How To Distill Bourbon With @ClawhammerSupply

today I am distilling a bourbon wash I'm taking it all the way from fermenter through to a product that is ready to drink so if you're new to distilling or perhaps you just kind of want to brush up on the basics of distilling a bourbon or a Corn based whiskey this is the video for you how's it going Chaser so I hope you're having a good kiss week I'm Jesse this is still it and today I'm doing a little bit more of a Back to Basics video on the actual distilling process I know often this part in the standard videos where I you know do a different recipe or um you know play with a different ingredient gets brushed over and that is often because I assume that the people that are watching this channel regularly have probably got a pretty good understanding of the basics and I don't have to go into that every single time in any case I have a wash here ready to go and speaking of watching other YouTube videos the first thing you should do if you're not sure how to make a wash like this is go back and watch a different video on claw hammer supplies Channel this is a collaboration guys uh I was in America a little while ago I got to hang out with the team from clawhammer and they were absolutely awesome a whole bunch of fun to hang out with and we together made a video making this wash I made an exact the same way as I made it with Emma and Kyle from clawhammer the only difference is that I sparged at the end of the process which means I've got a little bit more volume and a slightly lower ABV all of that to say if you want to know how to actually have a wash ready to distill so you can actually make a bourbon beginning to end go and watch that video with me hanging out with the guys at clawhammer and then come back here to figure out how to distill it of course guys there's going to be links in the description down below with all that said let's get stuck into step number one which is actually to figure out whether or not your wash has fully fermented or not and this often gets looked over so why are we doing this well we want to know that the wash has fermented out dry and already I've hit a uh I guess like a colloquialism a inward for distilling that is going to start driving the new distiller mad it's pretty basic it just means that all of the sugar that can be fermented has been fermented so it's no longer sweet we're getting as much conversion from sugar to alcohol as we can so we're going to be able to make as much product as we can later on and we're going to start out super basic here guys the the first way to know if this has happened is just to look at the wash you're looking to see that the wash is no longer turbid and sort of turning over and actively bubbling you may get a little bit of fizzing every now and again that's fine that's just CO2 off-gassing but what you don't want to see is it actively turning over and you definitely don't want to see a cruising on top we've had another word cruising um a bunch of foamy goopy looking crap on top of your fermenter you can also at this point in time give it a little taste as long as you're pretty sure that nothing too funky is growing in there and it should taste thin and slightly sour if you don't have any other tools that's fine just look at it smell it taste it you're probably good but for a few bucks you can get one of these and this is a hydrometer this essentially all it does is is measure the the density of a liquid you put it in and dissolving a buttload of sugar into a liquid increases its density significantly so at the beginning of a fermentation it might be up somewhere around here like 10 65 1070 something like that but as that sugar is consumed by the yeast and tuned into alcohol the density of the liquid is going to drop significantly so one of these placed into the liquid so a wash like this I'm expecting to ferment out dry like we said earlier that just means there's no sugar left in it so the density of the liquid is going to be the same or actually even slightly lower than water in other words this is going to read very close to one just be aware guys that there is stuff like what it's an example here rum molasses there's a bunch of unfermentable sugars in a lot of molasses so you might have a final gravity of like 10 35 that's totally normal and of course you can go to you know the flash guy option or something like this this is an easy dense it essentially does the same thing as the hydrometer it just lets you read the numbers on your phone and it's easy to use and kind of makes you feel badass they're pretty cool but they are not cheap you can also use one of these guys it's a refractometer but there is a trap here you can use this to find your final gravity but you can only do so if you know exactly what you're starting gravity was well starting gravity is the gravity reading that you should have taken at the beginning of fermentation that would have been covered in the other video with claw handle Supply but you have to know the original gravity and you have to do a little bit of maths or plug it into a calculator so just be aware if you're getting very strange readings with this thing that's why you haven't hit the sky you're going to need a few mils of your sample and you're going to need a skull as well and the key is to put a few drips right here on the horn it's going to tell you absolutely nothing about your sample but it is a sweet segue into today's sponsor skull Bliss skull Bliss hand carve these awesome designs into RAM cow Buffalo or longhorn skulls and you guessed it they have a giant sale on right now I've got a longhorn skull with a metallic finish and I have to say it looks absolutely freaking amazing I'm going to hang it right over there but honestly these things are very cool guys and they have a giant range of different skulls finishes and carving patterns to fit whatever taste you have they also even have a lamp wall mounts to put a light in behind them which I didn't get and I kind of regret that now because having light coming through all those details would look pretty freaking dope anyway like I said they have a crazy