Aussiedistiller, Home Distilling, Moonshine, Home Brew

Hi guys

Been racking my brain on some green spirit I'm getting lately.

So here's the low down..

I ran a rum wash the other week and had an enormous yeild (discussed elsewhere) and the following rum run had a slight rotten smell which cleared up after a few days airing. The run done after that (rum also) had a strong rotten smell and a green tinge to it. These were ran back to back with two different washes. Consideration was given to the cooling water gaining a few degrees by the way.

I turfed the third run, there was no chance the smell was going anywhere. Or was there?

I cleaned out the boiler, I then dismantled the still and soaked/dismantled the plates and scrubbed everything clean. Quick vinegar boil up and a rinse and off we go.

Thinking it may have been the wash I charged up with a uj variant the following week and to my surprise the smell and colour returned. Rotten stench with a green tinge from a completely clean still... it cant be the still.

I turned the stil off halfway through and dumped the wash. I then went to work reading up on the problem.. to no avail.

So I have now done 4 runs with the colour and odour. I am currently running the same uj as aforementioned and the first jar is green, not much of a smell other than heads but the colour is off putting nonetheless. So far it's 16 jars in at 90% and edging on tails, the colour and odour has seemed to have gone.

My focus is now on the boiler.. I left wash/backset in the boiler aftrr the last run, maybe the welds are rusting and have contributed to the problem?

Thanks for reading my long winded post and I hope to get some answers to this ongoing issue as it's killing my motivation.

Green just brings the thought of copper to me, didn't you do the citric acid bath a couple of weeks ago ? Maybe a cleaning problem. :-B

1 2many wrote:Green just brings the thought of copper to me, didn't you do the citric acid bath a couple of weeks ago ? Maybe a cleaning problem. :-B

Yeah that was the cleaning part I mentioned 1 2 :handgestures-thumbupleft:

All plates and caps were like new. The problem was there before and after cleaning

Probably not much help but high pH washes can cause blue distillate in copper stills from memory,

Interesting , Someone hopefully can help I would like to know the answer too.

1 2many wrote:Interesting , Someone hopefully can help I would like to know the answer too.

I asked UZ to post this out here, my answer in private was pretty close to what SBB was saying, only I said high alkaline wash might do it.

Just for curiosity sake UZ can you measure the ph of your water, your wash if finished, and give us a look at your copper bits ?

SBB wrote:Probably not much help but high pH washes can cause blue distillate in copper stills from memory,

All washes were ph adjusted to 5.5 as per usual. I'll take ph now of water and wash

Has anyone had this recurring issue before? Could the welds have degraded and now be tainting the spirit?

Ok whiskey at about 4.5


Rum looks the same but hard to tell


Water is about 6.5/7


This is the beginning, hope you can see the colour scaling down from left to right


This is the first jar next to water

What do you clean your bottles with mate ?

Wonder if you distilled some plain tap water if you'd get colour ? it'd certainly count a few things out.

As for degraded welds I'd be pretty certain you'd know if they were, one quick look would show anything up, can you get a torch and mirror in your boiler for a look...... I usually just hold my phone in there and take a couple of pics to check out hard to see spots.

I'm pretty sure it's not the still, we recently sold the 100th Mac 4 and I'd expect the problem would be well known by now if it was.

Also try soaking a bit of copper mesh in some neutral perhaps, see if it taints it in any way, and maybe find out the source of the mesh and see what info they can give you about it's make up.

I'm not sure what it is, but I reckon it's something fairly simple :handgestures-thumbupleft:

When you ran you vinegar clean did you condense any?
If so was it green . I'm just a newbie here but I bet my ass it's from your copper. Weather its a reaction or just build up of sulphides that didn't clean up. Do you have mesh in there as well as the plates ?

I still can't get copper out of my head, when you cleaned in the vinegar you mentioned that you rinsed it with water until it didn't smell like vinegar. What I am thinking is the acid reaction on the copper didn't stop, I have read that you should really soak in bicarb to neutralize the acid. I am guessing that colour is copper oxide. :-B

Have you got a sight glass on your boiler?

It isn't puking a little with the rum washes? :think:

1 2many wrote:I still can't get copper out of my head, when you cleaned in the vinegar you mentioned that you rinsed it with water until it didn't smell like vinegar. What I am thinking is the acid reaction on the copper didn't stop, I have read that you should really soak in bicarb to neutralize the acid. I am guessing that colour is copper oxide. :-B

I reckon you might be onto it mate, or maybe his boiler welds aren't quite right (purged) :think: I dunno I'm just chucking things out there to get some info for myself too :handgestures-thumbupleft:

The still parts are all sanitary grade and easy to spot any flaws or production problems, so at this point I'm happy to discount the obvious, but it's got me thinking of the seals "maybe" if they've stuffed up and sent wrong ones to me ? ... I'll ask the question when my colleague gets back online.

I wish we had easier access to chemistry & testing kind of gear, the expense of getting something like moonshine tested by professionals and the anonymity issues makes it bloody near impossible unless you know someone willing to keep their mouth shut ~x(

One way or another we'll get to the bottom of it collectively, might just take a bit of rooting around until we do :handgestures-thumbupleft:

sam_and_liv wrote:Have you got a sight glass on your boiler?

It isn't puking a little with the rum washes? :think:

I can puke my 6" rig to the 3rd sight glass and the product is still clear, so unless you're pumping wash through the RC I think it's unlikely :shifty:

Hmm, I have only puked my 4 inch bubbler once up to the second plate running four and it had a tinge for a few jars, just thought I would check the obvious.

Urrazeb, when you say you adjust your washes to 5.5 is that during the ferment? i.e. your trying to end up at 5.5?

Other than the high alkalintiy all I could suggest is cleaning the absolute shit out of it, cirtic bath for the parts (netrelize with bicarb as well maybe) then a full on vinegar run then a full on plain water run and see what you get then.

Seems weird that your the only one experiencing this :?

Looking at OP....bad smell....sulfur dioxide as in rotten eggs smell ..maybe .Bad molasses perhaps .

Sure I read somewhere about blue spirit causes by excessive amonia...are you over doing the DAP ?

All good points with the copper but wouldn't that surely be gone after a run or two max? Surely the alc would neutrlaze it enough from its acid wash?

I use dolomite as I have since I started to raise Ph and this is before I pitch yeast. The rum and uj were both 1st gens.

S&l I use a sight glass for rum washes and the stillis watched like a hawk so pukes don't get very far :handgestures-thumbupleft:

Whats got me fucked is it's all the last 5 runs... got to be the boiler, washes are basically ruled out as there were different ones ran with same results, still is ruled out as it's cleaner than the glass I drik from.. that leaves the elements and boiler/welding

Running a test batch now..

Cleaned boiler out and put in plain water to cover, added 4L of clean feints not related to the colour runs.

So far so good. 2nd jar in, no colour and clean heads.

I think maybe the moist environment is allowing the rust to develop and this is coming through when I run? :?

If the last 5 runs we're rum how about chucking though a TPW or something else to rule out the wash completely :-B

Need to ask what has changed between the last 5 washes and whatever you were doing previously?

Chuck some water in on its own and see what happens. It's a reaction of sorts have you changed anything else ? Drain fittings or anything. I'm a problem solver . It's always about going back to the start of the problem to find the cause. Sometimes it's a combination of things but normally(generally speaking in life) it's 1 thing that has changed to cause a repeatable issue