WOW! best whisky I've made
An all grain whisky recipe designed to be similar to a clean Speyside whisky. This has been slightly modified by increasing the amount of peat smoke influence a little.
See original recipe at http://www.artisan-distiller.net/phpB...
After 1 month, the progress is very promising, easily the best whisky I have made so far.
Mash and ferment as usual, aiming to keep the flavour as clean as possible, so avoid stressing the yeast.
On stripping runs, collect 1/3 of charge volume and call it your 'low wines', then switch to 'feints' collection until ABV being collected makes it not worth the energy to continue.
For spirit run you want to have 60% of the charge volume from the 'low wines', and the remaining 40% from the 'feints'. Start the narrow heart cut from the where the output is coming off at 75% abv, and stop when it's coming off at 65% abv. The rest is added to your feints jar. This is a narrower heart cut than you might do normally, but is designed to produce the clean style of whisky.
For your first spirit run you will not have collected enough 'feints' from the stripping runs to meet the 40% volume required by the recipe, so top up the 'feints' portion with clean water to get the desired volume. After the first spirit run you will have collected plenty of 'feints' for following runs.
The heart cut will be about 70% abv. Add 10grams of wood chips for each 1Litre of new make and leave for a month. Dilute down to 60% abv and leave for another month. Keep diluting by 10% each month until the spirit is at 40% abv, then bottle.
I chose to divide my output into two, aging one as suggested above, and the other I added some of the distillate that came off after the narrow heart cut to go a little deeper into the tails in search of the smokey flavours. This second lot is diluted to 55% abv, added 10grams of wood chips per Litre, and will be aged without further dilution for at least a year.
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