My journey so far....

[Daz]

Im new and a novice, i got myself a Vevor 2 pot 30l still (yes i know most of the experienced people here say they are shit but you got to start somwhere). Anyway i started out with a few basic sugar washes and then a brown sugar/golden syrup wash for a rough rum distillate. Through this new journey ive been learning about cuts, stripping runs, aging and flavouring etc. Where i did stripping runs i was getting 80% ABV outputs from 40% ABV low wines which i was quite happy about. My next project was a Buccaneer Bob rum recipe, which introduced me to home made yeast nutrients and dundar for my future BB rum iterations. Ok so now we get to the good part, my first grain mash. I decided i wanted to go with a mainly barely based mash, 4 kg kibbled barley, 1kg kibbled maize, i toasted about half the barley in the hopes of getting a more complex flavor. Boiled it, added the amaylise enzyme. I took a gravity reading and it said 1.000 which i discounted as being erroneous, added my Still Spirits yeast and it seemed to be happily fermenting for about 2 days. Took a gravity reading 10 days later 1.010 then down to 1.000 on day 13. Strained the mash and started the distillation run and got 20% ABV at the tap. At this stage i realised i had f@#ked up and probably not done work on the grains to release the sugars. Two choices, chuck it out or try and save it.......i ended up splitting the wash into 2 batches inuding the grain mash, added 2kg sugar to each, split a 150gm turbo golden yeast between the 2 batches, gravity reading was 1.070 for each. Waited 5 days gravity reading was 1.000 for each. Stripped both batches yeilding 40% - 15% ABV low wines. Today i did the spirit run, adding 2.25l of high ABV feints from another neutral run to the wash to get it up to 40% ABV. The spirit run produced about 4 litres in the high 70s before dropping off to mid 60s and then a sharp drop off to mid 30 down to 15% ABVs. The transition from hearts to tails has a very nice sweet almost chocolate molasses note to it. The cuts, based off taste (watered to 40%) seem to have some promising flavours. Learnt a lot on this one and i think i made the right decision in splitting the mash/wash and adding sugar. Ill be taking my learnings into the next mash .