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indyspirits

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These are probably oligosaccharides and maybe proteins from the wood in the barrel. You said this was your longest aged product, is it also in used barrels? Used barrel aging shows this more, also exposed toasted oak, in our experience. New fully charred barrels don't tend to show this. The longer aging would mean more exposure to the wood extractives. You can remove it by chill filtering, if you don't want it.

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  • 1 year later...

Sorry to pickup on an old thread.  We have "cloud" issues with oils/proteins/fatty acids or whatever coagulating in the gin.  We have been filtering our gin with 1 micron filters and and are happy with the taste.  We  have used a .45 micron and found the taste to be a bit less vibrant?  I know dialing back the botanical bill is an option but I am not keen to do that.  We bottle at 42% and I do understand the higher abv the less chance of the "clouds".  Does any have suggestions based on your experience?  Much appreciated.

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1 hour ago, bcoutts said:

Sorry to pickup on an old thread.  We have "cloud" issues with oils/proteins/fatty acids or whatever coagulating in the gin.  We have been filtering our gin with 1 micron filters and and are happy with the taste.  We  have used a .45 micron and found the taste to be a bit less vibrant?  I know dialing back the botanical bill is an option but I am not keen to do that.  We bottle at 42% and I do understand the higher abv the less chance of the "clouds".  Does any have suggestions based on your experience?  Much appreciated.

If you go back through this and other related threads, you will find that there are many things that can cause cloudiness. Gin usually is a completely different situation from whiskey. Assuming your gin is made from fairly neutral spirit, and redistilled with botanicals including juniper, and the botanicals are not in the condensation side of the vapor path, most of the cloudiness you see would be from oils from the botanicals. You really should not see much difference between a 1 micron and a 0.45 micron filtration in that case (although you might on early filtrations, as the filter materials often will saturate with oils initially, more so for the finer filter). In this discussion, I am assuming you are not barrel aging the gin. If you are, then the issues associate with aged whiskey also can come into play. If the oils are what are causing the cloudiness, you have only two choices: reduce the oils in the original distillate, or bottle at higher proof. That's it. Now the latter is an easy solution. The former more complicated, since you can reduce the source materials or change the conditions of distillation, including where in path, proof of source, cuts, etc.

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