sale on right now in fact there's the best time of year to pick up one of these skulls so use the code in the description down below to go on over to their website and pick out your own premium handcraft skull today at this point you're probably starting to get the idea that this is going to be a rather long rather detailed video helping new distillers get into the game get into the craft of Home distillation so if that's you awesome keep watching you're going to love this video it's going to give you a lot of the information you need to get started or to up your game slightly if you're a new distiller as well if you're just here to kind of see some interesting entertaining content about how you make Spirits I totally get it that's awesome this may not be the video for you I'll drop some links in the description down below for more of what you're after I'd suggest probably the 1700s historic absinthe or the peaky blinders gin links down there so let's assume that our wash hair is fermented out completely dry in a nice case it has sitting down just below one and it's time to distill it but first we need to decide what still we're going to use what kind of still we should use for this and this is a bit tricky team because there's no real right answer there's different ways of going about this but in the hobby or home distilling world for making a whiskey or a bourbon you've got two main options one is to double pot still we'll get into that in a second or the second is to use some plates this is a bubble plate in spoiler alert we're not using these today we'll be making another video in a little while talking about this kind of distillation but essentially you stack these bang bang bang bang in the column and they force extra interaction between the liquid and the vapor which is going to force or encourage or push however you want to describe it the ABV of your final product way up like I said we're not using these today we're going to focus on pot distillation and I'm going to tell you why this is a pot still and a pot still by almost definition of what a pot still is is relatively simple distillation this is all we need for a pot still and this sits on top of the pot all the wash is going to go in here and it is going to be heated up until it starts to boil the vapor is going to come up through here and it's going to go up through a column some pot Stills have an onion a dome like a big ball there's all sorts of different shapes but essentially all of those things do the same thing which is direct The Vapor up to the line arm the line arm directs The Vapor over into the condenser the condenser cools The Vapor back into liquid and then we collect the uh the liquid the the distillate down here off the end of the spout so as far as distillation goes this is about as basic as it can get why are we doing it this way when we can use you know like more complex methods the long and the shorter it is team is that distillation is basically the art or the science or the Alchemy of separating different chemicals out into different fractions and then choosing which of those fractions you want to keep and the more you move away from simple plot distillation generally the less flavor you're going to end up with at the end all things being equal some people like a lighter bourbon you know heading more towards a Tennessee style whiskey not me I like a bourbon with a buttload of flavor I like it to have a big thick chewy voluptuous velvety mouth feel and I like it to actually taste like the ingredients that we put into our wash that is why we're going to be using pot distillation but there is a issue with pot distillation and that is that every time you run the still the ADV that you're going to get coming over here is directly related to the ABV that goes into the pot so why does that matter for us with pot distillation it matters because essentially we cannot get this up to a high enough ABV in large enough quantities to matter to put into a barrel or age on Oak at a high enough ABV to make bourbon it's just not going to happen so we are going to have to double distill it that's why we call it double pot distillation so the first thing we're going to do is get stuck into our stripping runs don't worry I'm going to explain what that is in a minute but for now all you need to know is that we need to charge this still just tip some of the wash into the still and it's very important that we don't overfill it so I'm going to aim for about here on the still now you'll notice that there is a bunch of chunky goopy stuff sitting in the bottom and you'll notice that I haven't put that into the still this is our yeast and when it's finished doing its job it's going to flocculate which essentially means it's going to drop out of suspension in the liquid and settle out down at the bottom uh hoping and waiting and praying that more sugar is going to come along for it in this case that's not going to happen I'm not going to put that into the still we don't need it in there and depending on the type of yeast that you're using it can actually give some pretty seriously bad of flavors so we're not going to use that so after sipping that first bucket in our level is right around here I'm going to top it up a little bit more but like I said earlier we do not want to push this too high and the reason for that is that we do not want our still two here comes another one of those words puke foreign what is puking you most likely ask well as we Heat this up uh to eventually get it to boil and get the vapor to come off so we can move it through the Sterling condenser and collect it this liquid is going to start to foam and if there is not enough room here to accommodate for that foam that foam is going to build up and still and it's going to start moving higher and higher the foam level is going to move higher and higher until it gets condensed and forced down into this tiny little space here and when it does so it's just going to go shoot straight up and pour over the top in effect what that means is that we're just getting straight liquid that hasn't actually been distilled forced through our stool