Why your base spirit decides how the essence tastes
Why your base spirit decides how the essence tastes
When a home-made spirit tastes harsh the essence gets the blame, and it's usually innocent. An essence adds flavour on top of whatever's already in the glass, so a base with a solventy edge or a bit of a burn gives you a bourbon with a solventy edge, and swapping to a different essence changes the flavour sitting on top while leaving the problem exactly where it was.
Which is a bit annoying, because the essence is the expensive interesting bit and the base is the boring bit, and the boring bit is doing most of the work.
What harshness in a base actually is
A few different things, and they taste different from each other once you know what you're chasing.
A sharp solvent note of the sort that reminds you of nail polish is usually acetone, along with the lighter compounds that come over first. That's a cuts problem, and it means the heads went into the jar with the rest.
A heavy, oily, slightly wet-cardboard thing that sits at the back of your mouth is the opposite end of the run. That's the tails, and it tends to build up as the batch goes on so you notice it more in the second glass than the first.
A general roughness with nothing you can put a name to is usually fermentation. Yeast stressed by heat or by not having enough to eat makes compounds you'd rather it didn't, and no amount of careful distilling afterwards fully undoes that.
Cuts are where most of it is won
Take more off the front than feels comfortable and stop collecting earlier than feels comfortable, and your base gets noticeably cleaner. That's it. The reason people don't is that both of those cost you volume, and there's a strong pull to keep collecting when it's still coming out clear.
The trick that makes it easier is collecting into lots of small jars rather than one big vessel, so you're not making one irreversible decision. Smell and taste each jar afterwards, cut it back with water so you can actually tell, and then combine only the ones you're happy with. The jars you're not sure about go aside for the next stripping run rather than into your good spirit.
What carbon does and doesn't fix
Carbon filtering is the other big lever, and it's genuinely effective on the lighter harshness. Activated carbon holds onto a lot of the compounds that make a spirit read as rough, and running a batch through will make an obvious difference on something that was nearly there.
What it won't do is rescue a bad base. If the fermentation went badly wrong or the cuts were careless, carbon takes the top off it and you'll still taste what's underneath, and you'll have spent money and an afternoon finding that out.
Change the carbon when it stops working rather than when the packet runs out. Carbon that's been through a few batches is full, and filtering through full carbon is just pouring spirit through a tube slowly.
Test it before you flavour it
This is the habit worth building, and it takes five minutes. Before anything goes near an essence, pour a small amount of the base, cut it with water to about half strength, and taste it on its own.
If it's clean and a bit boring then that's exactly right, and you're ready to flavour it. If there's a burn or a sharpness in there now, it'll still be there afterwards with a bourbon flavour draped over it, and it's far cheaper to fix it at this point than to write off a flavoured batch later.
If you're buying the base rather than making it
Plenty of people flavour a bought neutral spirit, which sidesteps the whole cuts question and is completely legal, and there's still a decision in it. Cheaper bottom-shelf vodka is often harsher than the label suggests, and it'll show through a light essence badly while a heavy one covers it reasonably well.
So match them up. A subtle flavouring wants a clean base. A big bold smoky or spiced essence will forgive a rougher one, and that's a legitimate way to use up something that wasn't quite good enough to drink on its own.
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 Universal Z Carbon. The carbon itself, and the part that does the work.
- Still Spirits Z Filter Paper 5pk. Stops the fine carbon dust ending up in the bottle.
- Alcotec 48 Turbo Yeast. A cleaner ferment is a cleaner base, so this end matters too.
- Still Spirits Bourbon 50ml Essence. Once the base is right, this is the easy part.
Did you know we also keep EZ filter kits, EZ filter carbon, turbo carbon, Still Spirits distillers conditioner and a range of turbo yeasts 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
- Distillers Conditioner, what it does in your boiler
- Still Spirits whisky profiles, what they do and the law
- How to set up a home brewing station on a budget
I'm forever wanting to skip to the interesting part, so taste-the-base-first is a rule I need more than most people do.
Cheers,
Candeece
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