Happy New Year All
First post after a long time lurking but here goes. In my gin distilling, I've recently increased juniper concentration from about 12 to 18g per litre of 50% neutral charge. Distillate comes off the still at 85% abv. However, when the output drops to about 82% (c. 55% yield), there's a very astringent, unpleasant bitterness coming through. I did a small test run using just the juniper berries and this is certainly where the bitterness flavour stems from. I didn't crush the juniper berries but did macerate for 12 hours prior to distillation (berries in the pot).
I'm a bit concerned as I expected to be able to run hearts to lower than this (79/80% at least) but doing so taints the gin. The early hearts are great but the bitterness comes on pretty hard and it's nasty!
Could this be a bad batch of berries or do I just need to be tighter when cutting to tails? Is my yield even close to an acceptable range?
Would really appreciate your views. Many thanks.
Broon