Do You Really Need To Clear Your Wash?

today we are here to talk about my thoughts on clearing or clarifying a wash before it goes into the still why would you do it the pros the cons is it worth it let's get stuck in how's it going chases i hope you're having a kick-ass week i'm jesse and this is still it still it the channel all about chasing the craft of home distillation and making it a legitimate hobby so clearing your wash guys this is something that i see a bunch of new distillers talking about um kind of worrying about actually it's one of those things that how clear is clear enough right you obviously don't want to put porridge into your still or do you you know but is something that you can read a newspaper through really necessary there's kind of a spectrum and it is hard for the new distiller to decide what is relevant for them and what they need in their situation in your situation if that's the situation you're in and i think this kind of to muddy the waters even more excuse the pun um you know there's products and and companies out there that that push certain products that do this and you know there's nothing wrong with that but you get the idea so before we get stuck into the how to do this and when to do this side of things let's talk about why you would want to do this can you hear my kids fighting over the bike out there hilarious so why do people want to do this in the first place to me there's there's two main things that people talk about when it comes to clarifying the wash number one is to prevent scorching now scorching is where whatever heat source you have in your pot whether it be gasified from underneath or an electric element in there or whatever it happens to be that ends up literally burning something in the still which can lead to all sorts of correct like nasty off flavors in the products you basically you're burning something and you're pushing those smoked sort of burnt flavors through into your product and there's just no getting rid of that once you get to that point that is the first one the second one that people talk about are kind of off flavors and generally what the topic of that discussion is is sort of stuff coming from the yeast so you have too much yeast in the pot too much yeast and suspension and you can get this you can get these yeasty flavors coming you know from that this might be a little controversial but personally i think that that second issue getting yeasty flavors uh from a unclarified wash just isn't i think it's a non-issue and the reason for that is if it was uh how do you explain bourbon it's almost always distilled on the grain it is absolutely chock packed full of yeast and it's not an issue so i think personally the way i think about this is if you're getting weird flavors from yeast and your final product your pro your problem isn't clarifying the wash your problem is the type of yeast you're using or the way you're treating your yeast that's that's my thinking on it and i know that there is a um kind of a black and white reaction to a situation and of course these nuance and different specific situations where that may not be the case and so on and so forth but as a general rule to the to the new distiller if you're getting whack yeast flavor in your product it isn't because you need to clear your wash more uh it is because you need to do a better job either with your elite year selection or the way you're looking after your yeast and your ferment should we move on we can forget about yeast now can we cool so if we take yeast off the table and we don't talk about that anymore the thing we do have left is the scorching issue which i do believe is you know there's no denying it it happens and when it does happen it's almost certainly not what you wanted unfortunately there is no hard and fast rule to what you can get away with and what you can't get away with when it comes to scorching so there is no hard and fast rule as to what you should or shouldn't do when it comes to clarifying your wash before it goes into your pot that's unfortunate i know but let's see if we can clear the air a little bit further so many so many bad puns about um murky and clarification and i'm not even trying but let's see if we can clean things up a little bit for those that are new to the hobby i like to think about it kind of as a spectrum there is a spectrum of what you can get away with depending on the type of steel you're running and the way you're heating it really there's a few factors that make a big difference here and the first one is the the density of the heat that you're putting into your pot now what i mean by this is how big of a surface area is the heat spread out by now there's a bunch of different things to take into account here for example uh if you've got a a blow torch like there's a tiny little flame on the bottom of a big-ass pot that is very dense heat right but perhaps you've got a way of kind of insulating and dispersing that heat then it is not such a pinpoint source of heat so it's hard for me to describe this exactly because there's things like the size of the burner the thickness of the actual pot the material that the pot is made out of is it stainless steel is it copper is it you know one of those fancy ass pots with the five layers and all that sort of stuff that you've turned into a pot to boil your product in is it an electric element that is directly you know into the product the the heating element is touching your wash or maybe it's an electric element but it's got a kind of like a bay marie style jacket like the the genio that i use has got an oil jacket that sort of diffuses that heat around pretty much the whole pot relatively uniformly all of these things you need to take into account when you're trying to decide i guess how scorchy your pot can be the next thing i suggest you think about is the way that you are using that still in this specific instance so are you going to be turning it up to full blast going as hot and hard as you can to do a stripping run or are you going to be using it on a really low setting and going low and slow for a a more precise spirit run you know obviously the stripping room is going to be more scorchy than the spirit run now i know this is hard for new distillers because there's just so many different combinations of things that i can't give you a hard and fast answer so instead of doing that let me give you a few examples of what i run on one far far far end i have the genio that is electric elements but it is surrounded by an oil jacket around the outside and at any one point that oil is only getting to about 110 degrees celsius and then it's conducting through the inner wall of the pot into the wash so it's heating up from all directions at once pretty much so that is the least scorchy thing that i have here i have my 50 litre keg which has two two kilowatt elements directly touching uh inside now if i'm using that as a stripping still that is a lot of energy going into a relatively small place so that can be quite scorchy because a chunk of something can literally touch the element right and then now we're in big trouble i also have the i also have the claw hammer still which is very similar to that it's just a it's a much smaller still but it's one two kilowatt element instead of two and then i have the uh chinese pot still which if i was trying to run it as a stripping still would probably be the scorchiest of all of them because it's such thin tiny gauge little stainless steel and i'd be whacking it on you know a hot gas burner in actual fact it turns out being actually quite good for example people are always surprised that i put everything like all the botanicals from a gin or like when i did the fishy mango thing i just whacked all of it in there fruit included it doesn't scorch at all because i'm running it at such a low temperature i