Run Planner
A connected planning estimate from fermenter to bottle
The Wash
What goes into the boilerExpected Yield
Still type and recoveryRecovery and average strength are planning defaults. Measure your own with the still efficiency protocol and enter them here.
Cuts Plan
Spirit run fractions| Fraction | Share | Volume | Destination |
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Foreshots are sized from the charge (roughly 50 mL per 10 L of wash) and always discarded. Shares are typical pot spirit-run splits; your nose makes the real cuts on the day.
Jar Plan
Collection vesselsSmaller jars give finer control over where the cuts finally land when you blend by nose the next day.
Dilution
Hearts to bottling strengthSimple alcohol conservation; for bottling precision use OIML Precise mode, which also handles the 1 to 3% mixing contraction.
Bottles
What ends up on the shelfHow the Planner Chains the Steps
Every figure downstream is derived from the wash you enter at step one. The charge alcohol comes from volume times strength. Recovery scales it to alcohol collected, and the average collection strength turns that into litres in jars. The cuts table splits those litres using typical pot-still spirit-run shares, with foreshots sized from the charge rather than the output, since the discard exists to remove the compounds that concentrate first regardless of how much you collect. The hearts line then feeds the dilution step by straight alcohol conservation, and the final volume divides into bottles.
Treat the output the way a distillery treats a production plan: a checklist for jars, water and bottles to have ready, not a promise of what the day delivers. The two numbers most worth replacing with your own measurements are recovery and average collected strength, and the efficiency guide gives you the protocol for both.
Frequently Asked Questions
No, they are planning estimates built from typical recoveries, fraction splits and strengths. Your still, your cuts and your habits set the real numbers; the Measuring Still Efficiency guide shows how to replace our defaults with your own data.
A column run at high reflux does the separating internally and produces near-uniform high-strength output, so fraction planning matters far less. The planner reduces that step to foreshots discard plus a single product stream.
Leave the default until you have measured your own. Recovery depends mostly on how far into tails you collect and how much you leave in the boiler, so measured values from your last few runs beat any generic figure.
The planner uses straight alcohol conservation for speed, which slightly understates the water needed. For bottling-grade precision, take the hearts figure to the ABV Dilution Calculator and use OIML Precise mode.
Yes. The toolbar saves the full input state locally and the Share button encodes it into a link, exactly like every other DistilCalc tool.
More Distilling Calculators
References
Primary and peer-reviewed sources for the technical claims on this page.
- Hall, M.L., Ph.D. (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Zymurgy, Summer 1995, American Homebrewers Association. Brew By the Numbers: Add Up What’s in Your Beer, Zymurgy Vol. 18, No. 2. Cited for: The Balling-derived relationship between original and final gravity and alcohol content used to compute wash alcohol.
- International Organization of Legal Metrology (OIML). International Recommendation R 22: International Alcoholometric Tables. Cited for: The internationally adopted density-to-alcoholic-strength relationship for ethanol and water mixtures at 20°C.