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Thanks. >> What's up everyone?
It's Jerry here. >> Welcome back everyone.
I'm Robin from This Blog's Neat and also rum at all. And today we're going to talk all about distillation cuts.
Now, I have a couple
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of other videos where I go over how to take distillation cuts and things like that, but this video will hopefully go into a lot more detail. And we'll talk more about that in a second.
But the reason I
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wanted to do this video is because I feel like there are still a lot of common misconceptions out there about distilling and making distillation cuts. One of those misconceptions is that distillation cuts are like crystal clear
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and can be measured like via temperature or strength of the distillate, right? ABV or it's dependent on the volume that you're collecting.
And I know that there are even some
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people out there who light their distillate on fire and look at the color of the flame in order to make specific distillation cuts. Please do not light your distillate on fire.
The way distillation cuts actually should be taken is really quite simple.
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Although that doesn't necessarily mean that it's easy. Uh then again, like distilling is not supposed to be something that's easy, right?
It's a craft and it takes time to hone that craft. And I kind of wish that more
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distillers really embraced that and talked about that. But anyways, I'm going to actually walk you through how I make distillation cuts specifically for my baseline rum in the hopes that this will be plenty of information that will
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help you hone your distilling craft. But first, let's make sure we are all on the same page with how my baseline rum is made.
Now, in order for a rum to be rum, it must be distilled from fermented sugar cane of some sort. And for me,
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that form of sugar cane comes in molasses. And specifically, I use baking grade molasses for all of my rums.
Make sure your molasses is unsulfered. If you're using molasses, it must be unsulfered if you want it to ferment.
I
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then use tap water and red star distiller yeast. So these are all very readily available ingredients that you can use to make rum.
I then let that ferment for 2 and 1 half to 3 weeks and then double pot distill it. So run it through a pot still twice.
And for more
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information on how exactly I make my rum. I've got a video on that.
You can also head over to my website for more information. or you can pick up a bottle and just turn over the bottle and on the
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back label has the recipe, the distillation details, uh, and everything. Now, there are a few different types of stills, a few different categories of stills.
There's pot stills, column stills, and hybrid stills. And we are not going to dive into all the different types of stills
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today. I have a video that actually does that if you want to check that out.
Today we're just going to be talking about pot stills because what I use is a pot still. A very straightforward pot still.
It doesn't have any plates or anything like that. It is just run as a
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simple pot still. So pot stills operate as a batch process.
An alcoholic mixture gets tossed into the pot that's heated up. It eventually boils and those hot vapors travel up the neck of the still over to the condenser and get cooled
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down and condensed back into liquid and voila, you have a distilled spirit. When a spirit is double pot distilled like baseline is, that means it goes through that process twice.
If it's triple distilled, like most Irish whisies are,
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a lot of Irish whisies are, that means it goes through it three times. Now each time you do a distillation and redistill your distillate, you are concentrating the volatile components.
So meaning ethanol and your flavor and aroma
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compounds. You're concentrating those.
And whichever distillation run is your final run is where you're going to make distillation cuts. There's no need to make distillation cuts in any of the distillations before that.
It's just the final distillation where you make distillation cuts. And generally
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speaking, you have the heads, the hearts, and the tails cuts. That's the first, the middle, and the last stuff that comes off of the still.
These also go by other names like four shots and spirit and faints or low wines and high wines. It doesn't matter what you call
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it. The name does not matter as long as you know what you're talking about as a distiller.
For today, I'm going to stick with heads, hearts, and tails for simplicity sake. So, let's talk numbers for like an actual pot distillation, an actual distillation for baseline here.
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This batch in particular, this is batch 2.25, was a 250galon fermentation. And when it was done fermenting, it got up to a strength of 10.5% ABV.
After the first distillation, also known as the
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stripping run, I had 75 gall of distillate that I call low wines, sitting at 35% ABV. I then distilled those low wines, and what I got out was 19 gall of spirit at 75% ABV.
And this
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does not include the heads and tails cuts. For this batch in particular, I collected three gallons of heads.
So, the first three gallons that came off the still were the heads. Then the next 19 gallons that came off the still were the hearts that ended up, you know,
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making it into the final spirit. And then I continued to collect the next like 17 or so gallons that came off the still as tails.
Let's talk about how exactly I determine where the heads, the hearts, and the tails fall. Now, as I
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mentioned, it is very simple. I do it based on taste.
And not to [ __ ] on you, but unless you are a distiller who works at a gigantic distillery where you have everything super tuned in and systemized
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and you are making the same distillate 24/7, 365. You should also be doing your distillation cuts based on taste.
And this is especially true if you are a home distiller or you're a craft distiller where you're making more than
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one product. Distilling is where distillers get to put their fingerprint on the product.
