"Making the cut" is one of the most important skills in distilling — and one of the hardest to learn. Get it right and you capture clean, characterful spirit. Get it wrong and you carry off-flavours into your product or throw away good alcohol. Here's how the cuts work.
Why cuts exist
During a spirit run, different compounds vaporise and condense at different points. They don't come off the still in neat blocks — they overlap on a spectrum from the most volatile to the least. The distiller's job is to divert the flow into different vessels at the right moments, keeping the good and setting aside the rest.
The fractions, in order, are:
Foreshots
The very first spirit off the still. Foreshots are high in volatile, undesirable compounds (including methanol and acetone-like notes) and are not for consumption. They typically smell sharp and solventy. Always discarded or set aside for redistillation depending on your process.
Heads
After foreshots come the heads — still harsh, with strong solvent and acetone character, but closer to drinkable. Many distillers collect heads separately and redistill them in a later run to recover the usable alcohol. Cutting too late into the heads leaves a hot, sharp edge in your spirit.
Hearts
The hearts are the prize — the clean, balanced, flavourful spirit you actually want to keep. This is the fraction that goes on to be bottled or matured. Knowing precisely when to cut into the hearts (away from heads) and when to cut out (before tails) defines your house style.
For compliance, the hearts are also the fraction that drives your litres of pure alcohol (LAL) figure — see calculating LAL and excise.
Tails
As the run continues, heavier compounds (fusel oils, wet-cardboard and oily notes) increase while alcohol strength drops. These are the tails. Like heads, they're usually collected and redistilled rather than discarded, recovering alcohol while keeping the off-flavours out of your hearts.
Feints
"Feints" is the common term for the combined heads and tails set aside for redistillation. Recycling feints into future runs improves overall yield without compromising the hearts.
How distillers make the cut
There's no single rule — it's a blend of:
- Sensory judgement — nosing and tasting the spirit as it runs
- Strength — tracking ABV as it falls through the run
- Temperature — vapour temperature as a guide
- Experience — your still, your wash and your target style
The best distillers combine their senses with data, and crucially, record what they did so they can repeat it.
Why recording cuts matters
Two reasons:
- Consistency. If you don't record the volumes and strengths of each cut, you can't reliably reproduce a great run. Good records turn a lucky batch into a repeatable recipe.
- Compliance. Your hearts volume and ABV feed your LAL and excise. Clean cut records make your excise figures trivial to produce.
This is where live still data is changing the game — see smart stills and real-time monitoring and using live still data to improve consistency.
How CaskPilot records cuts
In CaskPilot, each distillation run captures foreshots, heads, hearts, tails and feints — volume and ABV for each — and calculates the hearts LAL automatically. Over time you build a library of runs you can compare and refine, and your excise figures fall out of the data with no extra work.
The bottom line
The cut is where craft meets chemistry. Understand the fractions, combine sensory skill with strength and temperature data, and record every run. That's how you turn distilling from an art you hope to repeat into a craft you can reproduce.
Want every run captured automatically? Book a demo.