Just putting this down as part vent, part journal for me, part words of warning for any other new home distiller about LME.
My distilling journey started probably 7 years ago now on a little chinese stovetop rig in my bachelor apartment. Caught the bug and spent a long time procuring parts for a modular VM rig with a 13 gallon boiler, and I didn't start using it until this year. So far I've done just neutral on it and it makes an awesome neutral but my true love is very much in the whiskey/rum/brandy pot still realm.
I don't have a great set up for mashing grains so thought working with LME would be a good hack. Saw some on sale and jumped on it. Bought 60lbs of golden lme and 30lbs of pilsner lme, which is all they had. If it seems like a lot, I'm a pretty involved dad to a 1 year old and my 'stilling windows are limited, so when it's go time I need to go hard.
Anyway, LME is sticky. And it makes everything it comes into contact with eternally sticky, it's an absolute mess of a product and unlike anything I've dealt with before. Diluted it gradually with boiling water until I could get it into my fermenting barrel and then added water until I got a gravity of 1.076, about 50 gallons of wash. I read that it's hard to ferment to begin with and I'm really after a quality product so didn't want to go any higher than that. Based on some research on this forum while the "mash" was still warm from the boiling water I added some glucoamylase to try to attack any of the unfermentable long chain sugars that are apparently prevalent.
I pitched DADY which in hindsight I think was a mistake. I had it on hand and didn't think twice. If I was doing it again I think there was a better yeast to use here, but it is what it is.
Ferment seemed to take pretty well and it went smooth. I like a nice slow, cool, clean ferment so it bubbled away in my basement for about 2 weeks before stalling at 1.01 sg. I figured this was fine due to the unfermentable sugars that exist in LME and didn't attempt to start it up again. Let it clear two more weeks by which time we got to the weekend where my wife and kid were going away for a couple days.
So I get ready for a day of stripping, fill my boiler with about 8 gallons of wash. With sugar wash I'll normally do 10 or 11 gallons at a time but some smart people on this forum suggested LME might foam, so I left what I thought was lots of headspace. Started heating up, did a little cleanup and then I decided to do something incredibly dumb and thought I had enough time for a bathroom break before product started flowing. Never do this. I can't say that enough, shut down the still and never do this. By the time I came back there was puke everywhere. All over my garage, absolutely horrendous. I wasn't gone long but a ton of product puked out onto the floor. Shut it down, collected myself and started back up slowly watching closely. Still puked. Turned the power down real low and collected super slowly until I hit tails, which was pretty quick because I lost a ton of product to puking. Pretty pissed at myself but it's a mistake I'll never make again.
So cleaned what I could, and for the next stripping run added a sight glass to my riser, which turned out to be a great move as I could see the puke rising and turn down my power until I reached what I called "pukequilibrium", where the puke wouldn't rise above the sightglass. Unfortunately pukequilibrium meant my product was collecting incredibly slowly. With a sugar wash I'll have a stripping run done in 90 minutes, this was taking at least double that. So after about 12 hours of stripping, feeling pretty miserable and nauseous from the smell of cooked LME puke in my garage, I called it a night. On top of all this I was really unhappy with how the distillate was smelling and tasting. Overwhelming maillard/caramel corn notes and I wasn't optimistic at how it would turn out. But it could always be turned into neutral, so I pressed on.
The next day I did 2.5 more slow stripping runs and my spirit run. Ended up with 6 gallons or so of low wines that I diluted with backset to 35%. Spirit run was easy. Collected 500mls at a time, super slow for heads and dialed it up once I started being comfortable I was into hearts, and then on full blast for tails. That caramel corn note was prevalent in the later tails so I was optimistic that would be turned down a bit in the hearts.
Let the product air out overnight and did cuts and blended this morning. I think it's a better product that I was thinking it would be but I think it will benefit from some oak. Hearts have some warm, toasty cereal notes that I wasn't expecting to come through to the disillate as much. Final cut was 145 proof and I've diluted that down to 60% aging strength and have a little over 2 gallons of product. I thought I might get more but I think I was conservative with cuts as I can just put them in the feints jar and use them for a neutral run.
There was lots of things I could have done to prevent the puking (fermcap, butter, etc) but I really underestimated how volatile it would be and how slow it was to run and I still have questions about how good the product will be. So as of right now I'm not sure it was worth the effort and the hassle with LME, but we'll see what we get.
Oh...and my boiler, on account of all the puking, is a disgusting mess right now. It's just caked with a nasty ass sludge that's a pain in the ass to get rid of. Going to need a vinegar and sac run again for sure before my next endeavor - which will be working with fruit. Happen to be in a part of the world that grows it exceptionally well and I have orders in for some apple cider from a local orchard later this month and some grape juice from a vinyard later in October.
Pukes happen with all grain too, you kind of learn to work with them. The sight glass helps, but rather than keeping it at sight glass level turn the power down until you are sure the foam is subsided below the neck of the still, run it gently like this, slowly increasing power. Eventually the protein break will fall into the boil and you can run at much higher power. You also get the benefit of a lot more surface area for the vapor to come off of.
Some of the excessive caramel probably came from the golden LME, who knows... might turn fantastic on you. It's a common bourbon note.
Tricks for cleaning DME mess? Hottest bucket of mop water you can stand, multiple cleaning cycles... its the worst.
1.010 FG for DME is pretty good!:)
"pukequilibrium" <-- that's funny right there. Gonna keep that one in my arsenal. I've read somewhere on HD that you can avoid it if you do a "hot break" boiling the LME before fermentation. However, that does mean you have to cool it down to pitching temps...
Adding backset to low wines? Again from what I've read on HD, that's not a "normal" practice? I've seen it done with rums & UJSSM, but that's adding to next fermentation batch? Not criticizing, just eyebrow raised.
j0bm3oolytu.gif
There are two times of year: FOOTBALL SEASON and... Waiting For Football Season
Haha I weirdly thought diluting with backset was a thing but if it’s not I’m definitely conflating the concepts of a sour mash and a 1.5 spirit run.
Either way let’s see what we get, thanks for clarification.
This is good insight. I’ll try to run it like you suggest next time I’m working with something pukey. I found I did get a break in the foam but it wasn’t until my boiler thermometer read about 95 degrees and I was on my way into tails. I’m wondering if that break happens at a certain temp that’s easier to achieve before fermentation. Or maybe even the surface area would help as you suggest.
Really weird that it kept foaming for so long.
Usually, when boiling wort, there's a few minutes 2gr you have to be careful but then it's over and you can go back to a full boil.
I wonder if it's something to do with how that lme was produced?
Post time 2022-9-11 15:01:54
Author