When Distilling How much Do I Get

well welcome back to barley and hops i'm george yes the channel that dares to unlock the mysteries of home distilling we're going to answer some questions today and this is going to revolve all around volume how much do i get i'm all you moonshiners if you want to hear that's the kind of [ __ ] after that brief introduction and we're here to talk about volume and it's really a common question that we get on a regular basis so i thought it'd be interesting or probably really more important to kind of share with you some a few math figures you know a little bit of this but really a good explanation about what can you potentially expect to receive um because that is the age-old question um you know a lot of our videos instead of just sitting around and dreaming up something to do we base them off of the majority or the preponderance of certain questions that kind of come up all the time so that way i can understand what are the real aspects or the real interests or maybe those empty spaces in knowledge about home distilling so let's get right to it you know everyone always asks the question george if i run a five gallon still how much am i going to get out of it well you know that is all dependent and what do i mean by dependent well you have to have a starting point and then you have your process and then of course you have your ending point let me give you an example here now you know we just came back from gatlinburg tennessee and oh by what let me digress for a moment uh-huh after five days of uh alcoholic bliss uh uh i have a new awakened oh gosh appreciation for the moonshine community no it's not new i've always had it uh this what a what a great great place to visit in gatlinburg and pigeon forge and all those distilleries i came back and i ran my still now i've got an automated still sorry okay uh but this the same process holds true for manually operated still as well and i ran 18 gallons and i started off with 11 alcohol by volume in my mash and i've got all these jars laid out here to show you what i collected and i did this all in one day yesterday took me about three hours that doesn't include the heat up time and i've got seven quarts of moonshine and it starts at 140 proof because i was running it in pot still mode and i stopped at 100 proof so i've got seven full jars this jar is my heads uh now this was all done this is a computer operated machine so it makes the cuts precisely of course my four shots were already gone but these are the heads these are my hearts and these two jars would represent the tails so george why did you put out two empty jars i don't collect tails um and it's a personal choice you don't have to collect tails uh i just don't collect tails because i don't like you i don't drink them i don't use them for anything else um and it's to me it's just it's an additional waste of time now there are there are times when tails are could be a benefit okay but we're not going to get into that today but it is a general rule i don't collect tails because i just i'm not going to do anything with it um and i'm definitely not definitely not going to throw it into the next batch that probably deserves some explanation if i have a container what do you think of the white board huh yeah i had to i had to sex it up just a little bit if i have a container all right a fermenter and i've got a fresh mash here oh let's just throw for as an example i've got five gallons and what is that for those in europe i know it was 21 23 liters it all depends on how you're measuring and when you you got it okay so i think it's 19 liters i have to look that up again uh but let's say for instance i have two jars you know a certain portion only a certain portion of this as an example let's say it's ten percent alcohol by volume if it's a 10 abv here's the question of the day how much alcohol is in there if you do the math real quick in your head it's 0.5 gallons or of course a half a gallon all right so you have a half a gallon of alcohol and the rest is what you know it water okay so in that half a gallon of alcohol once i collect and now use this as a great example we'll get to that in just a second you know about the last two to three percent of that is what we consider tails and what are what what do what do tails consist of well tails consist of all those byproducts from the yeast your fusil oils and they're actually a slippery oil based product that doesn't vaporize with ethanol but it vaporizes with some portions of ethanol when the concentration of the ethanol gets so low and you're still trying to pull that out so you pull out what we call tails okay and the tails are the things that we did normally we would just say dang drinking that i don't want no tails okay because tails are not good they taste horrible they smell horrible they're slippery between your fingers they usually smell like wet cardboard they've been described many many different ways you know it all depends on what you put in i sometimes i'll say it smells like ass and if it's really bad what does it smell like you know two asses all right so in this last two to three percent of your run that's left here what would happen if i add more well that makes this about five or six percent so what am i do what am i theoretically what am i actually doing i'm infecting a good batch with tails so that at the end of this run i can i actually have to leave that in the still anyway or i've got to collect an extra two jars that i'm not going to use anyway you follow me so for the sake of conservatism in a way you know conserve your energy conserve your time conserve your effort if you collect tails and you have a purpose for it it's all on you but if you're not going to consume them well then why waste the time hmm so what do we what do we know we know that of course tails can show up anytime in general okay in general uh tails will start to show up below 100 proof so if you're a 100 proof or higher um it's more likely than not that you will not have tails okay that'll be you'll you'll still be in your heart's run but as soon as you drop below 100 well now the danger zone okay you've got a danger zone there you've got anywhere from 100 down to about 80 proof where this is you're in the danger zone of potentially collecting tails okay and it starts off here and let's say this is the level of intensity of tails or potential if you'll pick them up or not and then if you grafted it would start to increase dramatically as you get to about 80 proof and below 80 proof you're almost assured to be starting to collect tails now how else do we