"Greetings from the South,

First time poster and first time making homebrew. I have run 2 different batches through my homemade distiller and have results on the far ends of each spectrum (success and fail).

The first run was a 1 to 1 mixture of cornmeal to sugar mix with 1 packet of yeast. It fermented for 5 days and looked great. I removed most of the sediment by filtering the mash through a cheese cloth but the resulting distilled liquid was still hazy and very watery with just a hint of alcohol. FAIL.

Second run was with a Turbo Yeast pack and 17.5 lb of sugar. This batch fermented for 7 days and it had a nice smell to it. There was no sediment in this as the sugar was completely dissolved. Distilling was great and the liquid came out clear and strong. Not sure of the alcohol proof but according to the amount of sugar I used it should have been around 80 proof. I ended up using this batch in a Apple Pie Moonshine recipe which I plan to give away as gifts.

My two runs caused me to seek out guidance on how to improve my process and for answers to a few questions. On both runs, I had more mash (or is it called wash?) than my homemade distiller would allow so I had to do it several different times. I kept checking the liquid and noticed after a while the alcohol content seem to weaken and tasked watery. My experiements showed that about 3 quarts of mash made 1.5 pints of alcohol before it started to taste watery. I think this is due to the alcohol already being cooked off and all I am doing is distilling water.

Question 1 - How do you know when to stop distilling before removing the old mash and replacing with a new full bowl?

Question 2 - How do you determine what the alcohol content or proof is? In the Apple Pie recipe I found online, they said to use 190 proof moonshine or EverClear.

I started a 3rd batch a week ago and the mash is ready to run but this time I used a 1 to 2 ratio of cornmeal to sugar (2 lbs meal and 4 lbs sugar) with 2 packets of fast acting yeast. The fermentation process was interrupted and only lasted 4 days. Should I be concerned? What would happen if I added another packet of yeast?

Thank you for your advice."