and come out the end now to be honest on a stripping run it's not that big of a deal but it does mean that we're going to have to do a whole bunch of cleaning later on you don't want to leave all of that Gunk stuck in your still you're gonna know if it's happened because a liquid that is the same color as the wash is going to be coming out of here and it's going to come out a whole lot faster if it does happen just turn the power off let it sit for a while start again we do have one other little tool to help ensure that we don't get one of those juted pukes and that is to use something to basically mess with the surface tension of the liquid and stop the bubbles from I guess it's more stop the bubbles from forming and also help them pop easier and that is to use a little bit of butter you can also buy antifoam which to be honest actually works a little bit better but I'm guessing you've got butter at home so drop a little bit of that in there and that's going to help a whole lot anyway it's time for me to move this over there next to the sink because we are going to need running water foreign still is filled up and it is starting to warm up now it's plugged in it's turned on and while this is a a awesome and safe hobby there are a few things that we need to take seriously about it and it's just stuff that you're going to do every single time you need to make a habit of it so the Still's on it's warming up first thing is to ensure that the still is put together correctly with the claw hammer setup this is pretty easy everything's put together with tri-clamps I'm just going to ensure that everything is in fact tightened up because we don't want any leaks anywhere and the second thing is just to make sure that the area is suitable for operation I'll be honest with you guys with the camera gear especially I'm kind of bad at this so you know learn from my mistakes if you've seen past videos recently you probably wouldn't know what I'm talking about but you know make sure there's no tripping hazards make sure we've got enough room to work make sure nothing's going to fall on it or move into it and knock it over you know the the sort of thing that would make sense for a a barbecue or operating a wok and we also just want to make sure that our cooling is going to work the way we expect it to work so with this once again it's a very simple setup all we're doing is running a coolant into the bottom of the condenser here and back out the top so make sure you've got it all set up make sure you've got it connected and ready to turn on make sure that the water is going to flow where you want it to flow to that it's exhausting to the correct position and what I like to do as soon as the still is charged is just turn it on and make sure it's actually working the cooling water is turned on and I like to do a little sanity check of just touching the condenser and you know making sure that it's yes in fact it is cooler than the rest of the column it's cooler than ambient temperature I know it's working make sure that nothing is leaking and that the water is exhausting where you want it to go depending on the size of your still and water restrictions or you know how much you pay for water in your area you might want to turn this off again for a little while until the still is actually ready to start producing and of course you want to have something ready to actually collect into and right down there I have a big old pot that I'm going to transfer these glasses into my t500 still you uh never have enough large stainless vessels in a uh in a hobby Distillery also worth at least acknowledging one of the biggest no-nos in distillation which is to never heat a completely sealed vessel heating something that's sealed will create pressure and that's an absolute recipe for disaster with any of this sort of stuff now because we're running a pot still it is by definition an open system right there's nothing in this path that should be blocking it it should never be an issue but it is just it is a hundred percent worth getting into the practice of just mentally asking yourself is there a chance that this is a closed system anytime your team is still on the still has been running for a little while and we're starting to get to the point where we need to start thinking about actually operating this thing uh how do you tell that you're getting near that point well you can feel the outside of the pot that's starting to get hot but more telling is that it's starting to warm up above the line of liquid the long and short of it is when it actually gets hot up here at the point of no return where the vapor has to come down through the condenser you know you're right at the point where it's about to come squirting out the end uh so what I like to do to check for that is just to touch the top of the column gently because you don't want to burn yourself and then run your hand down the column to check if it's starting to get warm this is not warm at all yet it is warm down here of course if you still has thermometers on it that's going to give you an indication as well when it starts getting hot around the base of the column that's my signal to double check and triple check that the cooling water is on so if you turned it off to save a bit of water Now's the Time to turn it back on again so our columns heating up now it's still cool at the top but hot about Midway and at this point in time it's probably a pretty good idea to turn the power down a little bit if you don't have the ability to do that obviously you can't but I would suggest that having power control is the first upgrade you make to any still if you don't have it so I am starting to get hot up to about here so I'm just going to knock the power down to about three chords there's two reasons for that one is that when it first comes up to a boil uh if the power's too high that's the point we are most susceptible to puking remember puking we took talked about it earlier on number two is that especially on smaller setups like this you run the risk of overpowering your condenser I'm going to show you what that looks like in a little bit but if