collect tails during a run you can collect tails during a run by doing something as simple as trying to hurry up if we're running our still and i always use this as just this is just an example of a still it's not actually it may not look exactly like yours but that's okay because stillzer comes in in many different styles but and we're running our still and we're tracking our temperature right here now why are we tracking that temperature well because that's called the point of no return that's where your vapors exit the still into your condenser well we know that scientifically at 173 degrees ethanol is vaporized okay so we're tracking that to be around 173 degrees fahrenheit now we yeah yeah see now we start getting into really deep but really it's not so deep if you stop thinking about it there are stills that run at 184 i've got one that runs at 184 degrees start to finish it it loves it i love it but i know that that's my sweet spot it's just because of the design of my still some will run as high as 190. that's okay okay that's perfectly okay but once you start having your product come out and it's collected in your jar if you're if you have a high proof and you're running your temperatures to an in an extreme let's say for instance your still normally runs at 184 and you're running it at 195 well chances are what's going to happen is you're going to start to push some of those tails because the the energy and the heat inside that still is high enough to force those fusel oils to stay attached and drag through with your ethanol so can you have tails at 160 proof tails 160 proof is that possible why absolutely yes yes that's possible um is it likely well if you're running it slow and methodically no it's impossible but if you're pushing the envelope and you're trying to get that distal to come out really really fast and you've increased the temperature to a degree to that degree where it's pushing instead of allowing vapors to flow well then you're going to wind up with tails now how do we determine and i get this a lot well george ah golly i got a jar and it was 110 proof uh how do i know that there are no tails in here well besides having a scientific method or an automated system to make those cuts for you the only surefire method to determine that is to cut it okay if you take your jar and you in here you've got 110 proof okay and that's how much you have in there and you want to cut that to let's say 80 proof 40 alcohol by volume and so what happens is is you add the appropriate amount of water and of course using your hydrometer your proof and trail hydrometer you're measuring it and it goes to here and now this becomes 80 proof and you're happy with the proof but then you look at your distillate it's cloudy well if it's cloudy that is the first indication of tails you have tails inside that ethanol and no there's no way to get it out okay once it's there it's there those are those are oils and those fusil oils are not visible in a high content of alcohol because they are spread out they're long chain fatty acids and they spread out so you can't see them but once you add water to it you drop the alcohol level down they start to clump and as they start to clump back together they become visible known as being cloudy does that help i hope so now we promised to get to this run we promised to get to my seven quarts of absolutely pure delectable elixir that we're going to work with for the rest of the week now onto what i have right here as a demonstration um and then as an explanation i'll show you how this actually worked out for me all right because i started off with these are my figures i had 18 gallons okay i had 18 gallons of mash and that was at 13 abv alcohol by volume okay so that was that was my starting in data point all right but with that data point i know a whole lot i can figure out what this should look like on the end before that even happens at least i can get a great a good idea and what does that do for us well that allows us to predict how long is it going to take us and when should i start really paying attention you know as opposed to just allowing things to happen on their own well it works out relatively simple all right now now but at 18 gallons at 13 alcohol by volume now keep in mind that this is a little high i'm more in line of like 11 11 and a half maybe 12 ish or so but i hit 13 on this one i'm okay with that but remember the higher alcohol by we're going to get to that so with my calculator all i've got to do is calculate quickly watch this 18 times .13 equals 2.34 gallons all right so 2.34 gallons here's my example of 18 gallons all right 2.34 gallons of that and that is somewhere in the neighborhood somewhere somewhere in the neighborhood of what about right here 2.34 gallons is pure ethanol okay we know that because the alcohol by volume has 13 of 18 gallons all right now what have i collected well i collected 1.75 if i take 1.75 gallons from that 2.34 gallons minus 1.75 leaves me with 0.59 gallons of potential i mean that's what i've got left in here remember we talked about that with at the beginning of this video we actually showed you that this little bit down here is going to be alcohol yes but it's also going to be loaded with tails all right it's going to be loaded with tails so um now let's look in this example oh now how much is that 0.59 oh this is easy 0.59 divided by 18 equals you're gonna love this 3.2 percent abv please please don't concern yourself with 3.2 percent abv left over and it's left in when you take 2.34 from 18 gallons uh what's that about 15 a little over 15 gallons 2.3.2 of that is tails that's minuscule okay that's minuscule what does that represent well 0.59 gallons look at there there's a half all right of what i didn't collect those are the tails so and that's why i don't collect them again as a reefer just a rehash i don't use them i don't drink them i don't want them they smell nasty they they feel oily they turn cloudy when you cut them and they're to me they're virtually useless so it's the stuff you really don't want you want the hearts right so that accounts for that now but if that so that's minus 0.5 leaves me with .09 gallons well look at this so my heart on my heads and remember my four shots uh it kind of does that really make sense now does that kind of balance it out so out of 18 gallons of mash at 13 abv and you could this could be any number this this could be any alcohol by volume that you have developed okay uh i get 2.34 gallons 1.75 gallons is what i collected because i stopped at 100 proof remember below 100 proof is you start to run into