■ 🕑 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. 
│    
└─■ 🕑 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.