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Pot Stills, flavor vs. heads and tails


sweetT14

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I would like to start a distillery that produces true form moonshine, or young whiskey.

I say moonshine, because all of the recent buzz over moonshine that has came about has pushed many to produce a "legal" moonshine to be sold in retail stores. Well I have a concern that I wanted to gain some insight on. The moonshine in liquor stores has poor flavor compared to the homemade shine that has been produced in the past.

My question is... Does the flavor have that much to do with the distilling technique? And if so, why do people think they are making the whiskey better by distilling multiple times?

I have heard that if you distill it multiple times, whether using plates or a stripping run then a spirit run, however you may, that it will cause the alcohol to be more pure and higher proof, with less heads and tails. So yeah distill it over and over but this also causes the loss of flavor, am I right??

I know that they add back in the heads and tails to keep the flavor when they distill it a second time, but it still doesn't have the flavor that homemade shine has.

Is this solely from the distillation technique? like a pot still with worm condenser (yes that simple) vs. a column still with numerous plates, dephlegmator, and all the bells and whistles.

or is it more about the ingredients used?

I might be too much of a novice to even be posting on this forum, but that's why I posted under beginners....

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  • 3 weeks later...

Has little to do with the still as far as the flavor of good white lightning goes. I assume you are talking about the old timey kind, corn and rye and sugar? The tastes comes from wild yeast. Plain and simple. If made right, it tastes like sotol or a good artisanal tequila.

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I second what fldme said. Yeast is an often overlooked ingredient. The strain of yeast can change the entire flavor profile.

Cultivating a wild yeast is a long and difficult process unless you have access to the proper type of lab. I'd try some of the more "out there" ale yeasts available, and see if that works. And the type/efficiency of the still will have little effect on the product, unless you are going through umpteen plates with a vodka still or similar.

Another contributor to the flavor in 'shine is the unfiltered, untreated water used...often from a nearby well or stream. That might be a little tougher to replicate...

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I hear ya but are you talking sach, lacto, Brett, pedio....? Most likely a blend of all of those. Kind of fascinating to me as I have done a lot of research and travel studying mixed culture and "wild yeast" brewing. White labs has some whiskey strains out right now, but not mixed culture. Surely there is lacto in there and of course sach. The thing is, in a typical whiskey mash fermentation, you really shouldn't have enough time for the "wild" yeast to take hold. Lacto *maybe* will have a day or two max to start doing its thing after the sach slows down. I strip my mash after 6 or 7 days. That doesn't allow for much wild yeast to do its thing

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From my experience, the closest thing to it is hefeweizen yeast. Wild yeast if selected and cultivated and you kept a Dona tank of it going, should have plenty of time to do its thing. The famous beam yeast is wild yeast. You can get the flavor in the white dog. Very pleasant Brett like taste.

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Brett is what I refer to as a polite yeast. Polite in the sense that it doesn't start doing its thing til all the other yeasts and bacteria are done with their thing. In a mixed culture pitch, you wont get any Brett character for a couple of weeks. I would be amazed if beam lets their mash ferment long enough for any sort of Brett character to come through in their whiskey. It would need to be at the absolute bare minimum of a month before any distinguishable Brett character would begin to show up in the mash. Interestingly, if you pitch Brett solo, it ferments pretty similarly sacc and much more cleanly than when pitched in aimed culture.

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