turkey fryer

[number18fan]

anybody use one of those deep turkey fryers to distill in? They come with a burner and a thermostat for about $100. it will easily hold 5 gallons .

[smokerscully1]

If its an aluminum pot--stay away from it.

[FeralPig]

Its aluminum. There are many posting as to why that is bad. Read the site. But the burner is great for distilling. I use one.

[lawdog]

get a keg, and use the burner. dont use anything aluminum

[Culpeper]

Howdy, I am recently retired and about to build my first still. I have seen plenty of styles and when I priced the items separately, such as Stainless steel pot, and gas burner from a restaurant supply store you can spend over $200.00 for the parts. Last week while having a beer with my friend (who has no knowledge of my plans) just in passing mentioned that he had bought a turkey deep fryer last year (for turkeys). I started checking out prices on Bass Pro Shops, Cabella's . As fate would have it a couple of days later I got an advertisement from Amazon.com that was offering free shipping and I thought I would search for one there just for the hell of it. Wowza.............You can get a 30 Qt. Stainless Steel pot there with everything except for the propane tank and including a thermometer for $69.00..........and with a little smarts can "still" (no punn intended), make a big batch of chicken soup when you are not distilling water.

Culpeper

BTW, This is my first post but I have been researching and daydreaming about this hobby for many years. I would like to thank the folks that created this site because it has by far the most collective knowledge of anyplace that I have seen in five years. If I hadn't found this place I would have been doomed to a very big headache because the folks on the History Channel show "Moonshiners" never mention "Heads". They just dumped fermented wash into the still and then showed the end result.

[smokerscully1]

Several years ago I was traveling thru the US and stopped at a Sportsman Warehouse, They had a hundred turkey fryers stacked up and they were clearing them out at $35 a piece. I bought a half dozen--I run a catering company for forest fire fighting. The pots were aluminum. They worked great for boiling potatoes and making french fries and deep frying fish as well as turkeys.

I bolted a SS salad bowl to one of the lids and put my column on that, pasted the whole thing up with flour and water and was good to go. Fermented off some birdwatchers sugar wash and ran it off. It's a 30l pot so a 25l charge worked well.

Big Problem after just 3 runs. Pin-holes developed in the bottom of the pot--wash leaked out and put out burner flame--now I got raw propane leaking out in the shop. I was right there--good reason to pay attention and its not for nothing the ole-timers around here tell you not to run your still unattended. I figured it must have been a bad pot--so I tried it again--I got lots of pots right. After 3 runs--same problem. I may not be smart but Iam persistant. There is something in a sugar wash that eats holes in the bottom of an aluminum pot when you boil it.

I'm still running the same system but instead of the turkey pot I found some stainless pipe the same diameter as the aluminum pot. I had a welder friend fix me up a pot otta that --cost a couple of jugs of rum. Its way overkill and very heavy but I couldn't find a stainless pot locally that was big enough.

If you can find a turkey fryer with a stainless pot for $69 you're in buisness.

[Dnderhead]

""is something in a sugar wash that eats holes in the bottom of an aluminum pot when you boil it.""
wash is acidic a good thing in away it does eats aluminum but if it was alkaline it would "eat" copper and
then you git blue distillerent.

[Culpeper]

Howdy, I don't know if this will help but I own a 2003 Yamaha 1100 V-Star. It has Aluminum Carbs. I bought the bike in 2004 before they went with the bogus Ethanol scam here with adding Ethanol to Gasoline. I never had a problem untill I found out this past February that Ethanol reacts with Aluminum and really screws up the innards of an Aluminum Carb. After $1,000.00 to fix the the problem which involved having the carbs removed and rebuilt I only run Ethanol free gas in the bike. I don't think sugar is the problem. Sugar is in Millions of soda cans.........I just had a Coke the other day and the expiration date on the can was two and a half years ago. Just my humble opinion.

Culpeper

[Hawke]

It's not the sugar that is the problem. Any fermented wash will end up with an acidic ph. Some as low as 4.0. This low ph and heat on the porous/ highly reactive aluminum equals short lived boilers.
BTW: Soda cans are lined to keep the contents from reacting with the aluminum.