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What to do with HEADS?


mtnman22

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  • 2 weeks later...

I would be fairly confident in saying that those who make whisky in an alembic (no plates) pot still would re-run their feints, usually in the next spirit run.

My feints still contain about 1/3 of the ethanol that went into the still. There are some of the more interesting flavours in the feints but there are also a lot of unwanted flavours that boil off towards the end of the run.

A little bit of basic science here,. As the alcohol is boiled off the boiling point in the pot increases slowly. As the temperature rises other volatiles start evaporating off, some of them are not what you want in typical whisk(e)y.

When you re-run the tails in the next spirit run the good alcohol and flavours will come off early in the run at a lower temperature.

OR I have heard of doing a completely feints run. The spirit will probably be quite different from the normal spirit run of low wines because the concentration of volatiles in the pot will be quite different. Could be very tasty or crap, but that is what I believe "craft" is all about, as long as you chuck out the crap.

Since this thread was about HEADS, what are you calling heads? Is it everything up to the HEART, or just the very first runoff?

I was originally taught whisky making as some of the Scots do it.

The FORESHOTS are everything up to the start of the heart.

Some Scottish and Australian distilleries re-run the "FORES" up to 10 times before they dump them

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  • 3 weeks later...

I like this idea, has anyone run heads through one of these? Does the proof inconsistency effect its functionality at all, and down to what proof can you run in one?

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