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Gin - Proof off the still


DSW

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Hi Folks, I can't seem to find any useful guidelines on what to pull gin off the still at. Intuitively, I would think in the 170-180 range for maximum cleanliness/clarity and perhaps to avoid louching, but I've seen literature that suggests the 160 range. Thoughts would be appreciated. Cheers

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In my experience, the volatile oils that cause louching concentrate in the 'heads' of the run, and the proof of 'end-heads' varies from batch to batch. The best way I've found for my process is to a 'demisting' test on the beginning of the run by pulling 25 or so ml every few minutes and adding 25 ml of water to every sample. When it stops clouding up at 50/50 spirit to water, I can be pretty confident that I can start collecting hearts and have no problems with louching for that batch.

As for your end-hearts cut, that's up to you, but I pot distill my gin (direct macerated, fired off botanicals) and usually stop at about 135-140 proof, but sometimes it's lower than that because my I make the call based on sensory... the parrot proof is just a helpful hint that I may be getting closer to cutting time.

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My combined gin proof (new make gin) is about 155. I discard a bit of heads, defined by the harsher juniper oils and then shut down the still at about 115. No tails are collected.

Pot still with maceration.

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Hi Folks, I can't seem to find any useful guidelines on what to pull gin off the still at.

Gin, for the most part is a very subject distillation . To find our hearts range we initially made the profile by taking fractions and sampling them. We found harsher oils in the very beginning of the distillation; and when we started pulling a bitterness we didn't like we we called that the tails cut. Certainly there is much alcohol left in the still. I fooled around for collecting heads/tails for redistillation in the next batch but found no flavor benefit (and a bit more work). So, when we hit "tails" we just shut the still down.

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Hi Micah Nutt,

Quick question as you seem one of the few people to have tried redistilling raw tails (ie without reprocessing first to clean it up) - did you notice any change in consistency by recycling the tails?

I understand the motivation for recycling tails is largely an economic one as can be a lot of alcohol down the drain, but it seems to play havoc with consistency when trying to recycle.

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Hi all,

As someone mentioned above gin is a very subjective topic as there are so many variables. I see some of the rough cut points above and they all make sense to me. Where I work we take a small heads cut (1.5 litres, with a NGS charge of 200 litres diluted to approx 120 proof for maceration), and cut to "tails" at 160 proof (I put the tails in apostrophes there as I do not think it is tails at that point personally).

I think we do not take nearly a large enough heads cut (leaving quite a pungent, spirity distillate) and our heart-tails cut is far too high meaning we are not getting the earthier flavors lower down, and leaving us with poor yield.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi Micah Nutt,

Quick question as you seem one of the few people to have tried redistilling raw tails (ie without reprocessing first to clean it up) - did you notice any change in consistency by recycling the tails?

I understand the motivation for recycling tails is largely an economic one as can be a lot of alcohol down the drain, but it seems to play havoc with consistency when trying to recycle.

As per experimenting with saving heads and collecting tails for redistilling, I found it was considerably more time consuming running out the tails. Also, collecting and reusing heads just adds, for the most part, to the subsequent distillations' heads to be collected (and therefor, more time). The finally product I found no better with not much more yield.

Sorry about the delay in response.

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