta do maintenance on the thumper and break it down and dump it. Regardless of the details, it acts as a small tails cut in some way.
4. Scale and "cutting" finished product. If you have a market for budget rotgut, you can sort your barrels and sell your garbage for the bottom shelf products and your honey barrels for the premium market. Jack Daniels is not good, most of the price reflects the marketing and branding. But their single barrel barrel proof is notably better. Not because it was made with different cuts at the still, just through barrel selection.
5. Tennessee whiskey like Jack Daniels gets the Lincoln County Process which filters the raw whiskey over maple charcoal. The charcoal will adsorb some nasties, similar to but less effective than vodka makers using activated carbon.
6. Barrel aging. Shit evaporates unequally and chemically changes, char adsorbs some things. Most bourbon that people actually enjoy is 4-12 years old. Cheap whiskey (not bourbon) can be distilled on a column still like vodka up to 95% (light whiskey) or diluted with up to 80% neutral alcohol (blended whiskey). Either option results in "cuts" though they will be in sidestreams from different heights in the column rather than sequential like a batch still.
7. It just isn't very good. If we define "dangerous" to include hangovers it's obvious that big whiskey like Jack Daniels is worse than what most of us make. If we include the light and blended whiskies they are thin and lightly flavored while still having obvious flaws and rough hangovers.

There are two kinds of cuts - tight heart cuts for drinking white and wide cuts for aging.

Bee wrote: ↑Fri May 13, 2022 7:26 am There are two kinds of cuts - tight heart cuts for drinking white and wide cuts for aging.

You can do more than one cut from one spirit run. The most I’ve done is three different cuts.

NZChris wrote: ↑Sat May 14, 2022 12:49 am

Bee wrote: ↑Fri May 13, 2022 7:26 am There are two kinds of cuts - tight heart cuts for drinking white and wide cuts for aging.

You can do more than one cut from one spirit run. The most I’ve done is three different cuts.

I don't think I ever thanked you for this titbit. It changed the way I thought about cuts enough to make blending a lot more interesting.

NZChris wrote: ↑Sat May 14, 2022 12:49 am

Bee wrote: ↑Fri May 13, 2022 7:26 am There are two kinds of cuts - tight heart cuts for drinking white and wide cuts for aging.

You can do more than one cut from one spirit run. The most I’ve done is three different cuts.

I don't like cheating the barrel out of stock. That's what gumball head runs are for.

As for danger from no cuts:
Distilling does not create any of these compounds. The maximum amount of methanol in a batch of beer is the theoretical maximum from an entire distilling run, were you to have 100% of it left in your final product, which you won't. If there are no cuts done and all the heads/tails are mixed in, and none of it is lost in aging, which it will be, there's still no more than the amount which would be in the original ferment.

The reason for cuts and blending is quality, and to create your desired end product, not to increase safety.