first tell us what equipment you have so we can visualise a method. :)

"Low wines generally a pot stilling term used for what is collected during a stripping run. A pot still with say a 10% wash(also known as beer) may start to produce at 65% alcohol but that will quickly fall off so pot stillers will run their still fast and collect until their product % drops right down around the % of the orginal wash. That usually gives an aggregate % of somewhere around 35%. This is low wines. After a few stripping runs enough low wines can be collected to do a ""spirit"" run. On this run product will be collected at much slower rate and careful cuts will be made to seperate heads, hearts and tails. Hearts is the keepers. I believe feints refers to heads and tails which can be added to your next run, thrown out, used to load a thumper or kept as a non pertroleom fire starter for bbqs or campfires.

With your still you won't need to do stripping runs. A good refluxer allows you to pull a consistant high proof from a lower % wash then you ever could with a pot still. I'm pretty sure you can find a recipe for uncle jesse' simple sour mash(guys on HD seem to call it ujssm) in the recipe section. Some people will run so it comes off at around 88-90% and then call it whiskey. It can also be run at a higher abv% if you are looking to produce a neutral(vodka type liquor). You will also find several simple sugar wash recipes in the recipe section.

Good luck and enjoy your new still."

Think of the distillation as a bell curve where the more volatile compounds come out first(acetone) and the least come last (water) . Fermentation conditions influence all these components.


Foreshots have methanol and acetone...good for parts cleaner, label remover, fire starter, not for drinking. A sugar wash fermented under good conditions should produce very little of these. A real fruit fermentation (say grapes or grape wine) will produce quite a bit in my experience
Heads are next off and have a mix of stuff in them: various esters, "congeners", etc....these can be good or bad flavor components depending on what you fermented, the conditions of the fermentation, how long it sat before distillation, what type of yeast you used, etc. If you are making anything other than a neutral spirit, you'd want at least some of these within, hence making "cuts"....if you don't like their taste you dump them in the feints jug and run them later to get the alcohol. Again, a sugar wash has little of these
Hearts are the part that has more alcohol/water/less flavored stuff.... not necessarily in percent ABV but in amount in terms of volume
Tails have EtOH, less volatile components, water and higher alcohols....visualizing the bell curve. If you don't like the taste but they still have EtOH, they go into the "feints" jug for later processing as well.


I've been playing around with single barley malt/sugar experiments in my quest to make a "single malt scotch": I make pint cuts after the foreshots and have found that, by my tastes, combining #3 thru #8 makes a pretty tasty "scotch". #1-2 taste good but add a bit of "hangover" the next morning. #9-#12 taste good but seem less "scotchy" so I store them up and re-run later

Hope this helps

Super information. one other question about packing. Should it only be used in nuetral washes or is it also used in pot stilling. Does the entire column need to be filled with the rings or is copper better? Thanks once again for the help.

Sisco...
One should always have some copper in the path as it sequesters sulphur compounds and such. If you have an all copper still then you have the copper there. Thus the copper mesh suffices for that too in stainless or glass stills, however when you reflux or fractionate for neutral spirits and or highest ABV then you are talking about "theoretical plates" and a whole different principle and rashig rings can also provide them as does copper mesh. Effectively mesh, either stainless or copper, or the rings increase the internal surface area of your column (adding more theoretical plates) wherein the EtOH "concentrates" as it goes up the column, hence much greater %ABV. Also, when refluxing and fractionating the process is much slower, giving the EtOH time to concentrate as it moves up the temperature gradient. For me, on average 3-3.5 hrs when potdistilling and 6+hrs when refluxing a 25 liter wash