Discussion - Spirits, Essential Oils, Vinegar

Would you like to exchange your experiences about spirits, essential oils and vinegar with other participiants? Please observe our forum rules (see Helpful tips for use).

June 2018:

It has now been an unbelievable 16 years (!) since the last major change to the website and forums. When you think that two to three years are an eternity for the Internet sector, that is really something. In any case, there has been so much going on in terms of technology that it has become urgently necessary to completely redesign not only the forums, but also the entire website, from scratch and bring the programming up to date. Naturally, along with this we also introduced various new features; for example it was high time we allowed pictures to be uploaded with a forum post too or enabled users to subscribe to the forums via RSS feeds. And of course we have subsequently included pictures that are saved on external websites and were then integrated here using an img tag, so that no valuable information is lost. In any case, we hope you continue to have fun swapping experiences and trying things out.

Juni 2002:

At this point, we would first like to extend a big thank-you to all the users of our specialist questions for their lively involvement. Without you, we could never have developed such an informative and high-quality reference guide in such a short time (the first post dates from April 8, 1999). The large number of posts and high numbers of visitors made it necessary for us to develop the specialist questions ourselves using PHP and MySQL (at last no more annoying advertising banners!). During the course of this, we have hopefully introduced several improvements.

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Below are a few rules so we can maintain the high quality in the future as well.
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  • The three topic areas, i.e. distilling spirits, distilling essential oils/hydrosols and making vinegar, are divided into three different websites. Each website contains the two forums “Recipes” for all the topics concerning fruit and recipes, and “Discussion” for all the other topics related to distilling spirits, essential oils/hydrosols or making vinegar. If we find posts that are unintentionally in the wrong forum, we will move them to the right forum. These posts have not been deleted, just moved.
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So, that’s it. We hope you have a lot of fun swapping experiences, reading, posting and naturally also trying things out afterwards. Dr Malle & Dr Schmickl Dr. Malle & Dr. Schmickl

I need help

Woodchuck am 14.12.2021 09:42:39 | Region: Northwest usa

Hey everyone I started distilling in mid September this year. I started with apple brandy and when apple harvest was over I started doing rum. The end product is delicious. Problem being I'm barely yielding two quarts on my strip run out of a five gallon boil. Brown sugar is what I use for the mash 6lbs for 5 gallons dady yeast and fermax at 75-80 degrees f. Why am I not getting a 20% mash. Am I not keeping it warm enough? It's making me crazy and it's costing me way more than what I get out. Any wise words will be greatly appreciated.


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RE: I need help

Tom am 19.12.2021 14:51:36 | Region: Tyrol
The maximum achievable alcohol content depends on the variety of cultured yeast you added. Turbo yeast, with the highest possible alcohol tolerance, survives up to about 18 to 20 %ABV (if 18 or 20, depends on the type of Turbo Yeast). All other yeasts die off at far lower concentrations, somewhere between 8 and 14 %ABV (except port yeast or sherry yeast, which got to about 16 %ABV).

The temperature has only an effect on the speed of the fermentation, not the final achievable alcohol content.

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