Quite literally.

I'm doing cuts my second time ever, on my second spirit run ever. Using an air still, which is yeah I know, but it's what I got until a couple projects clear off my plate this summer and I have time to commit to a larger scale still project.

I fucked up cuts on my first batch, 100% distillers malt, and ended up dumping the alleged hearts and all the feints into the low wines of my second ever batch, which is 80% barley grain and 20% distillers malt. It gave me 7/8 gallon of 36% low wines, which is a hell of a lot better capacity and ABV than my first batch, for my little 1 gallon still.

Ran it with a controller to slow the air still down, to about one drop / second, or 50 ml/10 minutes. Conveniently, half pint Kerr canning jars have a clear point in the jar markings that is almost exactly 50 mls. Got good fractions, clean transitions. It all makes a lot more sense to me than my first batch did. I'm pretty sure I've got about 4:50 or 500 mils of hearts, all above 80% ABV.

If I take a fingertip of the stuff near the middle of hearts, and rub it into my palm to vaporize it and take a smell, I'm getting good clean alcohol and warm grain and vaguely fruit. It's quite nice.

But it became really obvious where hearts ended and tails began. I got one jar that started having some pleasant hay/earth aromas. I'm pretty sure that's a keeper, but we'll see tomorrow once I cut to 35% and see what it taste like there.

And then somewhere a little ways into the next jar, about 78% ABV, those hay/earth flavors changed to sickly faintly nauseating rotting vegetation with overtones of pond muck. It is really obvious where that transition happens. That wasn't true my first try, but my conditions and my fractions are a lot better this time around.

But the thing I'm realizing is, that smell is so inescapable, that I've got to get rid of it before I make any other decisions. Before I do anything else, all of the obvious tails are going into my feints jar, and leaving the vicinity. I very clearly need to get that stuff out of my nostrils before I can make any other decisions. So the obvious jars have already gone away tonight, and I'll see where I am tomorrow once everything has sat overnight to breathe, and my nostrils and sinuses have settled back to baseline for detecting aromas.

At least in these first couple batches I haven't got anything of The aromas I've been reading to watch out for, things like concrete, or wet cardboard, or wet dog. It's more like rotten vegetal aromas. And it really stinks.

In case it's not obvious, I'm having a ball with this. Learning like mad, and this is all fun.