you can kind of get ahead of the game and turn the power down now it's always easier to creep up in temperature rather than suddenly be hit with a problem and have to jack it down quickly so we're just starting to get first drips coming off the still which is exactly what we want it's going to start very slowly but it'll build speed up as it goes uh as you know all the different parts of the Stills start to warm up so at this point in time we're going to monitor this closely because the first thing I want you to do is make sure that you're not overpowering your condenser now I've actually turned the power back up so I can show you what not to do do you see how my gloss is starting to really fog up there's a condensation all over the side of the glass and if we touch it it's hot all the way out here because there is hot vapor pouring out all over the place we do not want that best case scenario is that you're just losing product in the worst case scenario is that it can kind of be a fire hazard especially if you're using an open flame to power the still so if it feels hot if you're seeing a whole lot of condensation on the glass or you can literally see vapor pouring out you need to do one of two things first you need to increase cooling power to your condenser if you can and second if that's not really an option or it's just a shorter condenser like this we need to bring the power back down so let me do that now this is a collaboration with the clawhammer supply guys and let me tell you they are absolutely freaking awesome if you're into brewing beer at all make sure you go over and check their Channel out And subscribe to it awesome Channel their production quality is insane and they're doing a kick-ass job but obviously I'm going to be using core Hammer equipment here today because it just makes sense but I did just want to say that if you are in the market for bevering equipment or distillation equipment in America especially that's with our based it is really solid equipment and I've been using it for a long ass time there are links in the description down below they're not paying me to say this this is just a collaboration between YouTubers but if you do end up buying their equipment those are affiliate links just so you know so the power has been turned back down there's no more hot gas you know hot vapor pouring out the end of the still and the liquid itself is cool it doesn't have to be cold uh warm is okay sort of in the vicinity of 15 to 30 degrees Celsius is where I like to aim almost all the time all right so now this is under control we need to do something else really quickly as soon as the still is running the next thing to do is to check for leaks and the easiest way to do that is with something with a decent amount of thermal mass and is shiny and you can just literally hold this next to all of the joints or anywhere where a leak may occur and look for condensation on the surface so I'm just using a um a big old triclamp cover but a little handheld mirror works wonderfully as well so our condensers not being overpowered we don't have any leaks we're up and running and we are in fact collecting into our vessel but it is important that you keep an eye on this you do not want leaks you know large pools of high ABV flammable liquid just kind of collecting in places you don't know about it so keep an eye on this and whenever the jar starts to get close to full switch it out this may sound really pedantic of me to even bother explaining but I find the easiest way is to lift the jar that is collecting up so it's not making contact with anything have another jar ready and just sweep them around pop the other one down and chances are you won't even spill a drop let me show you [Music] so you might be asking yourself uh what about operational temperatures for the still what about off-tech speed coming off the end what about Cuts all of those sorts of things and the along and the short of it is this is the stripping gun we don't have to worry about it but what we can do is kind of optimize efficiency here so we turned the still down a whole lot to make sure that the condenser wasn't being overpowered and at this point everything's up and running we're comfortable now we know the Stills working the way we want it to work we've got no immediate urgency on anything now we're comfortable what you can start to do is inch the amount of power going into the still back up again one of two things is going to happen you're either going to get to 100 power on the still or you're going to start overpowering the condenser again if you get to 100 awesome you're going to run a little bit faster and spend less time doing the stripping run if you start overpowering the the condenser again just back it off a smidge until you're happy with both the temperature and the fact that there's no Vapor being lost after a little bit of fiddling around buy me the power up I'm back up at three horsepower now and you will notice that the deeper you go into the run you can probably push that even a little bit further and now you can just settle into the rest of the run all you really need to do is keep changing those jars out how do you know when to stop well uh when you run out of alcohol with this sort of thing I would strongly recommend running down to at least uh 10 coming off the the spout so what do I mean by that I mean the ABV of what's literally coming off here 10 not the the overall average you can go even lower and to be honest I'm going to go lower I'm going to go all the way down to about well like two percent today just because uh I want to ring every little bit out of this that's up to you it's just really a question of how much time and how much electricity or gas you want to use like I said I would strongly recommend going down to 10 though but you ask how do you test what ABV a liquid is well the simplest way to do it is with one of these little jobbies it is a alchemeter and the idea is that you just float it in a sample of the spirit you're testing a trap that people fall into all the time when using these things is testing a spirit at the wrong temperature these