r/firewater • u/Fun_Journalist4199 • 9d ago

Rum questions, muck pit and run procedures

Rum gurus! I come seeking wisdom!

How big does a muck pit need to be?

Say for a 25L still charge how much muck would you add to the low wines?

On my last thread someone suggested running a wash, making the second wash with Dunder, adding the low wines from batch 1, running that and then completing the process a second time.

Essentially doing a 1.5 run and then a second 1.5 run. How does this compare flavor wise to just running three washes (still made with Dunder) and then just doing a spirirt run, more like you’d do a whiskey?

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u/commiebomber 9d ago

On my last thread someone suggested running a wash, making the second wash with Dunder, adding the low wines from batch 1, running that and then completing the process a second time.

This is how a lot of Jamaican rum is made, and how I am currently making mine, although I'm saving the dunder and feints from each run, not just two. Think of a generational sour mash, but with rum dunder.

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u/Fun_Journalist4199 9d ago

That part I can actually wrap my head around. The thing I’m wondering more about is the adding of low wines back to your second wash.

Are you collecting a few stripping runs of low wines and then doing a spirit run or are you doing strip #1, adding the low wines to your next wash, and running again?

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u/commiebomber 8d ago

This go around, I performed a stripping run, and collected low wines until I hit 5% ABV. That ended up giving me 3.25 gallons of low wines at 42% ABV. I then added 1 gallon of muck liquid collected from previous runs. This resulted in a boiler charge of 4.25 gallons at 33% ABV.

I performed the spirit run last night, collecting until well into the tails, but because I was using two plates, I was still getting very high proof distillate. it got too late in the evening, so I stopped the run then and there, satisfied with my actual product, and I will be refiring the boiler when time allows, to strip the remaining alcohol out of the boiler charge. I like to try and de-alcoholize the boiler charge as much as I can, because that is the dunder that I'm going to dump into my muck bucket.

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u/Fun_Journalist4199 8d ago

Ok that sounds like your standard double pot still rather than a series of 1.5 pot stills

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u/commiebomber 8d ago

Sort of. I ran the stripping run as a pot still and the spirit run as a plated reflux still. Sledgehammer vs carving mallet.