Why your home spirit looks pale and how to fix the colour

Why your home spirit looks pale and how to fix the colour

You can get the taste right and still hand somebody a glass that looks like water, and they'll have already decided it's weak before it gets near their mouth. That's a bit unfair on the drink, but it's how people are, and it's worth knowing what's actually going on before you reach for anything.

Where the colour comes from in the first place

A spirit comes off a still clear. Every bit of colour in a commercial whisky arrives from the wood it sat in over a good many years, and wood gives up its colour a lot more slowly than it gives up its flavour. That's the whole problem at home: an essence or a few oak chips can get you most of the way on taste in a week or two, and they'll barely move the colour at all in that time.

So a pale home spirit usually isn't a fault. It's just what an honest young spirit looks like.

What distillers caramel actually does

Distillers caramel is colouring and that's it. It's deliberately made not to carry flavour, so a few drops will take a batch from clear to a warm honey brown without changing how it tastes, and that is genuinely the whole job it does.

Two things follow from that, and the second one catches people out.

It won't fix a rough spirit. If the drink underneath is harsh, colouring it makes a harsh drink that looks aged, which is arguably worse than a harsh drink that looks young, because now you've set an expectation you can't meet.

And it won't age anything. A batch with caramel in it is a young spirit wearing a coat. That's fine, and there's nothing dishonest about it as long as you aren't telling people it's ten years old.

How to dose it without ending up with cola

Go in far smaller steps than you think you need to. A drop or two per litre, stirred right through, then look at it against a white background in daylight rather than under a shed light, because tungsten light makes everything look warmer than it is and you'll undershoot badly.

Work up to what you want over two or three additions instead of trying to land it in one. Taking colour out again is not a thing you can do.

If you're bottling a batch across several bottles, colour the whole lot in one vessel and then fill from that. Colouring bottle by bottle is how you end up with six bottles that are six different shades, and it looks careless on a shelf.

The other half of looking right

Colour is only part of it. A spirit that's cloudy or has bits in it reads as homemade in the bad sense, no matter what shade it is, and that's a filtering job rather than a colouring one. Run it through paper and carbon before you colour it, not after, because filtering afterwards will strip some of the colour straight back out and you'll be doing it twice.

And if you actually want smoke rather than colour

Worth separating these two, because they get talked about together and they do completely different jobs. Peat smoke essence changes the taste and the smell and does almost nothing to the colour. Distillers caramel changes the colour and does nothing to the taste. If you want a dark, smoky drop you need both, and you dose them separately so you can tell which one you've overdone.

Peat is the easier of the two to ruin, so start at a few drops per litre and then leave it overnight before you taste it again, because smoke keeps developing for hours after you've added it and a batch that seemed light at bedtime can be heavy by morning.

One thing worth saying plainly

Owning a still is legal here and we sell the gear, but actually distilling spirits at home needs an excise manufacturer licence from the ATO and most people haven't got one, so if that's you then what you're doing is flavouring a base spirit you've bought. That's completely legal, and it's what this whole article assumes anyway.

What you'd want for this

• Still Spirits Top Shelf Distillers Caramel 50ml. Colour without flavour, which is exactly what you want here.
• Still Spirits Peat Smoke 50ml. Smoke and aroma, for when the colour isn't the thing you're missing.
• Still Spirits Oak Cask 50ml. Oak character in drops, which moves taste a lot more than it moves colour.
• Still Spirits Universal Z Carbon. Filter first, colour second.

Did you know we also keep Still Spirits Mellow Oak, bourbon barrel chips, Sam Willard's oak soakers, 500ml swing top bottles and 1125ml spirit bottles in the shop. They aren't all on the website, so give us a ring on (08) 8536 4333 to check what's on the shelf.

The rest of it is in our homebrew range, and Brewhilder, our homebrew helper, will talk you through what suits your setup.

Read next

• Still Spirits Peat Smoke, what it does and how to use it
• Distillers Conditioner, what it does in your boiler
• Do you need a barrel to get oak flavour into a home spirit

I'm a chronic over-doer with anything that comes in a dropper, so I work in drops and look at it in daylight, which is advice I mostly give myself.

Cheers,

Candeece

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