Still

[degringolade]

 

Romanticism / Akseli Gallen-Kallela/ Lake Keitele

Woke up this morning a bit early.  No problem there.  Still is running as we speak.  I am watching is more closely than usual this time to figure out the heating characteristics.  One of the most important things to watch for when working toward Mr. EtOH is to be careful about the foreshot.  While Mr. EtOH is your friend, Mr. MeOH most certainly isn’t.  I have been using sugar washes lately, as they are super easy and they don’t have any vegetative mass that gives rise to methanol, I still make certain that I remove the first 40mL of the distillation run and toss it down the drain just to make certain.

I feel good about today’s run.  I scored around 20 pounds of C&H at Cash and Carry for $2.00 (It was slashed and got sealed up with tape and marked down).  So my standard one-gallon run cost only $0.20.  With this kind of cost, experimentation is the thing to do.  My standard lot of EtOH is a gallon of wash, which matches nicely with my still (Airstill) which has a gallon capacity.  The fancily titled “Fermentation Vessel” has a genealogy harkening back to a jug of hot cherry peppers obtained from Groceout for the princely sum of $3.99.  The airlock is a bandaid that I replace when it starts looking ratty.

So after I dumped the fermented wash into the still and got it going, I had a nice fat layer of yeast on the bottom of the fermentation jug.  Since I am always looking for a means of saving effort/money/time, I figured today’s experiment will be reusing yeast.  I weighed out the two pounds of sugar into a pot , filled it up to around 10 cups total and brought it up to 80℉ and made sure that all the sugar was fully dissolved and then dumped the sugar solution (wash) back into the fermentation jug and put the top back on.  I’ll report back in a week or so how this went.

Now the run has begun.  I tossed the first 25mL and started collecting.  I will stop when I have one quart moonshine.  These usually come out at right around 100 proof (50% EtOH).  Today I will be making blackberry flavored stuff.  I will put a couple of cups of frozen blackberries from last year's harvest into a 2-quart brown mason jar with 2 teaspoons of glycerol (for mouthfeel), dump in the results of todays run and put it in the fridge for a week to do it’s thing.  After a week, I will pull it out of the fridge and blend it with my handy-dandy $3.99 wand mixer from Goodwill and then put it back into the fridge for another week.

To finish things up, when all that rigamarole is complete, I will filter it through a coffee filter, adjust the proof to 80 proof and then report back the results.