Distillers are the ones who are selecting the flavors from the raw ingredients and from the fermentation that they want you the consumers to taste in their final
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spirit. So let's actually talk through my baseline distillation cuts here as for this batch in particular.
Throughout the distillation, the strength of the distillate is dropping over time. And this means that the flavors are continually changing throughout the
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distillation. As you can see in this graph, the initial distillate is sitting at 85% ABV.
that quickly drops to 78% ABV and then it steadily decreases for a while until it decreases more and more
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rapidly. Now, as you're looking at this and you're starting to look at the numbers, I want you to keep in mind that my still is only 55 gall and I had, as I said, 75 gall of low wines and uh I can't fit 75 gallons of low wines into a
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55gallon pot still. So, I had to split this into two separate distillations just for the spirit run.
So, the data that we're looking at right here is for a spirit run that had 37 gallons of low wines tossed into it at 35% ABV. So, keep that in mind.
So, of that 37 gall
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of low wines that I distilled, I ended up getting 19 gall of distillate total, including the heads, hearts, and tails, only nine of those gallons were actually kept as hearts. And as you can see, I took a data point at every two gallons
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to both measure the ABV and also so I can tell you how the flavors change throughout the entire distillation. So that means I'm going to go through 10 samples of distillate right now as if we
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are going through the distillation in real time. So, we're going to start with the first distillate.
What came off the still right off the bat. And this was sitting at 85% ABV.
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Okay. So, there are a lot of nice flavors in here.
However, there are also a lot of not nice flavors in here. So, I'm getting whipped cream and apples, like green apples.
Um, there's some pepperiness and some grassiness, but the flavors that I don't
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really like is that there's this chemical aringency to it. Reminds me of a nail salon.
Um, and is just overall a little bit harsh. And it's those harsh notes that I know when I add into the spirit, those harsh notes carry through.
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And I'm not looking for those harsh notes. So even though there are some nice notes in there, I don't want that harshness.
So after 2 gallons was collected, the distillate was now down to 78.4% ABV.
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And that drop from 85 is really really fast, by the way. So there there's still some of that like chemical aringency, but it's much more mild, much more subdued.
And I get more fruits, custard.
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It's very custardy. I get some raisins, like golden raisins.
There's still a little bit of that like nail salon thing, but again, it's much less. So there's also some cinnamon in here.
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Okay, so after four gallons was collected, the distillate was down to 77.2% ABV. So here, this is fruier.
There's still that custardy thing. There is caramel in
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here as well. There's a little bit of like a cheesy thing that reminds me of pub cheese.
There's still that pepper that I was getting in the first the first distillate and that like chemical bitter has now turned into like a spicy
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bitter thing. So it's like cloves and anise.
So after 6 gallons was collected the distillate was down to 76.1% ABV. This is fruier.
There's more caramel.
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There's lots of juicy dried figs. There's cinnamon and there's raisins.
And that bitterness has now kind of presented as like a like a grapefruit. Um, so there's more citrus on here.
And there's also a little bit
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of earthiness. We are definitely like well into the hearts right now.
Okay. After 8 gallons was collected, the distillate was down to 74.2%.
2% ABV.
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There's still a lot of fruits here. A lot of dried fruits that have kind of turned into prunes, but there's still lots of figs as well.
We're now starting to get like a little bit of a general grungginess. Um, there's some waxiness,
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some cinnamon pine cones, something almost savory and uh and roasted. At this point, this is where I start to pay like close attention to see if we're getting closer to the tails or not.
It's that like cinnamon pine cone
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note and that waxiness that I start to get when we are getting close to the tails. After 10 gallons was collected, the distillate was down to 71.6%.
6% ABV.
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Okay. Yeah.
More of that waxiness, more of that cinnamon pine cone thing is coming forward. And now I'm starting to get something that reminds me of a craft store like Michaels.
There's golden raisins.
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There's candy ginger. That that uh roasted thing is still present.
After 12 gallons was collected, the distillate was down to 67.2% ABV.
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This is a lot of that waxy cinnamon pine cone thing. And we're like deeper into Michaels now.
Like we're in the the section where they have all the wooden stuff. Like there's a lot of pine.
There's also prunes and anise. And those
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prunes are getting a little bit on the grungy side. So at this point, we are in the tails.
Okay, after 14 gallons was collected, the distillate was down to 60.5% ABV.
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Okay, that's yeah, very very similar to the previous sample. However, there is noodly water mixed in.
So, like pasta water mixed in. I'm also getting a lot of black tea and a little bit of pepper.
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Okay, so after 16 gallons was collected, the distillate was down to 49.1% ABV. Deep in the tails here, there's there's cheese on the nose.
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Yeah, there's like a like a feet cheese thing on the nose, but the more I smell it, the more I like it. This has a lot more of that what I what I refer to as like noodly water, but it also is reminiscent of like a
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clean wet dog. Like not like a dirty wet dog, just like a clean wet dog.
