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Yes that's my official strategy now: two stripping runs with dilution, and a spirit run with dilution. A Barley wash for neutral seems to me a bit of a blasphemy: barley is for beer or whisky 😜

That's another thing that keeps me too much near the kettle. I have this possibly wrong idea that I have to stir the wort during boiling to reduce the risk of scorching. I suppose this makes no sense, because I have theoretically no solids in the wort, and the convective motion should move the...

@Miraculix Well, yes, I meant "gruit" as "any herbal addition meant as a preservative, different from hop". I see that not all herbal additions qualify as "gruit". I know all the fiscal history of "gruit" and how it was used to tax beer etc. but what I was saying is that herbal additions did...

But that's the point: I want them cheap and good-tasting! 😀 I did hit 95-96% with my column and I attribute the "rum" taste to that 5% of non-alcohol content. In my first and so far only spirit run, I did not dilute. I stripped 4 washes, and then I put the 4 washes in my kettle and made a...

It's an additive with the European code E551. It has many names: silica gel, colloidal silica, silica sol, Kieselsol in German, silica dioxide etc (I am translating from Italian so don't get the names literally). It's always E551 and, if it's E551, it's that. Having an European food additive...

I don't have the possibility to cold crash but I am playing with final product clarifying substances and, after some research, it appears that silica sol (E551) works well in the fermenter and it works better at ambient temperature than at cold temperatures. I tried it once with a beer which is...

I don't agree with this theory, that in the past they did not have antibacterial and therefore they drunk all beer sours. For what I know gruit did act as an antibacterial agent, but it cannot impart the bittering that hop imparts. The "antiillness" properties (bacteria were unknown) of certain...

Although I wouldn't call gruit a "bittering agent" and I suppose generally speaking that non-hopped medieval beer was much sweeter than we can imagine now, there is a thread in the forum about a homemade beer made traditionally in Africa, South Africa if I recall correctly. Not the usual...

Yes bottle 3 seems absolutely lighter.

If you window is, at it appears, to the right, the right bottle might receive more light and the other two bottles might be in the shadow of the first bottle. That might make the difference appear greater than in reality.

I am new to distillation and I am trying to obtain good neutral. I always have a "rum" undertone from my sucrose washes. Good or very good once you put herbs in it, but "rumy" when I taste it alone. I will next strip twice before doing the spirit run with the packed column. I think this is the...

This is very interesting. I came to the partial - and open to revision - conclusion that what gives the "flair" of corn, what, oats and, on a different table, the "sugary" taste of sugar wash, is the water component of the ferment which survives the distillation. Human taste buds are...

Before I get too tired (it's 3:25 here) I have an idea which might be interesting for the OP. IF your process is clearly repeatable, you could: a) Make 10 samples of 10 different degrees of alcohol reduction; b) Make accurate measuring of whatever parameter you find differentiating enough...

Wrong thread. Deleted.

Dude, either you are a poacher, as your nickname implies, or you drink too much beer, or my English is really deprived of clarity and I should begin from page one, which is entirely possible. And I do hope you are not a poacher although crazy I cannot tell (and the Pope would say: who am I to...

Same here. I don't even attempt to get rid of the spent grain if a few days haven't passed. I let the grains drain in a bucket and I try to collect them when they are not too wet. I must recycle them in the humid collection and I cannot just throw "garbage" in it, I dry it as much as possible...

If "he" is myself, I am not saying that. You can know ABV if: You have a hydrometer, and with that you measure OG and FG, and then you calculate ABV; OR You have a refractometer, and with that you measure OG and FG, and then you calculate ABV; There is no difference between refractometer OG...

If you took the OG gravity, before fermentation, of that beer, you can use the refractometer to know the FG of that beer, which in turn allows you to calculate how much alcohol there is. Comparing the refractometer FG reading to a hydrometer will not tell you how much alcohol there is, nor the...

Alcohol affects a refractometer reading and that is why, while you can have a decently accurate density measure by measuring a wort (no alcohol, you are measuring an OG) with a refractometer, you cannot use a refractometer to measure density of a fermented beer (with alcohol, you are measuring...

That can only work if you use a hydrometer (which can be graduated in Plato or Brix or other measures). Actually not even because it doesn't ask you the OG so how can that infer the ABV from the FG? This is not something possible or I don't see part of the page for some reason. If you use a...