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Hi All,

struggling to get my head around the thoery behind why a spirit run shoud be ran slow.Heard and read different reasons
but whould like a definitive answer.

cheers

I'm sure someone with give you a technical answer but it goes something like this:

Running you still slow, ensures that you get the highest concerntration of the most volitile (lowest boiling point) substance. at the top of the still......usually when your take off point is.

It also keeps you still in equilibrium...this basically means that the majority of the vapour in the still at any one time consists of mainly one substance...in our case this is ethanol.

If you run the still too quickly, you will lost this equilibrium and then basically everything comes up the still....mainly water and a few higher alcohols. If you start capturing these as well you % will go down.

Hope that helps

Me

By too quickly, I am refering to both heating and taking the product off.

if i'm right in my thinking (still relatively new to all of this) if you have to high a heat, the still will still equilse, however at the top it might equalise at 80% for instance. meaning you would end up taking off a less pure product

I'll give it a try.
On a stripping run, all you are concerned with is concentrating the alcohol. Run it hot and fast as your rig can handle. For a spirit run, you want to seperate the fractions, this is easiest to do if you run it as slow as possible, with just enough heat to maintain a soft boil. The slower you run the more defined, and concentrated, the fractions will be.
First is Foreshots, mostly methanol
Second is Heads, mostly ethyl-acetate
Third is Hearts, mostly ethynol (the stuff we are after)
Fourth is tails, this is where you will get the esters, fusil oils, propanols and other cogeners. (Some may be desireable as in the rum oils that come through between 40 and 20% ABV)

Simply put, run too fast during a spirit run will cause you to smear heads and drag tails all through your body section.

Hi all,

Cheers for the replies, been thinking about what you's said and its cleared a few things up in my mind.
Good stuff.

Another thing to consider is that running a stripping run slower has the same effect as running a spirit run slower, which actually would put your spirit run that much farther ahead.

Hack wrote:Another thing to consider is that running a stripping run slower has the same effect as running a spirit run slower, which actually would put your spirit run that much farther ahead.

Not unless you were going to make cuts on it. It'd make no difference cause you are going to use all the fractions anyway.






AndThenItWouldn'tBeAStrippingRunPunkin

I would also mention that running a potstill and running a column you are trying to equalize are 2 different things.

punkin wrote:

Hack wrote:Another thing to consider is that running a stripping run slower has the same effect as running a spirit run slower, which actually would put your spirit run that much farther ahead.

Not unless you were going to make cuts on it. It'd make no difference cause you are going to use all the fractions anyway.






AndThenItWouldn'tBeAStrippingRunPunkin

I've never actually done any comparison on this, but I'm working backwards from the idea of a spirit run. If you run a spirit run too hard you don't get as pure of spirit with a lower %abv, all the way through the run. If that's true wouldn't it make sense that a stripping run would work the same way? I thinking that if you run a stripping run slow and easy like a spirit run you'd get purer low wines with a higher % abv. That's what I mean about putting a spirit run ahead.

Of course, I'm completely open to the possibility of being wrong. It's just an idea I had.

From my observations, it's a finite amount of alchohol in the wash, we are collecting all that alchohol as far as we are able. If we collect it fast, the fractions are blurred and all come over in different mixtures together. If we collect it slower, we are able to seperate those fractions more.
In the case of stripping we collect all those fractions and mix em together to create a pot full of low wines for a later date, so it don't matter if they are mixed up from the start.

I think i see your point, that we are collecting less water if we run slower on a strip, but i don't think it'd be enough to make any discernible difference.

Hack wrote:

punkin wrote:

Hack wrote:Another thing to consider is that running a stripping run slower has the same effect as running a spirit run slower, which actually would put your spirit run that much farther ahead.

Not unless you were going to make cuts on it. It'd make no difference cause you are going to use all the fractions anyway.

AndThenItWouldn'tBeAStrippingRunPunkin

I've never actually done any comparison on this, but I'm working backwards from the idea of a spirit run. If you run a spirit run too hard you don't get as pure of spirit with a lower %abv, all the way through the run. If that's true wouldn't it make sense that a stripping run would work the same way? I thinking that if you run a stripping run slow and easy like a spirit run you'd get purer low wines with a higher % abv. That's what I mean about putting a spirit run ahead.

Of course, I'm completely open to the possibility of being wrong. It's just an idea I had.

I also follow what you are saying Hack, but I think Punkin is more right on this one. When I make just one pass with my still for a final product I like to run it slower and at a lower temperature so that I am getting a cleaner break from heads, hearts and tails. When I am going to make a second pass though, all of that first run is combined together and I really would like to cut about two or three hours off my day so I run it at a much higher temperature. It is going to get seperated twice by this process, so you might as well get a lot of alcohol out the first run, and then get the clean seperation the second run.

This making sense? Did in my head before I put it out here.

punkin wrote:... we are collecting less water if we run slower on a strip, but i don't think it'd be enough to make any discernible difference.

That's probably it right there. And since keeping the fractions separate on a stripping run doesn't really matter, why bother? If it made a big difference there'd probably be a group of people advocating running slow on stripping runs too.

I used to double distill in my pot still but after a few runs I couldn't see much point. Now I do a single SLOW run, take a bit of care with my cuts and I believe I have more flavour, especially in my rum. Maybe this is 'wrong'but it seems to work for me.

blanik