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“Gin Botanicals and Tails: A Guide to Reusing Spent Ingredients”
Hey Guys,
I am new to the forum but I have several years distilling experience. Although, I am fairly new to distilling gin. We dialed our botanicals in and began producing about 6 months ago. The questions I have for everyone, as the title suggests, are; What do you do with your spent botanicals? (throw away? compost? animal feed?) and What do you do with your gin tails? (recycle? etc.) Currently we have our tails hauled off for recycling at a significant cost to us. Wondering if there are any alternatives to our current method of dealing with “waste”. Any help or feedback is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
CenTxDistiller
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13 Replies
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Floor drain…
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2x floor drain after dilution ….
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Gin botanicals make great compost.
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We send our botanicals off to a local cidery that makes a kickass gin botanical cider with them.
I reprocess my tails by distilling it to 190 and reintroduce into subsequent batches. The tails from the reprocessing gets diluted and down the drain.
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Compost, then the liquids are diluted and go down the drain
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Thanks for the suggestions guys. Diluting sounds like the way to go with the tails. I’ve been on the lookout for a local soil or mulching company to take our spent botanicals, no luck yet.
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Why collect tails if you are discarding them? Why not just stop the run and then sewer your pot liquor (most-likely it will not be in need of dilution).
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What is the maximum alcohol content you can legally dump?
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in cali I’ve been told the legal amount you can dump is less than 1% alcohol
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Hey guys,
I really like the idea of gin botanical cider.
Does anyone know anywhere that recycles their gin tails straight back into subsequent batches, without any re-processing at all? I have heard of only two distilleries that do, and am assuming it is their process that allows them to do this.
One of them does a two shot approach, and uses a carter head, so take it that their extraction of heavier oils is less due to the carter head, and so the tails don’t get overly concentrated. They then dilute their distillate 50/50 with clean spirit before reducing for bottling.
The other distillery has a still with a return from the condenser to the pot which I assume returns the heavier, oilier compounds so again take it that this limits the concentration build-up in the tails to an extent.
The received wisdom (as far as I can tell) is that recycling tails unprocessed concentrates the oils leading to oily, acidic and astringent flavours in the gin. With that in mind, and with the relatively minor cost of ditching the tails, why would anyone want to recycle them?
Cheers for any thoughts.
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If you’re keen to recycle the gin waste, can you not recitify the the heads & tails using your holstein column – and send it back to your NGS supplier for use in nail polish remover etc.?
I would’t re-use them in subsequent batches unless making third-party supermarket own brand gin
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You could always hydro separate the good alcohols and introduce them to the next batch run then dump the remaining down the drain.
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I keep gin waste to recycle in making Absinthe . . . . .
Specifically I keep “gin waste” (not that I have a huge amount) to wet the dried artemisia absinthium, prior to steeping the herb in high proof spirit.
I believe this gives me better economy when making Absinthe.
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