■ 🕑 55. 2025-05 ferments
│  A new month, a new subthread.
│  
│  Made 3 liters of apple cider tonight. Usually 5.5% ABV but I added 
│  enough sugar to bump them up to 8%. I prefer the lower ABVs because they
│  ferment and age faster, but a big thing I get out of this hobby is 
│  practicing patience and appreciating things that wait in the future, so
│  it's not a big deal.
│   
├─■ 🕑 56. 
│ │  Cooked up a new sugar wash today: 
│ │  
│ │  - ~18 liters water
│ │  - 4kg sugar
│ │  - 250g bran
│ │  - boiled for 30 mins with spoon of yeast
│ │  - pinch DAP and epsom salts
│ │  - 50g yeast at room temp
│ │  
│ │  Smells pretty good, very wheaty and sweet. 
│ │   
│ └─■ 🕑 59. 
│     After my strong success doing a 1.5x run of breakfast cereal with 
│     sugar, with various feints in my new reflux still, I was curious how 
│     running a "wash" on its own through my reflux still would do, after 
│     seeing that my new still can effectively reach azeotrope on relatively 
│     lower %s.
│     
│     The results were somewhat disappointing! Reaching azeotrope again took 
│     a lot of fiddling around and stalling, overall output was not worth it, 
│     and the output spirit (while quite drinkable!) was not what I was 
│     expecting. 
│     
│     I think for the future I will be sending spirits stripped at least once
│     to my reflux still, whether diluted feints or low wines. It does add
│     time and electric use to the process relative to a simple one and done
│     run, but I think the intermediary step is worth it, in terms of operator 
│     burden and quality of end result. 
│     
│     Reflux is still a new world for me. But it's fun playing. 
│      
├─■ 🕑 57. 
│   Ran my new reflux still for the first time on 05-07, Wednesday 
│   
│   After I took off foreshots, it stabilized at 78.3*C for nearly the
│   entire run which means the stuff coming out was 96% ABV. Probably lost
│   some due to evaporation, but wow.
│   
│   The takeoff rate was pretty slow because I'm using a hack until I buy
│   a proper needle valve. 500ml per 2 hours. But still, 96%! 
│   
│   I fed some old tails and heads from other runs into the boiler with most
│   of a bucket of 12% ABV sugar wine that had breakfast cereal soaking in 
│   it for flavor. Some of the breakfast cereal notes carried through but
│   it smells and tastes ultimately like a rum. Dilute down to the low 40%s
│   and I ended up with 6 liters from 12 hours of operating time. 
│   
│   Based on my math, the ~80cm of packing in a 2" pipe is achieving 13 or 14 
│   "plates" worth of distillation when refluxing. A stripping run normally
│   takes me 8 hours to pull out 4L of 40% that have a lot of off flavors,
│   and running 18L of ~35% takes 9 hours to extract ~3L of "hearts" around
│   70%. So big picture, the reflux saves a lot of time for producing a 
│   clean, strong spirit. 
│   
│   going to do another reflux experiment next week with the bran sugar wash, 
│   curious how it will compare to the cereal sugar wash. I suspect it will
│   taste like a pretty good whisky. There are hints of whisky flavor in my
│   breakfast cereal reflux (some of the heads/tails I dumped in were from
│   my bran sugar wash spirit run) but it ultimately tastes more like rum
│   than anything. 
│    
└─■ 🕑 58. 
  │  I forget how many days ago I started but I started doing UJSSM 
  │  (cracked corn + sugar "whisky") a few days ago and started a 
  │  birdwatcher's vodka (tomato paste + sugar) last night. My plan is to 
  │  save the UJSSM hearts after I hit generation 2 with a mild amount of 
  │  heads/tails to age on oak and send the feints along with birdwatcher's 
  │  to my reflux for future experiments.
  │  
  │  ----
  │  Expected ABV ujssm: 9% 
  │  Expected ABV birdwatchers: 12% 
  │   
  └─■ 🕑 60. 
    │  Boiled out the "birdwatchers" today, got a bit over 4L, jars being 70%,
    │  60%, and 38% strength. Once I get some more "low wines" from tomato 
    │  paste wine, I intend to run them through the reflux with some 
    │  sodium carbonate (washing soda) to see how that turns out. 
    │  
    │  Smashed some matcha candies up and threw them into a jar of 95% ABV a
    │  few weeks ago. Diluted it today with a mix of matcha powder, creamer,
    │  water, and a dash of barley malt syrup, down to about 23% ABV. The 
    │  matcha flavor is really impressive, lots of creamy goodness happening,
    │  and the alcohol is barely present. This stuff is on par with Bailey's
    │  yet a liter only cost about $3 to make (totally worth it) 
    │   
    └─■ 🕑 61. 
      │  I forgot to update the thread, but last week I started 12L of apple 
      │  cider. It's finished fermenting -- only took 4 days -- but it needs
      │  time to clear up. 
      │  
      │  I got some of the mead I made a few weeks back and freezejacked it 
      │  today. Balanced it out with a little artificial sweetener and I'm 
      │  impressed with how it turned out. Maybe 18% ABV, very strong honey 
      │  flavors, and a nice satisfying amount of burn. 
      │   
      └─■ 🕑 63. 
          The gikocider cleared up a few days ago. I also started fermenting
          the second generation of UJSSM corn beer a few days ago and it's nearly
          done. 
          
          Blog post on oaking/aging spirits -- may be relevant to oaking wines,
          maybe not. https://4x13.net/blog/oaking1.html