by Shano592 » Tue Jan 21, 2020 4:29 pm
Ok, so an update. I was finally able to give this a go the other day. The results were kind of mixed, but ultimately excellent.
I ran the gin basket empty, while doing a stripping run. Here is where the first issue occurred. The holes in the mesh were way too fine, and the condensate was unable to empty back into the keg. So the gin basket was filling, then I'd have to back off the juice, in order to let it drain.
The gin basket was removed from the stripping run, and stripping went on as normal. After cooling, I removed the mesh floor. I will be drilling 1mm holes, to see how that goes. The current holes are maybe 1/10mm... absolutely tiny!
Anyway, onto the main run. I ran the still as per normal procedure, with the viewing port in place, no mesh floor. The aim was to simply place a cotton bundle in there, with all of the gin-gredients. So, The Gin Genie was brought up to temperature, it ran through a 30 minute reflux, I removed the fores, then about 7 jars of heads, which were poured into my keep-all jar. From there, I backed off the heat, removed the outlet section (which connects above the gin basket), and inserted the cotton bag. It was a tight fit, as there were a lot of ingredients.
The Genie was fired back up, and I started taking more jars, each getting more and more yellow. It could easily have been me after a hard day's work, at one stage. At no point did I have any issues with fluid levels, like I did with the mesh floor in place. It was a very simple process, with some very thick, heat-proof gloves.
All up, I recovered 23x 150-ish ml jars at about 70% ABV average. Of this, I was able to make 4 jars of drinkable gin with a barest of yellow tint (at 40-45% depending on the bottle), and some not pleasant, watery stuff. Plus heads and tails, which I will keep to run through the Drunk Pelican for seasoning. I did run all of this gin through a paper coffee filter, to make sure nothing from the cotton bag made it through.
Not a bad outcome, and I will say that the cotton bag made inserting the ingredients very simple.
I have to say that I'm happy with how this went, and with some progressive modifications, this should be a good addition.