Got my 15 gallon still built and the cleaning runs done, starting my first project on it. Within the next couple days I'm going to post some details about the still, including calibration If exactly how much energy is being delivered on the gas burner, and performance of the recirculating cooling system with cooling tower.

Everything I've done before has been 4 gallon ferments for my little countertop air still, using bread yeast or distillers yeast. Learned a lot on those, but among the things I've learned is that there's so much smearing in the air still that it limits what I can do. So I'm really looking forward to seeing how this still performs.

Anyway, this is what I did:

13 gallons water, chloramine neutralized with ascorbate, and minerals added because my water is so damn soft. Poured into my fermenter at 100° F. Aerated 5 minutes with a paint mixer on a hand drill, frothing the hell out of the surface of the water.

15 lb dextrose. Decided to go with dextrose/glucose instead of table sugar/sucrose, because of so many reports of "sugar bite" from people using sucrose. Added it first in the fermenter, and this stuff fully dissolves nearly instantly.

Generous handful of crushed oyster shell.

12 - 1/2 pounds of cracked corn, run through the Corona grinder once to make the crack finer.

5 lb of rye, run through the Corona hand grinder twice.

Temp was 87° F after adding everything.

5 Tbsp FSI-917 whiskey yeast, sprinkled on top.

It was bubbling nicely within half an hour. .

Taped a seed starting heating mat to the side of the fermenter, with a controller to hold the whole thing at 85° F, and wrapped it all in a blanket to insulate.

24 hours in, and it's bubbling solidly away. I'm pleased.

And most of all, it smells amazing. Distinctly different from the aroma of bread yeast or distillers yeast that I've used before. An interesting richness to it. Oatmeal cookies with vanilla maybe? Recognizably a yeast aroma, but also not bread yeast, or the smell of a beer brewery. I'm really looking forward to seeing how this comes out.

If the fermentation goes as planned, I'll do a 10 gallon stripping run probably Friday or Saturday, and then set up Gen 2 on top of the grain and trub, with 40% backset from Gen 1. Spirit runs on a combined low winds after Gen 3 and Gen 6. I'm currently planning to do 6 generations of this, starting to replace a third of the grain each time after Gen 3.

Then I think my next project after this, is going to be a wheat, oats, rye whiskey, equal parts each with 1/2 of the wheat and rye malted, three fermentations for three stripping runs - which will give me a reasonably full boiler for my spirit run - and with about 25% backset on the 2nd and 3rd fermentations.

Yes, I'm having a ball with this.