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So just before I started my run my wife accidentally dropped my hydrometer so instead of measuring every jar with a corresponding temperature reading for my notes all I did was collect and make notes from smell and taste it will air out tomorrow and I will taste for cuts on Tuesday i can'twait to see the differencebetweenwhere i think the cut is today and where it ends. I am guessing that I have between 6 and 7 liters between 70 and 80 percent. My plan is to age it in a small barrel for 10 months

Braille helps those who can’t “see” to read. It sounds like you’re learning how to use ALL your senses instead of relying on your “crutches”.
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Even if this turns out badly I will have learned a very expensive lesson on what not to do

You shouldn't need a proof hydrometer to make cuts.
Rely more on your senses
A hydrometer has no sense of smell or taste.

I rarely ever use my hydrometer to measure individual jars. I’ve never found it gave me any helpful data point to make cuts. Smell and taste are all you need. I only measure the final ABV after dumping all my keeper jars into one vessel. Interesting thing is I usually end up with a very similar combined ABV if I’m making the same recipe back to back, after cuts.

Use your hydrometer for proofing at the end. Also, you shouldn’t need a thermometer when pot stilling. More useless data.

Good for you! The only thing I use a refractometer for is to know how far down to run the tails before I pull the plug. They go in the feints jar. It doesn't matter what the proof is along the way. The smell and taste are what gets put in the jars.

Congratulations Ridgeback . Now all you need to do is throw out the thermometer and you’ll be a real distiller

Seriously though , it can be daunting running with out crutches but it’ll be better for you in the long run

Congratulations on a job well done. Doing a cut without modern crutches is a good skill to have.

I've never used a hydrometer to make cuts. Taste, smell, intuition. You'll do fine.

One day, when you consciously cut all of your batches without the ‘benefit’ of a hydrometer, you should thank your wife for doing you a giant favor.

How do you all do cuts when tasting if you don't know your starting proof? I do normally smell and taste everything cut down to 30 percent without the hydrometer I know where I would make my cuts but they seem rather wide on the smell alone I haven't watered anything down yet to taste

If it smells and tastes good, it is almost certainly good.

I find I use various instruments during the run to judge how far along I am, but not to determine my chosen cut points. If I were doing multiple back-to-back runs of the exact same thing I can use the milestones I determined on the first run or two and apply to the rest, otherwise each run is unique and requires your senses to truly determine a cut point. Even then I still use my small jars as I approach, and pass, a cut point to 'catch' it. The rest is captured into a larger vessels since heads are heads, hearts are hearts and tails are tails and don't benefit from granular collection. That could also be a more experienced me talking as I used to collect all in jars and directly evaluated everything. Now I use my personal judgment to pick out the volume that needs such evaluation and just collect the rest together, in their respective vessels.