the dangers of collecting tails and you don't want to mix those up because you can't get them out once they're there they're there one method that a lot of people use is that once they get to that 100 proof they keep trying to squeak out a little bit more you go to a smaller jar and you keep going them smaller jars and you keep collecting it until you notice that there's tails and then you stop there all right so that you get that just that little bit more okay now so so have we we've come full circle and describing uh what i have what i was able to predict my prediction came out exactly on the money sometimes it'll be a little bit more sometimes it'd be a little bit less and it's all dependent upon how you run your still oh you know i love it when we're able to use a little bit of math just a little bit in order to put you on the path to success um let's erase this so let's look at it this way and um get a kind of get a feel for determining volume based on a beginning portion all right you already know that we have that remember that i talked about this before that brick wall that divide between alcohol by volume and proof abv versus proof what is the relationship between those two the relationship between those two is absolutely nothing okay you've got this brick wall that separates them okay so what does abv tell us abv tells us that after fermentation we are left with a perc a certain percentage of alcohol by volume and let's use an example of five gallons at 10 okay i've got five gallons at ten percent abv so how much alcohol is in that five gallon container there's your five gallon mark how much alcohol is there well ten percent of five gallons is going to be 0.5 that's going to be a half a gallon so right down here you're going to have a half a gallon of ethanol folks you're not going to have any more okay to me it does it doesn't matter what you do how you do it how you hold your mouth when you do it it's it's just it's there's not going to be more than that so you you can no longer now you cross this line you can't make any more alcohol all right what are we going to do on this side of the chart we've made it here okay when we get to the other side of the chart what we're going to try to do is we're going to try to take this from this we're going to separate these two and we'll take this we'll wind up here now invariably since we know we can't collect it pure at 100 percent all right 200 proof depending on how your process runs will depend on has a direct a direct effect on proof now we already know ahead of time we just we we don't even assume this we just know it we know that since we're not going to collect 100 that we're going to collect this ethanol and we're going to collect a portion of that water that goes with it and there's a reason for that that's in another video it's there's a lot of things molecularly that's going on with science and physics and thing but trust me you're gonna have ethanol and you're gonna always have some water so let's we'll use a pot still as an example okay in a pot still if you're running at 140 proof that is equivalent to that is actually 70 percent alcohol that's 70 alcohol by volume and the remainder of whatever you got is 30 h2o water okay and then let's say for instance you run it all the way down to 100 proof that means that you've got 50 alcohol okay and you've got 50 water okay that's how that works out now but the point is is you're not going to ever make any more alcohol you're just going to adjust the purity of what you collect so it you know the age-old question and i get this a lot too is while i'm collecting it the best i can get is 120 proof and i i want to get a higher proof usually my question is why do you want a higher proof uh or could i want to get more alcohol well you don't get more alcohol yeah i said that yeah you don't get more alcohol you get a more pure alcohol so let's say for instance we drew this ethanol out of here this half a gallon let's say for instance oh i love this part of it so you add these two together it's just this look if you add these two together that's 100 of whatever your jar size is okay that's what that is and same thing with this one is 100 of your jar size now uh what is the difference well the difference is the purity level 100 proof versus 140 proof now when you collect when you collect 140 proof from start to finish you will collect less because going in you're always collecting 70 of it is alcohol and only 30 percent of it is water you're going to run out of alcohol a lot quicker if you're collecting 70 percent of this you're going to run out of alcohol a whole lot quicker than if you're only collecting 50 percent of it it kind of makes sense so what will happen is is that you'll wind up with a jar and that'll be here it'll be 70 percent ethanol and 30 percent water but in this jar you're going to have it'll be full you'll have 50 water and 50 ethanol all right so you're going to have more alcohol in here but at 50 as opposed to here you'll have less alcohol but it'll be at 70 at the end of the day these will both equal the exact same amount of alcohol that you started with okay you can't create alcohol all you can do is ferment and allow the yeast to make alcohol as a byproduct of the fermentation process when you walk over to this side of the equation what we want to do is we want to separate it we want to take the two and separate them as best we can the more pure we separated the higher the proof the less pure we separated the lower the proof that's how the separation process works in this equation because we've got these two sides of equation we've got alcohol by volume and proof the difference between the two well we hope we've answered all your questions yes if you get an opportunity please subscribe share this with your friends love being back i'll tell you what gatlinburg tennessee if you ever get an opportunity to go out to see those wonderful folks yes sir they've got plenty of shots for you to taste and try and so much to do so much amusement for the family and friends we love being with you happy distilling

Channel: Barley and Hops Brewing

Views: 49,260

Keywords: neutral spirit, sugar wash, barlerandhops, hops, home, Sugar (Ingredient), sugar mash, distilling, barley, corn sugar vs cane sugar, corn sugar mash recipe, making a wash for distilling, running a still for the first time, first distillation, using yeast, mooshine, whiskey, making rum, making vodka, bourbon, baby step bourbon, making bourbon at home

Id: E0GxZqaQ09k

Length: 26min 32sec (1592 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 27 2020