things are calibrated to be used at a specific temperature it'll be written on the side of the instrument and it needs to be pretty close like within a few degrees Celsius to really give you an accurate reading also you generally want to use a much smaller test jar than this but I smashed mine anyway other options are to use a spirit refractometer which is one of these guys you just put a few drips of the spirits on the lens close it up and have a look through here there'll be a blue part at the top a white part at the bottom where it changes from Blue to White is where you read it in this one funnily enough is saying 40 ABV now there is another option which is to use something like this this is the easy dents you take a small Sample about two mils is all it takes pop it into there and it connects with your phone via Bluetooth and we'll give you a readout so right now I'm sitting at 40 ABV we've got some more distilling to do before we shut this down and do it all over again once the distillation is finished you're going to want to empty the still out if you're just going to do this over and over again you can just you know tip this on the grass put it down the drain however you decide to dispose of it is fine by me but what I'm actually going to do is save some of this because you can use it for sour mashing that is a completely different video we'll deal with that in the future but just know that I am going to reserve some of this to use in the future Now The Stills empty and it's time to fill it up again a lot of people ask how many stripping runs am I supposed to do and the answer is basically until your fermenters are empty there's a few little caveats there uh we'll deal with that in just a second so what's that caveat essentially we don't want to run the still where there's a chance where the element in the bottom of the still will end up running itself dry what I'm saying is just make sure that you have enough liquid coming out of the fermenter into the still so once the the volume that we take out through distillation is taken out the element is still going to be fully submerged for a stripping run you might take out a third of the volume maybe that's probably pushing it [Music] so with these still they'll back up again we're just going to run it exactly the same way as we did the first time we're going to bring it up to temperature ensure that we've got cooling running through the condenser we're going to make sure that there's no leaks or anything like that I'm sure that it's running safely uh check that it's coming off in the correct way and collect everything that comes out the other end and we're just going to repeat this process until all of our wash is [Music] it's the next day the still has been cleaned out I gave it a quick rinse out with the hose just to get any of the Little Chunky bits out of there and here we have the results everything we collected from all of our stripping runs in this case I did two this spirit is called the low wines and actually let's test it and see what ABV we're at this is 25 ABV and that's probably the range sort of between 20 to 30 percent ABV that you're going to be sitting in if you did collect down nice and low coming off uh there's still for the stripping runs now all of this can go into uh our still again I want all of the drips we worked hard to make this stuff I'm not going to waste it all right now if you come and have a look over here you're going to see a wee problem our element is still exposed in the still so generally speaking when you're making something for pot distillation double pot distillation you want to make roughly three times what you can fit into the still three to four times in terms of wash so if you have a five gallon still you're going to make 15 to 20 gallons of wash if you have a 10 gallon still you're going to make 30 to 40 gallons I think you get the idea that is going to ensure you don't run into this problem here uh if you do get to this point you've got a couple of different ways of fixing it number one if you have a hunch that you're going to run into this problem you can reserve a little bit of the wash from your fermenters and just put that straight in there it's going to add up in volume a lot quicker than the distiller obviously number two is this stuff will keep just fine put it into ideally a glass or a stainless steel container with a lid so it doesn't just evaporate and do the whole process again you can slowly fill up your a low wines container with multiple fermentations until you have enough low wines to run the still but if you're a YouTuber you can use a power of video editing to solve this problem here's some I prepared earlier I made another mesh for exactly this reason [Music] [Music] foreign running again we're into the Spirit Run guys the Spirit Run is the final run of the still uh collecting the spirit that you are actually uh going to keep so I set this still up in exactly the same way the only difference is that you've probably noticed it's running a little bit slower and that is really not a bad idea to do especially when you're getting new to this essentially just running the still a little bit slower allows a little bit more natural reflux to happen in here it's going to produce a slightly cleaner Spirit a slightly higher ABV honestly it does make a huge difference but it's better to err on this side especially when you're getting used to this rather than running it too fast now the first little bit we collected we're going to call the four shots this is the stuff that comes off first and I've collected I don't know maybe 40 mils or something like that this stuff is not good for you you don't want to drink this the nastiest stuff is more likely to come off at the beginning of the distillation I actually like to keep this though and use it as fire lighter degree degrees uh weed killer um you know cleaning sticky labels off bottles and stuff like that so I keep that in a bottle label it well and keep it separate from everything else now we're starting to collect heads heads are the initial part of the run that you do not want to drink or consume as they are