How to scale a spirit blend so batch two matches

How to scale a spirit blend so batch two matches

Everybody gets a blend they love eventually. Somebody hands you a glass back and asks what's in it and you realise you don't actually know, because it was a bit of this and a splash of that and a top-up you'd already forgotten about by the time you sealed it.

That's the real skill with blending, and it isn't a taste skill at all. It's bookkeeping.

Trial small, and trial in a ratio

Don't develop a blend in 2 litres of spirit. Develop it in 100ml, because you can afford to throw away ten failed 100ml trials and you cannot afford to throw away ten failed 2 litre ones.

And record what you did as a ratio rather than as a volume. A ratio scales up and a volume doesn't. Writing down "8 drops of A and 3 of C" is useless six months later when you can't remember how big the trial was. Writing down "per 100ml of base: 8 drops A, 3 drops C" scales to any size you like.

A 1ml syringe from the chemist is the single most useful thing you can own for this. Drops vary with the dropper and with how hard you squeeze. Millilitres don't vary at all.

Scaling up isn't quite arithmetic

Here's the bit that catches people. A blend usually reads slightly stronger at volume than it did in the trial glass, mostly because a small trial sits in a lot of air and some of the top notes come off it while you're fiddling about. Scale your ratio up to a bit under what the maths says, taste the full batch, then top it up to the mark.

That last 10 per cent is a two minute job on a batch you've already made, and it's the difference between landing it and having a 2 litre demijohn of something slightly too much.

Keep a reference bottle

This is the trick that makes all of it work, and almost nobody does it. When a batch comes out right, bottle 100ml of it separately and label it, then put it at the back somewhere you won't drink it by accident.

Then when you make the next one you've got something to taste it against, which is worth far more than a memory of what it was like. Your memory of a flavour six months on is genuinely unreliable, and two glasses side by side will tell you in one sip whether you've drifted, and which way.

Write down the things that aren't in the recipe

The recipe is only half of what made the batch. The other half is the conditions, and those move without you noticing.

• The base spirit, and its strength, because 40 per cent and 43 per cent are not the same canvas
• Whether it was filtered, and through what
• How long it rested after mixing
• Roughly where it sat, since a warm cupboard does something different to a cold shed over a fortnight
• The date, so you can work out how old the reference bottle is when you compare them

Five lines in a notebook. It's the difference between a hobby you're getting better at and one where every batch is a fresh roll of the dice.

Change one thing at a time

When you do want to move a blend on, move one number. If you lift the oak and drop the fruit in the same batch and it comes out better, you've learned nothing you can use, because you don't know which change did it or whether they cancelled each other out.

One variable, one batch, one note. It's slower for about three batches and much faster after that.

And label the bottles properly

Not the fancy label. The back one. Batch number and date on it, matching a line in the notebook. Six unlabelled bottles of home-made spirit all look identical in a cupboard, and the one you were saving to compare against is the one you'll open on a Friday night without thinking.

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 Whiskey Profile A Spirit Flavouring 50ml. Fruit and malt with a bit of wood behind it, and a common base layer in a blend.
• Still Spirits Whiskey Profile B Spirit Flavouring 50ml. Sharper and more apple-forward, used in small amounts.
• Still Spirits Whiskey Profile C Spirit Flavouring 50ml. Rounder and smoother, for softening a blend that bites.
• Still Spirits Whiskey Profile D 50ml. Vanilla and chocolate, and it lengthens the finish.

Did you know we also keep the Still Spirits whisky profile kit, the gin profile kit, hydrometers with test jars, 5 litre Italian demijohns 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 whisky profiles, what they do and the law
• How to keep a brew log and make every batch better
• How to run a whiskey tasting night with your own blends

I'm a great believer in writing things down and a hopeless practitioner of it, so I keep a reference bottle instead of relying on remembering.

Cheers,

Candeece

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