Hello, friends. I am here not because of a distilling question but because of an enzyme question.

I want to brew a poorly converted beer to leave a ton of sugar in the finished product. I want to do this so I can add One gallon of wort, to 5.5 gallons of cider to make a semi sweet finished hard cider.

I think technically this is called a Graff. Under other circumstances, I would just use to row and do a bad mash but I don't have any on hand.

So if I take corn or wheat or Rolled barley and use only alpha enzyme, That should leave me with a wort with a lot of unfermentable sugar right?

I am aware that some tree types have variants and I am a little unsure. To save me having to go down a tree species rabbit hole, does anyone have experience or knowledge of this?

Thanks I advance

Is there a real need to crack or does it just slow the process down?

I had a bad experience with some fermentation that went a long time and distilled the next time with lots of sugar left and had a much better experience, is there a rule to how much sugar should be left when ready for distilling?

I have a glass thumper keg on my still setup and was wondering if anyone has tried a flavor of Starbursts b4? Would something like that even work?

I'ma write up my project here soon here. But basically I've got 7 gallons of 75% corn/25% rye/dextrose simple sour mash moonshine, from nine generations of sour mashing, put in 16 x 1/2 gallon mason jars for aging.

Plus another 2 gallons I'm keeping as white whiskey, and is already not bad for sipping only a few days from blending all the generations together and proofing down to 114.

I have the staves from a 3 liter American white oak barrel that I bought about 3 years ago, and used for a couple batches of barrel aged Manhattan. It's had about 6 months of rye / bourbon/sweet vermouth in it, and then I took it apart and the staves have been sitting in a box in my garden shed since then.

Cut each stave in half to about 5 in long, and even just cutting them they had this fairly magnificent rye / cocktail aroma to them. Toasted them for 90 minutes at 385° F, filling the house with an aroma of vanilla, Manhattan cocktail, with faint overtones of sweet white oak and toasted bread.

Then I gave them a light char on all the surfaces, hosed them down to extinguish them, and put two of the domino/staves in each jar with 7 cups of 'shine at 114 proof. Which released a little bit of new make whiskey aroma on top of that gorgeous wood smell.

My house could smell exactly like this for a very long time, and I would be a very happy man.

OK so I have a simple sugar wash going just sugar water and yeast I can't find a strait answer anywhere I look is freeze distillation of a sugar wash safe due to methanol and stuff and I know freeze distillation isn't technically distillation but is it safe to drink after words

So I’m planning to make some rum from molasses. Any recipes for flavoring anyone wants to share? I’ve had this idea of pomegranate lately being infused.

Honestly I forgot about this. I normally chuck the mash after the first run. But I’ve seen to put the back set in there and make it generational. Using 5 gal buckets and added 5lbs of sugar back into it will just a split a half pack of leftover yeast into the two buckets. 1/4 pack into 2 5gal buckets. It’s been bubbling very little for about 3 weeks but just checked it and the pr is 20? Is this too high and did I ruin it?

Ok...so my buddy got me into fermenting from cheap juice. Like always I run out...get all the gear and start. I'm still learning but I've made 10gal or so. I love it.

My wife's uncle has toyed with distilling. Has a nice set up. Made some great shine and cognac..well..great to our tastes anyway.

Soo...he's tired of doing it..he doesn't drink..and wanted to sell...well of course his son volunteered me to buy, I have the space and the spare scratch (kinda) and married to his fav niece lol...so I'm picking up his full kit for 1500. Now I have no idea what all it is but he's not cheap and I'm sure he's cutting us a significant deal..just how he is.

I have no idea what I'm doing here but picking it up this weekend... Lol....here we go!

Endnote. I'm a huge fan of the prison hooch sub...I feel like that's exactly what I'm doing...is this the prime spirits sub? Any others I should be watching?

Wish me luck!

I have some question regarding the dephlegmator I am having a hard figuring it out I have a continuous pump of water from my cooling barrel but I have to put a valve on the dephlegmator side because other wise it is almost impossible to not flood my plates but when I check the output from it there's barely any water coming out of it am I flooding simply because 2 inch column is too small for my size set up? I am planning some day soon to jump up to a 3-4 inch column another note to make is my condenser is wide open flow 100% of the time any help or tricks would be great

Have a 5 gal bucket of plums frozen in my chest freezer. About time to pull them out and start the magic. Any thoughts on how to remove the pits? Paint stirrer to blend and then pick em out? Or remove them one at a time and then blend?