now one because they're still not great for you they're going to make you feel like ah so if you drink this stuff and two they just straight up don't taste good a lot of places will give you kind of exact measurements or temperatures or abvs to cut at I guess sometimes there is a good way for someone to start in the hobby just to give them like an absolute base I think that's kind of a trap to fall into so I'm not going to give you those numbers today guys and that is simply because it hinders your growth as a distiller and it also creates a very low ceiling in terms of the potential products you can create so we're going to do everything by smell by taste and by feel so because I don't particularly want to ingest this I'm not going to smell it yet I am going to feel it it's very volatile it feels like rubbing alcohol and I'm gonna smell it it smells very much the same it smells very fumey it smells kind of like nail polish remover the stuff you don't want to drink so let me come back to you when it is time to actually taste the stuff [Music] a few more minutes have passed I've collected exactly that much spirit and a great way to smell the stuff I should say too guys is to get a little bit on your finger rub it in your hands and give it a good sniff so now the straight up kind of cleaning product quality has died away a little bit and the spirit's actually kind of sweetened up but this still isn't what we're after it's not a grain sweetness it doesn't taste anything really like the ingredients we put into the mash it smells kind of like to me it smells like uh changing the inner tube on a bicycle that sweet rubbery uh kind of a little bit sort of like stale ear kind of smell the guys at iron root Republic describe it as either fresh cardboard I can totally see and understand that or um a really young infant uh like milk spilly spew that same weird sort of sweet characteristic that's slightly off we don't want this either so keep on running straight past that you can at this stage if you want to give it a little taste um I'm relatively used to tasting High ABV Spirits so I do it just like that if you're new to us I would not suggest doing that you're going to blow your palette out and you're not going to taste anything for the rest of the day instead what you can do is just use teesprings so put a teaspoon under the spout collect half a teaspoon coming off the still give another half teaspoon of water and give that a taste The Taste is very similar to the smell it's still that weird stale slightly off sweetness flavor we don't want it so we're going to keep running heads for now once you get past that weird sweet cardboardy rubbery face you're gonna get to one other phase that we don't want to keep and that is a weird bitter stringent kind of flavor that is just not pleasant and you really can't oh well I can't smell this so much I have to taste it and that is a it's kind of somewhere between bitterness and the stringency it just sits funny on your mouth it it just sits funny on your tongue it's kind of piercing uh it's just not pleasant to drink you can get some other weird flavors in here as well it can be slightly soapy it can be kind of mentholy or eucalyptusy depending on exactly what it is you're distilling but once again we just want to wait this out and make sure we're not collecting this as Hearts but remember guys you need to be onto it in terms of switching your cut stars out as well don't forget that eventually you'll notice that a bit of astringent sort of harsh flavor in your mouth starting to fade and you'll start to notice the flavors of the things that are actually in that recipe the corn The Barley the wheat starting to rise up when that starts to happen you know you're getting very close to switching over to heart so what I would suggest people at home do if this is your first time doing this or you're new to it is to start collecting maybe three jars at just very small volumes like this just little bits and I'm going to show you over at the bench why we do that so here we have everything I've collected off the still so far starting with our four shots here definitely heads here probably heads here and sort of transitioning right around here where I think that bitter astringent flavor is starting to fade away the reason I recommend doing it this way for a beginner or a distiller who is even just distilling A new ingredient is that it can be really hard to make decisions on the Fly coming off the still in real time collecting it in jars like this allows you to kind of step back and make decisions without being rushed it's also kind of difficult to actually taste and smell the differences I've been talking about so far when you're not used to this kind of thing when you haven't done it before I remember when I started it kind of just all tasted like Bernie so I can jump around and smell and taste in comparison with each other rather than trying to carry a specific flavor in your head that you haven't even tasted or smelled yet that can be pretty freaking difficult so to run through what we've done so far four shots like I said I'm just going to put those in the container and use it for fire lighter or whatever heads definitely heads we know that's heads this hasn't got any of that rubbery sweet cardboard flavor but it is quite bitter and astringent and very prickly on the mouth this one let me give it another go this one's borderline actually but I'm not going to keep it I'm going to move it over here and this yeah I'm calling that hearts I'm gonna keep this now you can do your entire run in little cups like this if you want to and that'll let you make all of the decisions on Cuts later on but you can also once you're fairly certain you're into Hearts switch over to a larger container and just collect into that especially if you don't uh you know have enough glassware I am not going to discard the heads though we'll talk about what to do with this stuff once the still is finished running so we're getting near the end of the hearts cut and I know that we're in that sort of position because the grain flavor's starting to intensify it's starting