Rum Forest Rum! (Rum making: Round 1)

D-Day finally came yesterday - after months of planning, Ben and I began the process of actually distilling our rum. I posted the story about how it happened last week (which you can read here), and all of the prep that we went through to get here, and the day finally came.

So, for any of you who are hoping to do this in the future, I'll warn you, that it's a hell of a lot of work, and although not hard, you have to be willing to put the time and detail into it. Oh, and also, it's sort of illegal, so don't do it, and if you do....don't sell it - that's where you'll get into trouble. If you're just having fun, you should be fine....but don't hold me to that.

I finished work at 5:00 PM yesterday, and made my way to Ben's house, with my camping stove (which we would ultimately use to boil on) and the connector we bought from Wal-Mart for 20 bucks, so that we could use a full size propane tank on the small, portable stove.

We wanted to use as much sunlight as possible, so we got started right away. We already had the still built, and the night before we used rubber silicone to seal all of the connections and the lid to the pot. We brought everything outside, and using a couple of Ben's dads workbenches and some make shifting, we had a good configuration fairly quickly. Here it is (ignore the cooler, as that's just holding everything in place at this point):

Our initial setup

Once we psyched ourselves up some more, we were ready to pour our mash into the boiler (the pot). If you don't know, the mash is just the sugar/molasses/water/yeast mixture that was fermenting for the previous week and a bit. It's what made all the alcohol in the first place as the yeast ate the sugars, and now we're just taking out all of the impurities by boiling out just the alcohol.

Our mash - before adding it to the pot.

We only had a small hole to pour the mixture into the pot through - as we'd already sealed it up around the lid, so we used a small kitchen funnel (way easier than we thought) and then corked the hole afterward. Keep in mind, that we had no idea if any of this was even going to be fully air tight at this point, we were just working on our hopes. So, we poured it in, corked it, put the thermometer into the airtight rubber grommet in the lid, and got ready to start.

The hole on the left is the hole we'd be pouring our mash through,
and the hole on the right is where the thermometer would snugly fit through.

The initial thermometer reading.

The thermometer first read 55 degrees (Fahrenheit), we worked off of that instead of celsius, because most of the instructions and directions we had were based on those temperatures, and although we could have easily converted, this was a little more exact. The mash started off at 55 degrees, and we had to watch it closely until it reached 172 degrees (the temperature at which alcohol boils). Once we reached that, we had to keep it within about a 10 degree range to let the alcohol boil off.

Before going any further, I feel like maybe I should explain how exactly the still works...

Basically, if you couldn't tell from that picture - alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water, so at 172 degrees the alcohol (along with some other poisonous stuff) evaporates up through our pipe and as it cools, it eventually condenses and falls into the catch basin on the other side of the still. Easy as pie right?

Wrong. You also have to be careful because things like acetone and methanol have an even lower boiling point than alcohol, so the first little bit of what you collect - you MUST throw away. We were prepared for that though.

Anyway, back to the story....we fired up the burner...and waited...

The burner doing its job.

The temperature moved up rather quickly, but we slowed it down to make sure we didn't fly by what we needed. Once we got to about 160, we expected something....anything....but there was nothing.

After a while, we got some drops - but it was brown and didn't look anything like we expected.

First drops.

It was just a fluke I think at this point. We waited, and waited some more, even modifying our setup a bit with some troubleshooting, but there was still nothing. After about 6 hours of preparation, heating and waiting...we decided to pull the plug. We turned everything off, and pulled the cork out of the top, and although we all of a sudden got an influx of what smelled like acetone coming out of the pipe, something was clearly not working. 

So...we were defeated...but....we have solutions! We think that our mash got ruined - after only one day inside of his house, the smell of the molasses was too much for Ben's parents and it was moved into the garage. The only problem was that his garage was at its warmest, 10 degrees celsius, and that isn't even close enough for yeast to work. So we're hoping that was our problem. 

We're going to re-ferment...test our still a little bit before distilling again, and then give it another go - hopefully with better results. Our setup was good...it just seemed like there was something we missed. 

Wish us look the next time around...