alt Hacker News> A small pattern I'm noticing in your description is the presence of sugar in the distillation inputs. Assume I know nothing about distillation; is that relevant?
Sugar should be completely removed by a proper distillation setup (although a lazy setup can allow some "contamination" with sugars).
Yes, but distillation involves heat, and I'm curious if possibly the sugar reacts with anything to cause different aromatics or something, or perhaps fermentations stopping at higher sugar concentrations have a better aromatic profile for distillation even when the raw material is sub-par.