I know this has been brought up hundreds of times. I've read through a bunch of the older posts. 50lbs of cracked corn is 60$ from a homebrew store or 10$ from a feed store. I can get whole corn free from a friend's farm. I found an organic cracked corn for 18$ from a feed store. I have done work in several distilleries and noticed the corn they use comes straight from the field by the truck load. What would be the benefit of buying from the homebrew store?

Edit: lots of great responses. I wish I could respond to everyone individually. Thanks for the advice, knowledge, and support

I have read that some will boil water, add sugar/grains, let it simmer an hour or so, then let it cool and then pitch yeast.

I've also read of boiling the water and pouring it over the sugar/grains, allowing it to "stew" as it cools, then pitching yeast.

Is there any benefits to either process?

Single malt day 1. Going very strong

Hello

Just bought my first still. I'm needing to do my first run and I'm curious if anyone has an economic wash they could recommend.

I’m curious to try a bit of aging/ infusing (most likely with planks or staves) of non-oak woods. Has anyone experimented with other woods, and if so, how’d it go?

Ive seen some people in my family run the menthol back into it? and im not sure if you should actually do that so i want other peoples opinion

Hi all,

Looking for some help estimating potential yield so I can procure some storage vessels for what I intend to produce in my next project.

My homebrew shop has a special on flaked corn and I did a small run of a flaked corn based whiskey with malted barley and wheat last year that I want to redo on a larger scale.

My system is capably of producing ~30L of wort at ~10-12% depending on efficiency.

I will be getting a sack of flaked corn (25kg) and doing a mash with 75% flaked corn, 13% wheat and 12% barley, I'll be using some powdered enzyme to help with conversion. In order to achieve the ~ 10% that will require about 8.3kg of corn and about 1.2-1.3kg of wheat and barley respectively. That means I can get 3 of these mashs out of the single sack of corn producing a total of ~90L of fermented wort at ~10% ABV (using US-05).

I intend to strip the 3 volumes and then do a spirit run.

Assuming for the stripping run that I go down to a total distillate ABV of ~30%, that will be about 30L out of the strip at 30% (22.5 if I cut it off at something more like 40%).

From this stripping run I will then run the total volume through a single spirit run, make cuts and then split up whatever I get into 5L glass demijohns with oak spirals.

I will be using a pot still with copper scrubbers in the column. What sort of yield can I expect to get after making cuts in this scenario (I understand how long a piece of string is but more looking for rules of thumb or other people's experiences). Also what ABV would I expect the blended product to be.

I know there's probably a lot of what ifs here etc but appreciate any insight.

Anyone got a recipe for making sorghum whiskey or a sorghum spirit from sorghum?

Some of the metal balls fell into my mash. Anyone know if these are iron or lead ? I don't have a magnet on hand to test.

Should I just toss the mash out ?

Here sits an old set up. The intent it to put minimal cost into it but still have something acceptable to work with. Going to remove the condenser and connect column on it to 8 gallon thumper (stainless milk can shown) and put that condenser on other side of thumper. Column is 2”. It 90s and reduces down to 1/2”. Then 1/2” would go into and out of thumper. Condenser output it 1/2” as well. I’m a bit concerned with the manor in which the 2” reduces to 1/2” is too constrictive and will cause issues. 2” copper and fittings are expensive so I’d rather not have to rework this old thing if not necessary. However, since adding thumper I can reducing column height to free up some material I suppose. Thoughts?

Heat source propane burner. No safety pressure relief on keg but the thumper does have one. The nut on union is brass but out only holds copper together - it is not exposed to contents of the inside of pipe.

Anyone use these things for Spirit runs instead of their regular still?

I bought one just to fuck around with and tried it out last night by throwing some feighnts that I was saving for my next run and what came out of it was surprisingly good.

My thoughts are to run the fan on a dedicated circuit and control the heater with a variac device to slow down the stream a bit.

Anyone else doing this?

Four gallons of ~15% blackberry wine to run down bright and early!

Running a spirit run of 100% oat whisky today and looking for suggestions on how I should age it to not overpower the oat flavour. I have plenty of white oak from Virgin to well used and port soaked. What would you use ?

Hi all

I have a sugar wash on the go. It's 7kg sugar, water to 25l ish and still spirits distiller's yeast.

It was (slowly) plodding on but seems to have slowed to a crawl. Started at a gravity of 1.1 and over two weeks is now sat at 1.05 ish and hasn't moved for a few days. Temperature is kept at 23 Deg by a heat mat.

I've got some brewers yeast and sugar to hand. Is there anything I can do to kickstart it? I was hoping to test my air still this weekend.

If I add 20g brewers yeast and some sugar and give it a good stir, do you think it will get there?

Olly