A lot of that waxiness, a lot of that cinnamon pine cone is still present. There's now more starinise and almost like a stale
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coffee thing presenting. Last up, we have the sample that was taken after 18 gallons was collected.
The distillate was down to 29.6% ABV. And yeah, lots of uh lots of noodly
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water on the nose. Yeah, not great.
Um, so lots of noodle water. It's also like watered down soggy prunes
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as well as like watered down sundried tomatoes. There's also like a burnt quality to this that's almost a little ashy.
uh and and something savory
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and again with that like burnt. It's almost like charred meat.
So, as you can see, the flavors constantly change throughout the distillation. And I think that's another common misconception that I hear is that distillation cuts are kind of present themselves clearly,
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right? When it's hearts, it's very clear that that you're in the hearts and they taste like hearts throughout the entire hearts cut.
and that heads taste a certain way and then stay that way until they turn into the hearts and then once the hearts turn into the tails it's
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that's it right and um there's definitely things that I look for as I said in the heads I'm looking for that kind of like chemical bitter astringency thing and in the tails I tend to look for this like noodle water I know if I
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get that noodle water thing we're like deep into the tails But the the cinnamon pine cone craft store waxiness tends to start to present and it gets stronger and stronger as we
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move farther into the tails. So, it's my job as the distiller to figure out which of those flavors I actually want to make it into the distillate, right, into the final spirit and which I don't deem
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worthy enough to make it into the final spirit. For this distillation in particular, I ended up keeping everything between the 1 and 1/2 gallon mark to the 10 and 1/2 gallon mark as my heart's cut.
Meaning the first 1 and 1/2
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gallons were heads and the last eight gallons, 8 and 1/2 gallons were tails. And for the most part, I do rolling cuts, right?
So I'm combining the distillate together into cuts as
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it's coming off the still. However, I do tend to collect almost like buffer jugs, if that makes sense.
So, when I know we're moving from the heads into the hearts, I'll collect about a gallon to a
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gallon and a half in that in between area where it's kind of like could go either way, right? Same with when we're moving from the the hearts to the tails, I'll collect a buffer jug.
And so, for this distillation in particular, I had a
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gallon on either side of that of that hearts cut. So the first of the nine gallons and the last of the nine gallons were actually these kind of like maybe jugs.
And when I collect those separately and kind of set them off to
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the side without immediately blending them into the heads cut or into the hearts cut or into the tails cut. That allows me to kind of take my time deliberating.
But yeah, for the most part I'm doing rolling cuts. And this is
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as opposed to doing like partitioned out cuts. For instance, if I were to take two gallon jugs and set them all aside and collect all of that from the distillation and then blend once the
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distillation is done. That's one method and I know it's more popular in say like home distilling community.
I have used it plenty of times, especially when it's my first time distilling something and I don't exactly know what flavors I'm
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looking for. So, I think it is a good technique to kind of collect out those partitioned cuts or evenly spaced cuts when you are first learning because it does build up your confidence and help you figure out what exactly you are looking for when making distillation
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cuts. Anyways, I think I haven't tasted enough today during this video that I should taste baseline, this batch of baseline for you so you can actually see what the spirit tastes like once those cuts are blended together.
So,
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so this is in fact bottled at still strength, so 75% ABV. I believe it's 75.2% ABV.
I get orange creamsicle and cinnamon raisin toast. Worther's original
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vanilla ice cream. There's something grassy and minty in here as well.
I'm getting some prunes that are like a little bit grungy. It's also paired with this like damp wood thing.
So, I think that's what's giving me the grunge. It's not necessarily the prunes, but that
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like damp wood thing. [Music] I get cinnamon raisin cheese danish, which is what I'm always aiming for when I make my batches of baseline.
There's
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lots of figs, lots of fig jam. The that prune thing comes forward on the palette as well.
There's toffee, there's anise, there's clove, there's vanilla whipped cream, and the mouth feel is like super
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super super creamy. Really nice.
So, you can see there are notes that are coming from different parts of those cuts, I think. All right, with that, guys, I think this video has been long enough and I've been tasting enough and talking enough.
Uh, but I hope that all of this
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information was really helpful and encourages you to do your distillation cuts based on taste and also helps encourage you to keep improving on your distilling skills, keep honing that craft. There is certainly a learning
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curve, but you will continue to get better and better if you just keep up with it. And I hope that this video motivates you to keep practicing.
Anyways, before I go, I do want to give a huge shout out to my Patreons. Thank you guys so much for helping to support the channel.
We've already talked about
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this distillation and my distillation cuts. If you, the viewer, would also like to support the channel.
We would love to have you over on Patreon. If you'd like to join us, if not, do the YouTube things.
Please just like, subscribe, comment, share the videos
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with your friends, watch more of my videos, that whole thing. And with that, guys, I hope you enjoy this video.
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