Sure. A strip run is when you fill a pot still and basically run it as fast as you can and keep everything without any separation of the fractions coming out, it's to just get a basic distillation called "low wines". This distillate is full of heads and tails and is only about 40-50% alcohol and will need to distilled again to separate the hearts and be a higher alcohol %.
In making whiskey and rum I re-use the backest. Also called dunder, it's what's left in the boiler or thumper after a distillation. It's a bit of concentrated flavors and is acidic. It shouldn't have any alcohol left in it. In whiskey and rum making I use it as a % of the water used in the next generation of fermentations. It adds flavor. So after the first strip run I'll add my grains to the fermentor, then pour my desired %( usually 20%) of hot backset straight from the boiler on top of them to sanitize them. After a few hours I'll top off with cool water, check temps and pitch Angel yeast. With rum you can let the backset/dunder rot and colonize with bacteria to get even more flavor before adding to a ferment.
This oat whiskey I'm making I don't need to make a ton of, so I'm going to make 3 ferments, strip them and keep everything that comes out of the still as low wines, and then re-distill it to get a clean separation of the heads, hearts and tails. I'll use a thumper filled with backset to add flavor and to help with the separation. The first strip is called generation 1, then the next ferment and strip has the backset of 1 in it and it carries over the flavor and gets more flavorful and is generation 2, then you can keep going. Every generation has more depth of flavor to it by re-using the backset.
Edited by RescueU, 21 August 2022 - 11:20 AM.