need just a little bit of heat going into that thing to get the amount of product i need out the other side i'm sorry guys but i can't think of a better way to describe how you can work this out yourself i guess there's just some trial and error if you have a specific question about the specific setup that you're using and how you're using it and you know what you might get away with drop a comment in the comment section down below if i can't help you out if there's just too many questions and i can't get to them all hopefully someone else will help you out anyway let's move on to the actual clarification of wash all right team so with the wash itself i like to think of it in stages as well the first stage is literally chunks of you know hard grain type stuff which in my mind is the worst defender for something like this you may not be able to see it but i'm holding up a piece of a kernel of corn now if one kernel of corn gets into my 50 litre keg with those two electric elements and i'm doing a stripping run for example i'm already kind of playing it's kind of like playing russian roulette if this manages to get itself lodged you know how the elements have the double the two parts of the element running next to each other if this gets lodged in between the two and sits there like that it's gonna burn that i mean there's just that's just how it is it's gonna burn so flip any still i have other than the genio i clear my wash as best i can to get out every single little piece of you know hard chunks of stuff especially grainy stuff that is going to burn if it comes in contact with your heat source you may not think of this as clarification and i get that that's fine but in my mind it's just it's one spectrum of the same thing right so to do this uh you can literally filter it put your racking cane inside a mesh bag and pop that into your fermenter rack out off the top let it all the grain settled out down to the bottom rack out off the top tip it literally through a sieve or whatever it happens to be like i don't think people are going to find it hard to figure out how to you know get big chunky bits out of the wash themselves next from there i sort of move on to thinking about things that are kind of um i guess more like jelly-ish or stringyish or bitsy but they're not hard chunks so perhaps bits that come from fruit clumps of stuff that's sort of clumped up from fermentation and stuck together things like that i pretty much don't want any of those in my stills either other than junior that would be fine it's not going to hurt it at all but any of the other stills i don't want any of that stuff from there i move on to more sludgy things that are going to very quickly fall out of suspension in the wash now the reason i say this is in my experience things that stay in suspension you can have a feely soupy you can have a fairly cloudy wash and it isn't going to scorch or burn but if that stuff that's in suspension settles out and like you know basically precipitates all over the top of your element or on the bottom of the pot that's where you really can have some problems so a tip here is if you are doing something that's borderline tip it or rack it or siphon it or whatever it is into your pot literally start heating up the second your elements are covered and that'll stop things you know settling out on that on their elements so much yeast can fall into this category right if you've got a wash with a buttload of yeast still in suspension that stuff can precipitate out and then you will have a problem so just keep that in mind as well if you would like to deal to the slimy hazy powdery crap that could be in your wash that might precipitate out and you want to deal with that before it goes into your pot which this is kind of the point where i'm like is it worth it or is it not anything everything we talked about before this yes it's 100 worth it this is the point where it depends very specifically on your situation and you're on your still if you want to deal with it in the fermenter the first thing you can do to ensure that it precipitates out just wait until fermentation finishes properly yeast generally won't flocculate until it's done its job and then even then some yeasts will stay in suspension for a little while so let it finish let it ferment out properly and you'll see your um you'll see your wash clear you know the next day it'll look a whole lot clearer right if you want to push it a little bit further than that you can drop the temperature in the wash so if you're fermenting at 30 degrees just turn the heat off leave it for a few days you can even if you really want to you can pop it into a fridge and cold crash it like the beer guys do if you want to go for it i i've stopped doing that because i don't think it helps if you really want to take it another step further you can use a fining agent and this is the stuff that you know turbo will try and sell you personally i would never buy the stuff from them i would just use gelatin and there are great instructions out there from the beer guys on how to clear a beer with gelatin use the same use the same instructions for you once i get past the stage guys once i get to the point where you're looking at whether or not you should filter out something that's just slightly hazy i i just don't see the point it's not worth it it's not worth your time there's very very few situations where that slight haze in a product is going to be a problem my opinion take it with a grain of salt but there you have it all right guys so i need to say a huge huge thank you to the patreons thank you so much patreons i literally get to do this stuff because of you so thank you so much i appreciate it for everyone else out there if you're finding value in these videos and you'd like to help contribute directly to the channel you can go to chasethecraft.com support which will outline all the different ways that you can help out um you can pick up a stillet whoops you can pick up a stillat coin if you like or some merch or if it's right for you you can sign up for patreon so to sum up guys you need to think of how scorchy your equipment is and by that what i mean is how likely your equipment is to make something literally burn or stick to the sides and start burning in your pot and then dealing with your wash in an appropriate way to suit that equipment unless you can literally distill on grain and that's okay you probably want to get most of the chunky hard stuff out of the wash then you really want to start looking at kind of stringy globby jelly-ish sort of pieces that can get through and then you want to start thinking about smaller particles that can precipitate out of suspension in your still once you get through to the just slightly hazy washes all right guys i hope if you're a new distiller that helps you out if you have a couple of stories that can either tell me i'm full of or back me up by all means put them in the comment section down below just be a nice human being people we're all here to learn we're all here to share information so um yeah behave anyway if you enjoyed the video make sure you give it a thumbs up that helps me out it actually helps me out here guys so so do that the other thing that helps me out a bunch is if you can help me out by clicking that subscribe button down below there's a bunch of people that watch these videos that aren't subscribed so it'll be nice to um basically for me to get the numbers and uh get youtube recognizing the channel a little bit more and helping me out you know through the algorithm and so on and so forth anyway keep on chasing the craft guys i'll catch you next time see ya that was a ranty you

Channel: Still It

Views: 70,651

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Id: DJe8lRSTzD0

Length: 16min 40sec (1000 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 19 2020