Comments

  • Interesting. From other reading we had adopted the practice of recycling heads into the ferment alongside the yeast pitch. Got scared off from recycling into the spirit run when the heads appeared to keep building up through the third cycle, I was worried we'd overflow our feints bucket if we kept going.

    The armagnac article mentions that younger spirits like VSOP DO have cuts made. Inexperienced me can only assume that there's not a hard rule about heads and age, that any amount will eventually improve and you just have to feel it out?

  • I've never really spent much time on fruit distillates other than knowing that heads, especially late heads are especially critical in capturing some of those flavors, and in that situation, tight cuts result in an entirely different product - so it's not a matter of tighter is better.

    But, just in reading materials on this, that second link on Armagnac seems out of place with everything else I've read. It seems to imply no heads cut, which I'm not sure if is a result of some bad paraphrasing, misinformation, or translation. We all know that heads aren't all heads, and that early heads are vastly different from late, or even sometimes mid-heads. Whatever literature I've got, is a bit different from this.

  • edited November 2016

    Tech notes distilling & blending aromatic grapes

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJbBoZ5wEyg

  • edited November 2016

    Or maybe not, that's nuts...

    Distillation and ageing @ Armagnac

    This thing looks like a continuous stripper. I need to go buy a bottle, that stuff sounds awful.

  • Very interesting! A pot / continuous still!

  • Yep, that's what gets me with this gig.
    There have been quite a few paradoxical quirks that Ive picked up that people just don't have a good answer for.
    The processes that we go through are obviously sound but a lot of the reasoning behind them that you get told simply doesn't stand up to scrutinisation a lot of the time.

  • Just had an 25yo armagnac after dinner tonight.
    Very aromatic but very nice all the same.
    Not really anything unusual about it.
    Just another old bandy like cognac.

  • Except it took 25 years to make a heads cut :)

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