I have finished the brewing stage of what will hopefully be my first gin and now need to gather up the mental fortitude to stare at a thermometer for several hours and potentially ruin all the prior work. I'm not very good at distillation yet.

[–] poleslav@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Honestly screw the thermometer. I’m a bit green to it as well, but with my setup having “high power” or “low” power, I stopped bothering with using the thermometer as an indicator. Now I just use my tongue and an alchometer. Do cuts often, I use a boat load of 8oz jars. Toss the beginning parts obviously, use your nose and tongue to go into tails, I typically stop my stilling at 35/30% abv coming off the still. From there after all your cuts are done have a lot of paper towels on hand. I cover each jar (and there’s lots of them) with a paper towel and let them sit 24 hours to let any volatiles air out. From there I do my blending and this procedure has done me well for the last year and a half or two that I’ve tried my hand at spirits.

[–] Skua@kbin.earth 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Most of my brewing is for beer, so I have heaps of 500ml bottles that I use to make cuts, thankfully. I don't actually own any tools to properly measure the content of spirits, though. I'm currently going on "is it flammable" and "what does it taste/smell like". If I can actually get into it a bit more I'll invest in the gear, but I feel like I need to get over the mental block first

I appreciate the advice though. It's good to have some reassurance, because man it just fucking sucks to wait weeks to brew something and then totally fuck up the distillation. What's the thinking behind covering the jars with a paper towel rather than just the lid of the jar (or the stopper of the bottle, in my case)?

[–] poleslav@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Alchometer should only be like $20 USD, though if you wanna just use taste, that absolutely works too! I did that with my watermelon brandy (accidentally sat on my alchometer during distillation lol) for the paper towel vs lid or stopper, paper towel is far more permeable to volatile compounds. Could you get away without doing it? Yeah probably. Does it make a difference? Honestly, maybe, maybe not, theoretically to me it makes sense so I’ve done it every time, but I haven’t read any research papers on the topic. But letting it “air out” and let the more volatile stuff out (without letting bugs or fruit flies in) makes sense to me so I do it haha

[–] Skua@kbin.earth 3 points 1 month ago

Ahh okay, that makes sense. Thank you!