to be almost how do I put it it's starting to get a little bit more serial-like but also Dusty at the same time it's just getting a lot more intense now this is the one time where I am going to give you a little bit of a tip to start looking out for this because it can be hard you know when you knew it this I I very much admit I'm sitting at 63 ABV now and I generally find I cut from Hearts to tails with a whiskey somewhere between 63 and 50 ABV now this is up to you what do you want out of your whiskey do you want it to be more light and approachable delicate you probably want to cut a little bit higher get rid of some of these really bold grainy flavors out of your whiskey do you like a more grungy intense corny flavored whiskey go a little bit lower but once again to make it easy we are going to switch back over to these smaller jars so let me get that in there hoop and this can go into my uh can you see that no you can't go into my larger pot again and we're going to do exactly the same thing here on the Tails we're going to collect maybe four or five jars starting to get smaller in size as we go but what I want you to look out for when you're getting down near the Tails is to look out for anything that smells like wet cardboard wet dog um kind of gym sockey any of those sort of flavors you really don't want in your whiskey stop and have a think about it though those flavors are very similar to grainy Dusty cerealy corn think um Corn Flakes like smelling a bag of corn flakes and then smell a bag of corn flakes thinking about Jim sock kind of similar in some way so switching over to the small jars and being able to assess it you know in individual little bits later on is going to help us so here we have those next few jars that I was talking about up here we have what was closest to the hearts and I'm I'm fairly sure I'm going to keep that give me a minute or two just to decide and down this end yeah I'm not even going to taste it because that doesn't smell great I'll be real I'm not keeping that this one not not keeping that either and this one hmm borderline man all right so this is why it really is worth doing it so tasting these next to each other this fairly obviously tastes fine this is borderline uh into me it's just not really worth it so I'm going to put that over into the tail section as well now back over at the still you'll notice that we're still running doesn't taste good why on Earth is that let me collect a little bit more of this and then we'll talk about it so I have everything on the table now that came off the still starting with the heads that we rejected the hearts that we decided to keep and this is the stuff that came off in the Tails now this is the last jar of hearts that I decided to keep yeah no I'm definitely not keeping that all right let's deal with all of the stuff first so all of the stuff that we're not keeping both the heads and the tails uh we're gonna call faints and they can all go in together the reason I'm keeping the stuff is next time you do a Spirit Run especially uh that may not fit in there I'm just going to leave those like that the reason we're keeping them is that next time we do a Spirit Run for the same type of spirit so next time I do a bourbon these can go into that Spirit Run yes there's a bunch of stuff in there we don't want but because it is a pot distillation everything's a gradient nothing comes off an exact fractions it all kind of smears together so there's also good stuff in here that we want and if we redistill it again it's going to help sort of separate those out even more in other words we can squeeze a little bit more good stuff out of this by putting it into the next Spirit Room this is what is going to turn into our bourbon but first we need to proof it down to Barrel proof this is another point in the process where you get a little bit of artistic license the proof that you put into the barrel and I'm doing air quotes here for a reason you'll see why soon uh determines the kinds of flavors that are going to be pulled out of the wood that we're going to use I'll be honest with you guys maturation or aging is part of the process that is kind of I mean it's totally science but there is definitely an artistic and kind of just a magic aspect to it as well so everything I say here is a generalization and it's not going to happen every time but the range of ABV we're looking for for Barrel maturation is between 50 ABV and about 65 ABV if you're at 50 ABV obviously you've got more water in there and if you're at 65 ABV you've got less water why do I tell you this because water and alcohol are going to pull different flavors out of the wood down closer to 50 ABV you're pulling out more wood sweetness it's going to be malware over time a little bit more of that Barrel candy kind of flavors and up towards the 65 range you're pulling out more of the cooking spice sort of cinnamon almond [Music] clove even a little bit of black pepper definitely potentially a little bit more astringency and bitterness and just a more intense overall wood profile now I can't tell you what you like you just have to have a think about it try a few different bourbons and see what you're into today I'm going to be aiming further towards the the kind of more approachable slightly sweeter side of things so I'm aiming for 55 ABV today so how do you get down to that ABV it's actually pretty simple guys there's two ways to do it the first way is to measure the volume you have and measure the ADV you have and there are calculators out there that'll help you with this this is a little bit embarrassing but the uh the chase the craft.com calculators are actually currently down because I'm in the middle of switching over to a new website they'll be back really soon I promise you guys um Google will help you out with that though search uh proofing ABV Spirit calculator just to kind of cram it with keywords uh the other way is just literally to tip a little bit of water into the spirit and measure it now the problem with this is depending on how your This Is My Water by the way the problem is depending on how you're measuring your ABV