How does the size and shape of the still impact the final flavor of the whiskey?

Question

Devin Ershow · Answer

How does the size and shape of the still impact the final flavor of the whiskey? This might be a little bit of a controversial answer to this question coming from me because I think this is somewhat of a divisive topic in the distilling industry. You know I've interviewed a lot of whiskey distillers over the years and a lot of craft whiskey distillers that have grown from starting off on a five gallon or eight gallon or 15 gallon still to 500, 600, 1000 gallon stills. And I often ask them, when you were scaling up, did you keep in mind the size or the specific shape of your still or the line arm when you were scaling up to try to manage some sort of continuity from one still to the next? And I would say, you know, some of them say, yes, I tried to basically mimic it exactly. And some of them would say, I didn't really care that much. You know, there are other factors that I can do to make sure that the distillate that I'm making is either similar to what I was making before or better than what I was making before. Now you know, for those of you, those that would sort of subscribe to the concept that it does matter, it's all because of the vapor path, right? When you're distilling whiskey, you're starting off with a liquid that you are boiling, the vapor is rising and that's how you're trying to collect the alcohol. Now the path that that vapor has to go through should impact the flavor of your whiskey. You've got a big bulb at the top of your still, if you have to go up really, really high before it comes over, these are going to affect things like reflux, copper contact, you know, and all of its journey before it gets to the condenser and turns back into a distillate. So all of these factors can impact the flavor, how it impacts the flavor, if it impacts the flavor, I think is a little bit up for discussion, but it's a really exciting topic to explore.

Alan Bishop · Answer

So how does size and shape of the still impact the final flavor of the whiskey? Well for this question we're gonna stick strictly to pot still or batch distillation and not Kentucky column still because there's two different ways of looking at distillation and what we are concerned with here is our expertise in batch distillation. So pot still distillation is all about the retention and concentration of flavor and it is affected by every variable that you can imagine. Temperature, barometric pressure, the mood of the distiller, what the distillers eating that day will determine how he runs that still and makes his various cuts of alcohol that he he or she would like to include in the finished product. As such the height of the still has a lot to do with it. So small squat stills do not produce great quality ethanol. So what they tend to do is produce a very heavy bodied spirits which may not taste great to the consumer to the extent that in Scotland at one point in time the lowland distillers were actually producing such terrible distillate from their squat stills that the highland moonshiners were able to sell their distillate for a much better price despite the risk. On top of this how tall the still is determines how much natural reflux you get. Reflux is basically what happens when water falls out of solution and ethanol rises you get higher proof impurity. So even without forced reflux on a taller pot still what you have is the top of it takes longer to heat up and subsequently you get a little more natural reflux. So all those water of not all the water but some of the water and some of those impurities are falling out while the alcohol and the aromatics that you want to keep are coming across. The vapor path very much so affects the way something is distilled. The speed of distillation will affect the quality of what is distilled and the shape of that head is super important. So depending on whether or not you want to hold on to more or less of the volatility of the raw material you started with the shape of the head is going to affect that by how much the vapor comes in communication with the copper. The more of those heavy bodied elements that you may or may not want in the distillation will be removed. Hope that answered your question.

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"How does the size and shape of the still impact the final flavor of the whiskey?"