you need to be aware that as you add water this is actually going to warm up and if you're using a technique that is based on being calibrated to a certain temperature you're probably going to push outside that temperature as you do it I just mentioned that because it's another one of those traps that people fall into a lot uh so I'll be honest with you guys I'm actually feeling kind of lazy today because my measuring jug is full of um well it's full of tails so I'm just going to measure this take away sample and I'm going to use this little doodad to tell me what ABV we're at you guys are going to know what it's at before me okay we're at 70 ABV which is pretty typical for a run like this and what did I say I was going for 55 ABV right now if you are doing it this way guys always always always add like way less water then you think you're going to need because you can always add a little bit more you can't take it out again 57 so I was uh flying a little close to the Sun there to be honest let's go with a little more that's probably gonna about do it I think I overcooked it that's why you shouldn't use this method it's gone to 52.4 but I'll be honest with you I'm actually totally fine with that all right we've got one last step to getting this thing well on its way to becoming bourbon so let's head back over to the bench there and I'll show you what it is all right team the last part of the puzzle maturation let's just make or break time what is it essentially maturation or aging is uh putting your spirit either onto or into oak or wood uh and over time it is going to evolve and change there's chemical processes that happen to the spirit itself it's going to evolve over time you're also going to get flavor out of the wood and color out of the wood itself and you're also going to get precursors out of the wood that contribute to or Aid or enable other chemical processes to literally transform flavors as well basically what I'm trying to tell you here is there's a little bit of magic it's all science it's all chemistry and physics but it's a little bit of magic as well there is a bunch of things out there for fast aging and in my experience they can be interesting they can sort of help you tell what might happen to a spirit over the long run but at the end of the day there's really no substitute for time time is your best friend when it comes to making a quality bourbon okay so what options do you have now you could put Spirit into a barrel like this this is a bad mode Barrel there'll be links in the description down below you could use these smaller barrels like this as well that's entirely Oak both of those are solid options the downside here is cost for the barrel it can be kind of expensive and also you're going to need to make more wash more Spirit to really fill those so what are we going to be doing today today we are going to be putting our spirit into a glass jar I like to use these little flip top glass jars simply because I can buy them at Kmart for a very reasonable price and they do have a silicon gasket which I don't entirely Trust so I wrap the gasket this part here in PTFE tape just to stop contact with the Silicon itself and also when you seal it it becomes not quite entirely airtight or watertight and I think a small amount of gas exchange in and out of here is good we want a little bit of oxidation over time what about the wood you can use all sorts of different kinds of wood American White Oak is what you want to use if you're making a bourbon but there's all sorts of different kinds of Oaks that you can use people use wood from fruit trees and all sorts of different things that's all legitimate but for today we're keeping it traditional and we're using U.S White Oak it is also important to use Oak that has been aged or seasoned very important that's a whole nother topic just know that it's a thing so today I'm going to be using the chasercraft staves which will be available soon on the website I'm working on it guys I promise um and I have toasted these at 160 degrees Celsius for 45 minutes and then I've given it a charring with a blowtorch that is going to go in there oh my God there's a fly in there already get the fly out [Laughter] and seal it up how long is it going to take in there and honestly guys the answer is as long as it needs to take if you want to make something that is really nice you're looking at years two years would be a solid uh thing to aim for I think if you want to do it faster yes you can add more Oak in there um it's going to give more Oak flavor faster but it's not going to give you the complexity the age will so I'm going to put one of these in there and I'm going to taste this again at about six months see how it's doing maybe I need to take this Oak Stave out and split it it's starting to get a little bit too tannic a little bit too astringent or spicy or peppery but I think that's going to be pretty solid for at least a year as is if you want to add more and you totally can you can put two maybe even three staves in if you only want to age it for I don't know like two months once again lots of Oak flavor it's basically Oak tea bagging none of that complexity so congratulations guys if you've watched along all the way until now awesome it's a big video I appreciate you watching it this long make sure you drop a comment and a like in the description down below if you followed along practically and you've actually made it to this point congratulations that is absolutely awesome welcome to the craft I hope you enjoy the other videos on the channel there's plenty for you to check out and all you need to do now is be patient for your bourbon to turn out deliciously so do all the YouTube things hit the like button subscribe if you haven't already drop a comment in the comment section down below and I'll catch you next time what am I doing next time uh I think it's going to be a triple distilled Irish whiskey see you later guys

Channel: Still It

Views: 152,357

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Id: GzrUloeNObo

Length: 53min 34sec (3214 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 24 2022